Disputed NSA Phone Program Is Shut Down, Aide Says

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/us/politics/nsa-phone-records-program-shut-down.html

by tysone • 7 years ago

93 45 7 years ago

nytimes.com

mehrdadn• 7 years ago

Any reason to believe there aren't other programs doing similar things?

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

Death by a thousand cuts.

Building a haystack to search for needles isn't free. If it's not delivering enough needles then people are going to be under pressure to end the program. I think a lot of people in government have smartened up to the fact that these things can be just as easily used against them if they fall out of favor and that having this sort of ongoing data collection could become liability if the wrong kind of people are in charge. The kinds of things Muller has chosen to prosecute certainly makes a lot of people in Washington nervous about their skeletons in the closet so there's less political tolerance of these kinds of programs than there once was. Snowden's leaks and greater public knowledge of these programs have reduced public support. It frees up resources to go after Russian trolls (or whatever), hunting terrorists is so 2005. There really is no way you can justify a program like this in 2019 (or so we hope), they've been proven ineffective and unpopular.

bellerose• 7 years ago

It's not really a needle in haystack problem. If you record every moment of all your citizens. You can build a calendar application where you enter the name of the person and go through all the moments in question throughout the days of curiosity. Specifically when that person is under suspicions of some criminal involvement. I feel sorry for china because I can only imagine how much more data besides just phone calls are collected from citizens unaware.

mycall• 7 years ago

Conversely, their vacuum everything approach could have landed them additional evidence against Russian hackers.

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

Let us hope that you are correct. We would still need to fortify laws against data collection that is fiercely enforced (although already being a requirement in many constitutions in the western sphere). That would require oversight with severe consequences for any program breaking the rules. Personal consequences up the chain. Intelligence agencies have morphed to petty criminal gangs. Even if you can easily argue that they have been criminal before...

duxup• 7 years ago

Considering congress's general lack of interest in providing thoughtful oversight, it seems they could just setup another program and congress would just shrug.

dsfyu404ed2• 7 years ago

I think a lot of people at the NSA are relieved to not be doing this anymore. These programs were started post-9/11 when we had no idea whether they would be effective but we felt like we needed to try them or at least try something because they might be the silver bullet that prevents another 9/11. People knew they were constitutionally dark gray and fundamentally un-American on day 1 but they went along because it might help. Many of the more senior people in the early 2000s were old enough to recall the Hoover era and everything that came to light after it. Now that we've proven bulk collection doesn't work we can finally put it to rest. With the increasing popularity of encryption it was getting long in the tooth anyway.

I also think that the established political parties are realizing how much power truly does lie in the executive branch and how long four years really is. While the current example being used to teach these lessons may be highly repugnant to the current political elite (on both sides) he is not doing anything that cannot be undone relatively easily.

The bigger the program the shorter the time it will stay secret, a nation scale metadata collection program is necessarily big. Congress will find out about it eventually at which point they will not be happy (Feinstein and a few die hard authoritarians excepted) because said program is all downside and no upside (as proven by PRISM's track record).

Nobody in Washington wants a time bomb like the calendar use case you described sitting around lest some future far left or right president use it in a manner that inadvertently starts a civil war.

That said, I also fully expect that they've moved on to some equally nefarious shit without telling us because that's what intelligence agencies do.

skookumchuck• 7 years ago

Consider the ever-widening of demands for papers and records of Trump associates in an effort to find something, anything, to get him on, or at least discourage anyone from working in the White House, and isolate Trump.

It's an example of the government using its investigative powers for political purposes. I recall when Nixon tried to sic the IRS on his enemies.

marcrosoft• 7 years ago

If you say so...

14• 7 years ago

Does anyone actually believe this? Call me skeptical, but would they not just shut down "this" program them redesign it, adjust it a little, call it something different and act as if they were completely honest with the people and continue on doing exactly the same thing under a different name?

dylan604• 7 years ago

“Black briar is a program that we thought showed a lot of promise, but didn’t pan out so we’re shutting it down. This next project Treadstone is something we think really has some legs...”

superkuh3• 7 years ago

An anonymous "aide" says so? This statement is worth absolutely nothing like every other anonymously sorced comment from government officials that the NYT scrawls.

ngngngng• 7 years ago

"Please stop using Signal, trust us, you don't need it anymore" :)

paraxisi• 7 years ago

Yep, this carries just as much credence as "No sir, not wittingly."

anarazel2• 7 years ago

The aide is actually not anonymous if you follow the story a bit. If you follow the links in the story you can easily figure it out.

I think it's good to not expose career staffers to the full public public wrath without need. Making it more painful for staffers to talk to the public will just get you less of that, nothing else.

superkuh3• 7 years ago

I suppose that's a bit better but I was kind of objecting to the NYT and other large papers habit of sourcing these anonymous comments from government officials. This is not a one-off thing. It's their status quo.

