Why aren’t there any technologists on the NSA review panel?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/28/why-arent-there-any-technologists-on-the-nsa-review-panel/?tid=rssfeed

by Libertatea • 13 years ago

116 46 13 years ago

washingtonpost.com

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

Why are we even mentioning a "NSA review panel"?

Stating the obvious: This panel is not about solving the issue at hand.

Another example: Was anyone really satisfied with the "9/11 commission"?

beedogs• 13 years ago

Bush and Cheney and their administration sure were satisfied.

mcherm• 13 years ago

Was anyone really satisfied with the "9/11 commission"?

Actually, that commission produced a number of recommendations (http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/index.htm) which were welcomed by many in Congress and some of which were actually implemented. They included such issues as requiring government security agencies to share data with each other and reorganizing the reporting structure to ensure that would happen.

The analogy fails in this case though, because the 9/11 commission was independent and had members from various backgrounds.

noir_lord• 13 years ago

Why aren’t there any technologists on the NSA review panel?

Because the last thing the NSA wants on a panel reviewing them is someone technically competent.

mhurron3• 13 years ago

Ignoring the 'they won't do anything so it doesn't matter who is on it' part of things -

review government surveillance policies

Because they're not needed to review policy. You honestly don't need to understand technology, and therefore don't need a technology expert, for most things that happen in the world.

Do you expect a technology expert on a medical review board? The doctor is after all going to be using technology ...

RossM• 13 years ago

One might be useful to help extract the extent of the surveillance - one might incorrectly assume certain information is untrackable for example.

jnbiche• 13 years ago

If it's a medical review board looking at deaths caused by software failures, then yes, I'd expect at least one technology expert on there. And to the credit of the medical community, that's usually the case.

This review board is supposedly trying to establish how bad the NSA surveillance -- clearly a technologically-sophisticated system -- is. If you have people on there who don't even understand how the Internet works (i.e., most politicians), then how in the hell are they going to audit an Internet surveillance system?

But yeah, I agree with you in that it doesn't matter in the long run. This is a rubber-stamp review.

rlpb• 13 years ago

People who do not understand technology seem to treat technology as a magic bullet that can be adapted to implement policy. It doesn't work that way.

You need to understand technology in order to understand the implications of what applying particular policy may lead to, and thus whether the policy itself is sane. In the real world, there are major implications when technology fails to implement policy because it fundamentally cannot do so.

For example: in the UK, David Cameron's attitude towards Internet censorship seems to be "It doesn't work. You're smart; make it work." and completely ignores the fact that it is technically impossible to do what he would like. Yet he continues to demand it anyway.

mhurron3• 13 years ago

People who do not understand technology seem to treat technology as a magic bullet that can be adapted to implement policy

Pretending you need experts in 'technology' to do anything that ever comes in the same room as a computer enforces this view, it doesn't change it.

Policy should be written in such a way that it is abstracted from the implementation detail. To the point, it shouldn't matter if I am talking on the phone, writing a letter or IM'ing someone over the internet, the NSA should have to hit the same requirements to look at it.

completely ignores the fact that it is technically impossible to do what he would like. Yet he continues to demand it anyway

"Idiots doing idiot things because they're idiots." He has been told, many times, by 'technologists' that what he want's can't really be done. It doesn't seem to matter now, does it.

msandford2• 13 years ago

Let's say that I work at a bank and that the bank policy is to put all the money in the vault and as a result, the money will not be stolen. Then one day, the money is stolen.

Turns out that the reason the money was stolen is because the vault has no door. Just because the bank has a "money in the vault can't be stolen" policy on paper doesn't cause that vision of how the world SHOULD be to become REALITY. In order to winnow out the truth in this situation the review panel would need to have someone who knows something about security and vault construction on it. Also who perhaps would be allowed to inspect said vault to verify it's intact.

This is 100% analogous to the NSA review panel as all the folks in government are crowing about how it's policy that you can't look at such-and-such without a reason, but in fact there's no technological enforcement of said policy. Analysts can look at whatever they want provided that they give (type into a text field) some kind of ostensible reason, but that reason is only for auditing purposes. A bad reason typed into a field doesn't prevent the search as there's no review of said reason prior to the search running.

It's a bank vault with a door where the "lock" is a "sign in, sign out" sheet taped to the wall near the handle. And no security guard ensuring that people do in fact sign in and sign out. And definitely not checking to see that the money everyone's leaving with is in fact for the regular operations of the bank and not for their own personal gain.

mhurron3• 13 years ago

Those are handled by reports via required experts. Or did you also need an architect on the policy board because it involved a building? They probably plan to print the policy out, I guess we need the engineer who designed the printer on the board as well.

