>Like what? I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about here.
Uh, the constant mass shootings that have occurred over the past year wherein, 100% of the time, the perp was already known to police and FBI and had a very public troubling online presence detailing their years of mental instability and virulent racism?
>intelligence agencies don't talk about their activities, even their successes, for very good reason.
The hell are you talking about? The FBI is constantly publicly congratulating themselves when they "foil" a "plot" their agent provocateurs have cooked up.
The NSA doesn't like to brag as much as the FBI does but they're clearly just as responsible for dropping the ball on domestic terrorism every other week when yet another mass shooting happens...
Crossing into incivility like this isn't ok on HN and will eventually get you banned, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this. Please don't do political flamewars on HN either.
They have not justified the existence of these programs -- if they were efficacious they would still be wrong, in my opinion, but luckily for me my opinion never has to enter into it because as it stands it's just a double whammy of a 1) massively unethical 2) giant waste of money.
So yeah, even if #2 wasn't in play I'd still be against it.
I think your point is sound, but I'm not sure this is the best example. Regular shootings are causing a lot more deaths, although I doubt the NSA has any interest in stopping either one (and of course, their official charge doesn't include either one).
Right, but what else is the NSA ostensibly carrying out all this domestic espionage for if not to preempt domestic terrorism (which by and large has been dominated by mass shootings in recent years, it's been a bit since we had e.g. a bombing), which by all accounts is at its highest point in recent memory?
You two are talking past each other. Yes, the NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. But then why is it spying on citizens? Ostensibly to prevent bad things from happening. Yet bad things are happening, that could presumably be stopped with information gained from said spying. But no one is using the information that way. So why should we let them continue spying?
I think there's another sliver to be added, though, because the NSA can still give the excuse that the answer to
> why is it spying on citizens
...is that it's doing that to prevent foreign attacks, not eg. mass shootings.
Furthermore, even if it were doing anything useful with its domestic spying, such as preventing domestic crime, obviously we'd all rather address plain ole' shootings, which take many more lives than mass shootings.
Is there a reason you're being so intentionally mean throughout this thread? Take a deep breath, maybe a quick walk around the block. Your points are being lost because your vitriol is so overpowering.
It's funny watching what is essentially the equivalent of the Yankees getting criticized for not scoring enough touchdowns this season by people who are dead serious and consider this topic of grave concern. If these people aren't even able to Google the NSA before venturing their opinion on something so complicated, then it seems unlikely just giving them the basic facts is actually going to do something. People should feel bad about this level of willful ignorance.
Hmmm. Well, to utilize your metaphor, maybe it's more like people asking the 1919 White Sox aren't scoring enough touchdowns.
On one hand, scoring touchdowns (in this metaphor, preventing domestic crime) isn't their charge.
But on the other, they are also engaged primarily in self-serving funny business instead of hitting home runs (ie, protecting people from foreign aggression and securing the telecommunications systems of the USA).
Their claim is that it's in order to listen to the conversations where a foreign person of interest is the other party. :)
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the surveillance either, but domestic terrorism isn't their job. Sure, if they notice something, they will pass it along, but it's not what they are looking for (I believe). If there's been a proverbial ball dropped, it's probably more accurate to blame the FBI than the NSA.
All of your "arguments" so far have been nothing but "you have no idea what you're talking about" and "you know nothing". Why not contribute some facts and rational arguments to the discussion?
What is the expectation here? The commenter has absolutely no idea what they are talking about. The arguments are being made are clearly without any understanding of how any intelligence agency operates, and absolute ignorance of the NSA's mandate, much less any actual data about its activities.
It's like reading a post by someone bitching about the modern Hollywood blockbuster culture by citing Superman's plot arc in the new Avengers movie, except that somehow it isn't a trolling attempt. What sort of attention does that blatant misconception and willful ignorance deserve?
Sure it's shallow and ill considered, but it's also a not uncommon view among a large part of the population. While a pro NSA voice is not common here, providing lucid counter arguments would allow all of us to view the augments and maybe learn how best to counter these types of assertions in other venues.