KorematsuFred2• 7 years ago

Credibility Score: Gas Stations Sushi 0.24 NSA : 0.01

mediawatch052• 7 years ago

The Chinese government is doing all this and more. So is Iran, No Ko, Russia, to the greatest extent they can.

Credibility score:

US government agencies: 0.52

UK, Aus, Canada govts: 0.6

Chinese government: 0.01

KorematsuFred2• 7 years ago

The question is does USA see Russia, China, Iran as its peers and want to be in their league or not.

It is okay to be a despotic regime as long as you also face the risks that come along with it. USA does not face such risks and hence it can not be okay to compare it with say Russia.

I am reminded of the following (obviously fictional) story where Ronald Regan and Gorbachev wondered who had the most loyal soldiers. Ronald Regan asked one of his bodyguard to shoot himself to show his loyalty. The bodyguard laughed and asked Regan to fuck off. Gorbachev asked the same of his bodyguard who promptly shot himself to death. Regan was very surprised and asked Gorbachev as to how come his bodyguard was so loyal. Gorbachev said, he was protecting his family by killing himself.

I do not think China, Russia or Saudi Barbaria are worthwhile bechmarks for USA. Those countries have achieved little and will continue to achieve little.

posterboy• 7 years ago

... because everything runs over IP now and old "phone" interconnects aren't used nyway. Jinxed!

Jerry2• 7 years ago

One program is shutting down (according to who knows whom) but that doesn't mean that other programs are doing the exact same thing. NY Times is again acting as a limited hangout [0] for various spy agencies.

One of the things we learned from Congressional hearings (from James Clapper and others) and from whistleblowers like William Binney and Snowden is that these intelligence agencies change the meaning of words. Things like "collection" and "analysis" don't mean what you think they mean. When they say "we don't collect X" that just means they don't collect X under the program they're testifying about. If there are other programs, they won't tell you about those or will only testify in secret. Sometimes they outright lie about things too as we found out from Clapper's testimony.

Anyway, don't believe a word they say. This data is way too valuable to be abandoned. If not the NSA, someone else will be collecting it, analyzing it and disseminating it through some database within the IC.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout

nilskidoo2• 7 years ago

They're shutting it down in the same way they shut down terrorists.

huffmsa2• 7 years ago

Not sure about the down boats here. The program caught and/or stopped precisely 0 (ZERO) terrorists. It also failed to harvest any data regarding "Muh Russians".

It and many other NSA projects are about as effective as the TSA.

JustSomeNobody2• 7 years ago

Yeah, I really hope we're getting beyond the terrorist fear mongering. It only existed as a way to win elections and funnel money away from tax payers to corporations.

jamisteven• 7 years ago

" If not the NSA, someone else will be collecting it." Correct, that company in the private sector is called Palantir.

mediawatch052• 7 years ago

“What we learned from the 2016 election is that all the bad things we were told NSA was doing, Facebook was actually the one doing them.”

There are three kinds of groups collecting data on individuals today:

- Democratic governments

- Autocratic governments

- Surveillance-capitalism private firms

Of those three groups, only democratic countries have rules and laws in place to protect individuals. NSA has strict rules about data collection on US citizens; autocratic countries and Facebook do not. NSA has caught a few employees looking at data they should not have; those employees were disciplined.

I’d much rather have agencies of a democratic government doing this than anyone else. I’m a US citizen, but I trust the U.K., Canada, etc to do this right.

gscott• 7 years ago

The NSA doesn't need to collect anything:

"AT&T’s Project Atmosphere was unveiled Tuesday by the Daily Beast to be secretly selling customer data to law enforcement agencies for the purpose of investigating everything from murder to medical fraud."

https://www.newsweek.com/att-spying-program-worse-snowden-re...

Letter to the SEC from AT&T (linked below)

"Hemisphere is a government program, its design and scope are determined by governmental authorities, and AT&T has a legal compliance program in place in response to authorized intelligence and law enforcement efforts."

https://www.sec.gov/divisions/corpfin/cf-noaction/14a-8/2017...

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https://reason.com/blog/2013/09/02/report-dea-has-been-secre...

https://www.fastcompany.com/40590766/atts-long-partnership-w...

https://www.cnet.com/news/dea-supplied-with-access-to-vast-d...

https://www.aol.com/article/finance/2016/10/25/atandt-report...

https://www.cnbc.com/2013/11/07/cia-said-to-pay-att-for-call...

https://www.aclu.org/other/hepting-v-att-challenging-corpora...

https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/10/27/u-s-taxpayers-pay-a...

huffmsa2• 7 years ago

The lack of trust in these comments is heartening.

"Shutting down this program" != "No longer collecting and analyzing this data"