An Open Letter to My Former NSA Colleagues

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/08/nsa_domestic_spying_mathematicians_should_speak_out.html

by pivnicek • 13 years ago

106 20 13 years ago

slate.com

LOSindignados• 13 years ago

Seife's book "Zero" totally blew my mind a few years back. Powerful words:

"If this is really what the agency stands for, I am sorry to have helped in whatever small way that I did."

jacquesm4• 13 years ago

What bothers me is that there is just 'us' and 'them'. There is not even the hint of allies or any shade of gray in all this, you are either part of the United States or you are fair game.

fnordfnordfnord3• 13 years ago

What do you mean? US citizens are fair game too.

jacquesm4• 13 years ago

They are but they're not supposed to be. At least, they weren't. I know that's apparently changed but that is a funny thing to have such a flap over, if you feel that it is somehow bad in principle to target your own civilians when they have not (yet) done anything wrong what is it that makes it a-ok to do the same on foreigners? I can't follow that reasoning.

ferdo2• 13 years ago

If a nation or a group was acting towards American citizens the way the NSA (and other TLAs) does, we'd probably assume they were at war with us.

grecy• 13 years ago

Now you know how everyone outside the United States feels.

ferdo2• 13 years ago

I've been aware of it for years. My only consolation in the events of the past few months is that a lot of my friends no longer view my opinions as being in left field.

bazillion2• 13 years ago

I can understand the public outrage over what the implications are for things that have been circulated in the press. The author, however, is guilty of a very terrible error in my opinion -- he has walked the halls of Ft. Meade and seen how the NSA operated, and yet now he believes that the NSA operates 180 degrees from when he joined. He's essentially casting aspersions at those who have joined the NSA since his leaving, and those who still yet join, saying "Shame on you, shame on you for not having a higher moral standard!". Well, you sir can politely go fuck yourself.

Those who have served in the military or as civilians in the department of defense have given up a lot of their personal liberties in order to provide for the common defense. Service. It's not a concept I expect you to understand if you're reading this from a Starbucks while pitching your new startup idea to your friends. It entails willingly giving up the ability to talk to your friends and loved ones about anything you do -- you often end up telling people that you do some mundane job because you can't answer their followup questions. It means getting called into work or off of vacation because your small piece of the world has gone to shit, and not having anyone to vent to about it. It also means placing the very notion of where you live in the hands of the government, and sometimes being forced to be away from your family for years. It is all these things and more, but it is not ever something one should be made to feel ashamed of doing.

There are thousands of employees right now in the NSA who aren't even allowed to come to their own defense on the matter, because DoD has deemed that speaking about the situation is a security violation. They have to sit there and endure that the people around them who are very ignorant as to what it is NSA even does, just plain get it wrong. Well, as my NSA/CIA security clearance finally closed out yesterday, I have no qualms about speaking on their behalf.

The public is completely and utterly wrong about the motivations of the NSA and the information they were provided as "fact". Everything has been skewed to paint a picture that is damning and I would definitely be angry about if it were true, but it just isn't. There is a culture of protecting American civil liberties in the NSA. It's almost pathological -- anything that can potentially affect a US person is given extremely wide berth. There are major auditing and oversight mechanisms in place in case someone were to ever run a query that affected a US person. So the notion that in 2 years, the intelligent, passionate, and devoted people I came to know have somehow flipped around and violate rights willy-nilly now is a ludicrous idea. If this were true, we would be seeing a thousand whisteblowers (true whistleblowers, not Snowden) coming out of the woodwork trying to correct the system.

It is not true that the government doesn't care about the rights of individuals just because you want it to be true. Those that are employed are individuals too, and are not being magically compelled to carry terrible secrets against their individual moral codes and ethics. They are carrying out a mission of defense which extends into the technology of this century -- even cars have had 100 years for us to deliberate and come up with the current system of laws that govern that technology. While the legal framework for their actions are up for debate, their collective character is not.

The current public climate surrounding those who have been in the intelligence community hearkens back to days of activists yelling "Baby killer! Baby killer!" at passing by Vietnam vets. A few of you who are self-reflecting will at some point in your life when the intelligence practices becomes more public, regret your outrage and overreaction at this time. I feel like the rest will not, because it was a passing trend and never really affected you directly either way.