Just because it uses something does not mean a subject matter expert on that thing needs to be involved in every part of the policy surrounding it.

On top of that, this specific group is concerned with the legality of what the NSA is doing. This is the realm of lawyers and constitutional experts. The fact that they are using a computer instead of pads of paper doesn't change that.

Or did they need representatives from the paper mill before?

in fact there's no technological enforcement of said policy

Oh, and policy writers are often not policy implementers and never are in government, a review board of the policy won't change that.

revelation• 13 years ago

Because the review panel is a joke.

First, they wanted Clapper to do the independent review. [1] This is the man that openly lied to congress and remains scott-free to this day.

Next they picked Michael Morell. [2] This dude was the acting director for the CIA until March of this very year. Clearly he has the capacity to conduct an independent review of his NSA buddies.

Joining this luminary will be Cass Sunstein [3], author of such classics like "Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech", and the person who proposed the government should infiltrate what he deems "conspiracy theory groups":

However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories [4, page 14]

Supporting these brains is Richard Clarke, who built his personal career on pushing the "war on terror" after 9/11. He also recently added "cyberwar" to his extensive portfolio of things he has absolutely no clue of. His views on privacy protections and large scale surveillance are well known:

If given the proper authorization, the United States government could stop files in the process of being stolen from getting to the Chinese hackers. If government agencies were authorized to create a major program to grab stolen data leaving the country, they could drastically reduce today’s wholesale theft of American corporate secrets. [5]

(It doesn't take a genius to realize this is the proposal of a person that probably doesn't even have internet access.)

Of course, all of these people work in some capacity for the Obama administration. It didn't even occur to the government morons running this show that maybe, just maybe, they should not pick people with an obvious and direct conflict of interest. They don't even bother to give the impression of caring.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130812/13512624147/presi...

[2] http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/08/white-house-pic...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_Sunstein

[4] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585

[5] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-o...

tod222• 13 years ago

Because the review panel is a joke.

This is exactly right. This is a case of the government reviewing itself by packing the review board with insiders and sympathizers. Nobody who disagrees with the NSA's behavior has been selected for this panel.

Blogger Emptywheel has been following this much more closely than the general media:

Advocate of Secret Infiltration, Cass Sunstein, on Obama’s “Committee To Make Us Trust the Dragnet” [1]

The No-Technologist Technology Review Panel [2]

3 Tech Issues the Non-Technologist NSA Technical Committee Needs to Address [3]

[1] http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/22/advocate-of-secret-infi...

[2] http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/27/the-no-technologist-tec...

[3] http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/28/3-tech-issues-the-non-t...

xutopia• 13 years ago

Of course the panel is a joke but how many technologist put themselves in situations where they'd be in politics?

tptacek9• 13 years ago

Cass Sunstein is among the most famous living constitutional law scholars.

Richard Clarke built his post-government career (after being the most senior counterterrorism official in the Clinton administration) as a critic of the way the "war on terror" had been prosecuted, and has been working on "cyberwar" subjects for over a decade.

I don't like Clarke much and I don't agree with everything Cass Sunstein proposes but your dismissive tone harms your argument.

Amadou• 13 years ago

Cass Sunstein is among the most famous living constitutional law scholars.

Obama himself graduated magna cum laude with a masters degree in law from Harvard and then lectured on constitutional law for 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. Expertise in constitutional law doesn't necessarily translate to skepticism here. The constitution is not a moral authority on privacy.

Richard Clarke

He wrote an interesting op-ed before he was named to this committee. It appears to be critical of the NSA's operation, but a closer reading suggests his problem is about the degree, he's fine with massive record keeping, he just wants it in the hands of the telcos.

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/worry-nsa-article-1.13697...

dragonwriter3• 13 years ago

Cass Sunstein is among the most famous living constitutional law scholars.

He is a person who has expressed views supportive of an extremely active role of government in covertly surveilling and infiltrating with the intent of moderating domestic political groups whose views are unwelcome to the government.

This clearly makes him a extremely problematic pick for a review board whose role (as overtly stated by the President) is to instill confidence that the NSA is not taking an actions that are excessive, unconstitutional, and illegal under statute law in terms of covert domestic surveillance, no matter how "famous" he is.

sonupundir• 13 years ago

Cass Sunstein is among the most famous living constitutional law scholars.

