Data intelligence complex is the real story

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a1dd626c-cf80-11e2-be7b-00144feab7de.html

by teawithcarl • 13 years ago

97 48 13 years ago

ft.com

Sven72• 13 years ago

Patroits don't work cheap.

ivanca• 13 years ago

Maybe call it "nationalism" to avoid implanted emotional implications of the word.

Sven72• 13 years ago

Maybe I'll just wait a day or two for someone at the Pentagon to leak guidelines on how to provide constructive criticism of their budget.

Meanwhile enjoy this quote from Nicholas Negroponte - "Nationalism is the biggest disease on the planet. Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing."

pfortuny3• 13 years ago

This is exactly what terrorists want: the impact of a terrorist act is, in the end, measured in money much more than in lives.

They are not going to kill that many people in the end, what they want is to make people afraid and pervert all the freedom in a country. Because what they hate is our freedom, do not forget it.

EDIT: BTW, being wrong (if I am) is a cause for downvotes? Grow up, you people.

manuelflara• 13 years ago

Even though you have a point in that all this massive expense (and more) is a win for terrorists, I don't think they "hate our freedom". If anything, they hate those that cause them pain (like every other human being). The US have playing chess with the rest of the world for decades and they're starting to pay the price. This is not a war that terrorists started because they hated anyone's freedom (why don't they target Canada, then?), but the absolutely only resource they have against a superpower that's trying to crush them (putting dictators in other countries, etc).

e40• 13 years ago

why don't they target Canada

They do[1], but I agree, not as often. I've felt for decades that we need to stop meddling in other country's affairs. Remember, we've been a target for decades, too. Hijackings and the first WTC bombing.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/22/world/americas/canada-terror-p...

cjdavis• 13 years ago

I was with you right up to your last sentence. 'Our freedoms,' that's the number one cause of terrorism?

pfortuny3• 13 years ago

Yes: the freedom to say "I shall not comply with your exigencies just because you are powerful". This is what they hate. Because it prevents the fulfilment of their 'dreams'.

I live in Spain. I know something about terror, man. And what ETA despises is FREE people in the Basque Country, willing to say to them: get your shit out of my hands and my house.

Terrorist are cheap people, in that sense. B-series villains, really. They just hate people not complying with their wishes: i.e. 'free' people.

This is what each dictator hates most. And they are dictators: "I know what is right and shall put all means into play in order to obtain it".

jmduke• 13 years ago

The terrorists do not want to see the U.S. turn into a police state.

The terrorists do not hate our freedoms.

The terrorists -- and specifically I'm talking about al-Qaeda and related groups -- want "atrocities against Muslims" to end, they want support for Israel to end, they want U.S. presence in the Middle East to end.[1]

Terror sects aren't B-movie villains.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military/july-dec96/fatw...

Ygg2• 13 years ago

Terrorist just want to commit their atrocities in peace, without anyone bothering them.

pfortuny3• 13 years ago

I probably explained myself badly.

What they want is to terrorize. Their success is measured in money.

Any economist will just point out that money is how most things are measured as regards human relations in a normal society.

newnewnew3• 13 years ago

It's a little more complicated than that, as one of those "atrocities against Muslims" is the existence of Israel. Even if the US ended support for Israel, it's likely that Muslims would still bear animus towards the West due to Israel's pro-Western worldview.

Now, maybe if we started bombing Israel to demonstrate our sincerity...

yoster2• 13 years ago

We should use that money to drop bombs via drones 24/7. Eradicate them out of existence.

hga10• 13 years ago

Errrm, and what, exactly, tells us who to "drop bombs" on?

apostlion• 13 years ago

It's obvious — the terrorists that hate your freedoms!

Your skin is brown? DROP A BOMB. You're a Muslim? DROP A BOMB, AND ONE MORE, TO BE SURE. You're a goddamn Ruski commie? BOMB, BOMB, BOMB.

Achshar• 13 years ago

Is the site behind paywall? I don't want to register just to read one article.

chm• 13 years ago

www.bugmenot.com

hga10• 13 years ago

Last time I checked it's a staged paywall. You get X articles for free without any action, X+Y articles if you register, there may be another "free" stage, and of course you can start paying and that may have more than one level.

They compete with The Wall Street Journal, which is famously about the only paper that made a success of on-line subscriptions a long time ago.

dm2• 13 years ago

I closed the popup and the article still didn't appear, so I closed the tab and found something else to read.

carbocation• 13 years ago

FT apparently requires you to register to see your 8 free articles every 30 days. So you have to do something, not just nothing.