I would like to thank those that have served (including the author) and continue to serve for their part in upholding their oath. It may seem like no one gets you, but a few out here in the public sector do. In the cycle of the public raging against government powers, and then asking why the government didn't do more about x situation, the people in service get lost in the mix.

I hope that regardless of who you are reading this, that you have the ability to empathize with those who are outside of your personal story, with whom you will never have any interaction with. That I happen to know some of their faces doesn't change the fact that I don't assume the faceless ones are perpetrating a great conspiracy against the American people. I just assume that they're serving.

eliasmacpherson• 13 years ago

There are thousands of employees right now in the NSA who aren't even allowed..

http://cryptome.org/2013/08/proton-clearwater-lexis-nexis.ht...

Saw this on slashdot the other day, it's allegedly an NSA staffer spilling the beans because he's ticked off by parallel construction.

wkdown• 13 years ago

I am going to copypasta this in every "NSA is evil" post I come across. You put it more eloquently than I've been able to.

jacquesm4• 13 years ago

Yes, because eloquence === truth.

jacquesm4• 13 years ago

This is just like one of those 'support our troops' stickers that were all over the USA.

I just assume that they're serving.

That doesn't mean they are serving our collective best interests. They might very well be acting against those interests while they think they are serving them.

Vietnam vets are a particularly bad example to bring up here (and I know a couple of them that are very outspoken in this regard), they were fed a line and used and plenty of them still live with the guilt and horrors of that today.

To serve some masters blindly is quite dangerous for ones mental health especially in the longer term.

Calling Snowden not a 'true whistleblower' makes me wonder what it would take for you to consider anybody a whistleblower.

gglitch2• 13 years ago

Parent makes the case in favor of sympathy for public servants very eloquently, but constructs his argument by appealing to how much we don't know about what's really going on in the NSA--but the American public shouldn't have to take the NSA or its sympathizers on faith. It may not be reasonable to expect full disclosure, but the current level of disclosure is insulting. It's easy to believe that most civil servants have our best interests at heart; but we shouldn't have to just believe it. Suitable oversight should provide all necessary evidence.

bazillion2• 13 years ago

Oversight is definitely the key to limiting the possibility of government overreach, but it is wrong on the populace's part to think that just because they aren't privy to the oversight that it isn't there.

There is much the same problem with those who work in the political realm in D.C. They are constantly derided as do-nothing on a macro scale, but on an individual basis a lot of effort is put into how laws are constructed and amended. This is analogue to the situation in the intelligence community -- a lot of work is done by individuals and the organization they are a part of to preserve civil liberties, but disclosing the nature of their collection abilities in the interest of the transparency of their protection of civil liberties is absolutely counter-productive. A big difference between the two, is that the political worker can disclose their work while the intelligence worker can not.

I'm not denying that there are instances of overreach, but I'm merely making the point that the framework for protection of civil liberties is not a piece of glass that shatters on the first stone thrown against it. It is an organic process, which is subject to upper and lower bounds in order to come to rest at a medium level with which both the public is suitably comfortable, and which gets the job done.

fnordfnordfnord3• 13 years ago

... for their part in upholding their oath. ...

Which oath? The one where you swear to defend the constitution, or the one where you swear not to?

salemh• 13 years ago

Not sure how you are going to be able to substantiate this in any way, as the public can only judge the NSA based on the reactions of the establishment against its detractors and whistleblowers, lies and damned lies, etc.

So this may be a case of "don't blame the peon's" but is deflecting from the issues at hand of abhorrent abuses of power.

While the legal framework for their actions are up for debate, their collective character is not.

How so?

malandrew2• 13 years ago

I'm sorry for being so curt after you spent time on a long thoughtful answer, but the mere existence of parallel construction suggests that you are wrong on this. I think most of the rest of the infractions can be equivocated via bureaucracy, negligence or a belief that the processes in place actually do protect Americans, but parallel construction is so far beyond what is ethical and what is within the jurisdiction of the NSA that it is indefensible. However just because someone can explain away some of the wrongdoings committed by otherwise well intentioned people, that does not mean that we, the people, should accept this. What is going on presents a far far greater existential threat to everything our nation stands for than any terrorist in history. Nations heal from almost all single acts of violence, such as 9-11. However what we have going on right now is a metastasizing cancer that is spreading to all agencies and even local police forces.

If parallel construction is not 180 degrees then I don't know what is.

An Open Letter to My Former NSA Colleagues

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