Way to go! Replying to the grand parent's (revelation's) solid argument by using vague statements. Just what does the most famous living constitutional law scholar even mean? Besides being meaningless statement like the most beautiful woman in the world it is also almost irrelevant - almost nonsensical - to the current discussion. Just because a person has had a successful career - particularly in politics, bureaucracy and fields like that - doesn't mean the person doesn't have an agenda and vested interest. In fact some would argue it is quite the opposite as - unlike some tech/hard science luminaries, for example - their success is likely correlated with their other - rather nefarious - traits than pure merit alone.

Your next paragraph about Richard Clarke is in similar vein.

AsymetricCom• 13 years ago

Corporate secrets being stolen digitally is obviously a big problem, but saying that the government should fix it is obviously yet more corporate socialism.

junto• 13 years ago

  Why aren’t there any technologists on the NSA review panel?

Because they might ask sane questions of course.

csmatt• 13 years ago

They should just put Snowden on the panel and be done with it :D

rayiner4• 13 years ago

Because Obama doesn't see this as a technology issue. It's a security versus legal rights issue. Technology is involved merely incidentally. Hence a panel that involves two intelligence people (Morell and Clarke), and three law professors (Sunstein, Swire, and Stone).

The professors aren't ideologically diverse, but they're hardly intelligence community insiders like the article is trying to make them out to be. Swire was Chief Counselor for Privacy in the OMB under Clinton. Stone writes a lot on subjects like preserving free speech rights during wartime. None of these guys are anarcho-libertarians, but they're not John Woo "security first" guys either. They pretty much represent the views of the "mainstream left."

Hypothesis: what people want is not someone who knows "how to run a packet sniffer." There is nothing complicated about the underlying technology that can't be explained adequately to a bunch of intelligent people. What people are really mad about is the lack of any representation of the political views of technologists: people who put a very high ideological priority on free information and protecting communications online. Because that is the thing you can't explain in a whitepaper.

TomJoad• 13 years ago

"There is nothing complicated about the underlying technology that can't be explained adequately to a bunch of intelligent people."

Assuming the underlying technology and it's implications are explained adequately at all. We already know how they try to explain metadata, so how are they going to explain the stuff we still don't know about?

rayiner4• 13 years ago

Metadata is actually a good example. I'd bet that everyone on that panel understands perfectly well what metadata is and is not. The relevant part of the metadata issue isn't technical, it's legal: can it be protected by the 4th amendment, when it's sitting on AT&T's servers? What sophisticated technical understanding is needed to answer this question? Indeed, arguably better technical understanding undermines the argument for protecting it. When you understand that the metadata is something that's generated by AT&T and not you or your phone, that's less of an argument for protecting it.

betterunix• 13 years ago

"There is nothing complicated about the underlying technology that can't be explained adequately to a bunch of intelligent people"

Explained by...? I would have thought that having a technologist on the panel would at least serve the purpose of explaining technology issues to the rest of the panel's members.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

That's generally not how panels work. They'll commission expert reports, etc.

tptacek9• 13 years ago

Because no relevant technologist wants to sit on a panel that is inevitably going to conclude that some degree of SIGINT will need to impact Google. They've got to keep working in this industry, after all.

polymatter• 13 years ago

If having a technologist was important, there would be a technologist there. I'm sure there are many who would accept a position if it was offered. Much more likely is that it wasn't considered a technology matter at all. The technology is just there to do what its told after all.

tptacek9• 13 years ago

That is, as a matter of fact, true.

CWuestefeld• 13 years ago

Having a technologist like Felten on the panel could provide much-needed insight into the broader technical implications of government surveillance practices. For example, the National Security Agency (NSA) has claimed a data collection practice later ruled unconstitutional by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court was the result of a complex technical problem rather than an overreach by the NSA during a press call. Someone with technical training would be well-positioned to evaluate the technical merits of this claim.

When the government is doing something bad, it's not relevant whether it came from technical problems rather than cultural.

All we need to know is that the government has been doing something bad. The evidence that this has occurred, for any reason, should be sufficient to shut it down.

drcube• 13 years ago

Because the goal isn't an unbiased review, but a stamp of political approval? Did you really think the government as a whole is self-critical?

Read Feynman's account of being on the Challenger review panel. He was the token scientist among politicians and PR people, and they tried to steer him away from doing any actual investigations. They tried to agree, before doing any investigation into why the shuttle blew up, not to blame NASA and to indeed give it vote of confidence.

The goal is to deflect blame from the government while making the status quo look hunky dory. Any actual investigation is counterproductive and I guarantee it won't actually happen to the NSA. This is a PR campaign, period.