Any other sources on this story? The fact that the US spends $80 billion (overall?) on signals intelligence would not be particularly surprising.

corresation2• 13 years ago

It is and shouldn't be on HN.

There is a recurring argument that these sorts of paywalls are okay for submissions because you can run various circumvention techniques that remove them. Aside from the serious legal grey area there (it may fall under the realm of "hacking"), it is in effect stealing for those of us who abide by intellectual property rights.

Sites that implement paywalls understand that they eschew social news sites as a consequence. Abide by that understanding.

hga10• 13 years ago

A counterargument is that they have a registration wall that allows you to read a certain number of articles per month (currently 8 according to carbocation in another subthread of this thread). I find their content to be of sufficiently high quality I had no qualms about doing that some time ago.

jrokisky• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

cstross• 13 years ago

NASA = National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

NSA = National Security Agency.

cobrabyte• 13 years ago

Pretty sure they were trying to demonstrate that we could have continued to fund NASA at a full burn rate for a few years with these funds.

elorant• 13 years ago

Well if you look it the other way, that's a good market to build a start-up for.

hga10• 13 years ago

This article by Walter Russell Mead says a massive intelligence effort is an necessary corollary of Obama's position that the Global War on Terror is over, that we can return to a 9/10 mindset: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2013/06/06/public...:

Key bits:

"From the day he took office, President Obama has sought to defuse the war and decrease public concern about it....

"It is in many ways an excellent strategy, but it has one serious flaw: it leaves the President terribly vulnerable if a significant terror strike should succeed....

[ Details the intelligence effort required. ]

"More than that, he has to be able to act. If terror is to be nipped in the bud, drones must fire down from the skies. If the al-Qaeda leadership is to remain stunned, scattered and incapable of large scale actions against the United States, houses in Waziristan must mysteriously blow up. American citizens making war against their homeland must die, even if that means they don’t get to hear their Miranda rights first.

"President Obama’s core war strategy depends on massive intelligence capabilities that were undreamed of twenty years ago. It depends on the substitution of drones for troops. PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an avoidable accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy: public peace and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war, he must intensify the secret struggle."

Herring3• 13 years ago

Yeah, and before that was communists. I wonder what's next.

newnewnew3• 13 years ago

I'm curious what you believe about the Boston bombing and 9/11. Do you think the threat of Islamic terrorism is fabricated?

I'm also curious what you think about American communism. American communists were instrumental in getting the Soviet Union the Bomb, thereby bring the world to the brink of destruction. They also leaked information from the top levels of government during WWII, helping to deliver millions to the rule of Soviet tyranny. The domestic communist threat was very real. Sorry to quote myself, but: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843702

gasull2• 13 years ago

This reads like pro-Obama propaganda. Why does Obama want to decrease public concern about war? I'd say he doesn't want a public debate about it. He doesn't want a public debate about PRISM/NSA either.

hga10• 13 years ago

Oh, but Obama says he welcomes the latter, even congratulates us for wanting to have one, "[...] it's a sign of maturity because probably five years ago, six years ago we might not have been having this debate." (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/06/07/obama_on_n...). Who could possibly complain?

ovoxo• 13 years ago

The individual in me says "Wow, that's a lot of spying". Yet, the larger, money-hungry side of me says "what service/product could I develop to get a chunk of that $80 billion".

film42• 13 years ago

You have to admit, the US is doing a pretty good job with that $80 billion/yr.

I mean, what's the alternative? Spend $0 on secret data intelligence gathering? Of course not! I for one am happy to know that there are people on my side, looking for people who are not.

Furthermore, I can't seem to understand why people are so up-in-arms over US data gathering. I for one, have nothing to hide. Every crime I've committed online is so small, the NSA simply doesn't care. Obama said in his latest press conference, "We collect the meta data, not the data. We can see who is calling who, and if we need to listen to that call, we need to go before a judge."

I, a person of the people, am fine with the government spending this kind of money on secret data intelligence, because it keeps me safer. Period.

suredo• 13 years ago

while the education budget is less then 70 billions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ed...

newnewnew3• 13 years ago

That's just at the federal level. Total is about $800 billion[1].

The US is regularly on top of the OECD for spending per student in school. The idea that it doesn't spend much on education is one of those bad memes that never goes away.

[1] http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...

omarali• 13 years ago

The article is free if you click on it from google's search results. Here is a link: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=data%20intelligence%2...

gasull2• 13 years ago

William Binney talks about the military-industrial complex in this video from the last HOPE conference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqN59beaFMI

Data intelligence complex is the real story

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