You crossed into incivility repeatedly in this flamewar, and here you cross into outright bannable offense. Could you please not do this when commenting here? If someone else is completely wrong, and you react like this, all you do is make them seem more credible, and discredit what you know.
What would work much better is to wait until you can comment neutrally, and then comment neutrally with information we can all learn from.
If your grandmother worked somewhere with access to critical infrastructure or had access to IP that would be in our best interest to protect and she was for some reason in contact with terrorists or suspected foreign agents then it's useful information.
Keep in mind that they need court ordered approval to access the data so without that existing context it's off limits.
You should be more concerned with what your service providers and companies like Google or Facebook are doing with that data because they aren't limited by FISA courts.
> 534 million records of phone calls and text messages
But we don't know how that breaks down to "phones" as you say. I don't even like to use my phone but I bet if you count my texts and calls in a year it would be in the 1000s of records.
No I don't believe that there are "500 million phones going to suspected terrorists in the US" but there may be 500 messages from individuals who have suspected connections to terrorists and foreign agents. And you would never know for sure unless you can look at their metadata to analyze those suspected connections.
You're right that the FISA approval rate is incredible. But it's still a record of requests made (which helps prevent abuse). and as I understand it that number of requests is only in the ~2000 range.
Again, it's a much better situation than the level of scrutiny you're holding to companies like Google/Facebook/Microsoft or ISPs. And those companies aren't even offering national security as a service.
They really aren't. 500 million sounds like a lot, but it is very unlikely any call by anyone in your family is caught in this net. As someone pointed out, with 250 million people owning phones in this country, as well as vast networks of systematic and/or automated calling, the portion of calls actually being tracked here is pretty tiny.
It's also a situation where having useless data costs next to nothing (economically at least, philosophically is a different debate), but missing even a small detail could be critical.
We knew five years ago that the NSA was receiving "billions of [call detail] records ... per day", just indiscriminately collecting every CDR they could -- from everyone (including my grandma and yours), not just criminals or "terrorists" or whomever the latest bogeyman is.
I have no reason to believe that that has changed, that they have stopped collecting all of this data that is so easily available to them.
With that in mind, I do not believe that "it is very unlikely any call" by anyone in my family was included in the catch. I believe it very likely that many calls by many people in my family was -- and continues to be -- included in their "net".
Like, they are so ignorant that they don't even have the trivially basic information contained in the first paragraph of their wikipedia page. It's moronic.
We have not been made (substantially) safer. The trade was not worth it.
A town near me recently installed ANPR license plate readers. Their justification was to catch criminals, particularly those engaging in property crimes which were going unsolved.
Did ANPR help solve some property crimes? Almost certainly.
Were property crimes up significantly prior to the installation of the ANPR readers? No. Are they down significantly after? No.
>Were property crimes up significantly prior to the installation of the ANPR readers? No. Are they down significantly after? No.
I get that this comparison sounds similar, but it really doesn't make any sense. The most powerful nations in the world are constantly trying to gain as much access to our secure systems, communications, and infrastructure. Even though these efforts are almost entirely hidden from every level of the public, we still have plenty of stories of things like Stuxnet or the Chinese obtaining classified engineering data.
The NSA exists to combat this. They aren't fighting crime. They aren't fighting what is essentially an economically guaranteed statistical effect (property crime). They are an intelligence gathering and signal analysis agency tasked with thwarting foreign actors, which we know are actively pouring massive resources into activities hostile to us. That is why they exist, and that is why their successes (and failures) are almost entirely unknown to the general public.
IIRC yes. I also think I heard that Israel was involved. Anyway, who did it wasn't my point, my point was that all governments are engaged in this level of competition. The NSA exists (and has such a monstrous budget) because it is in constant, direct conflict with extremely capable and dangerous opponents. (not trying to pick out deranged criminals acting indepenedently from a crowd)
Yes and I imagine even having records on everyone wouldn’t be enough to catch all cases. Some of the recent offenders really seemed to only identify as problems during the act. No chance to stop them.
