NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/nsa-mass-surveillance-powers-john-inglis-npr

by panacea • 13 years ago

113 58 13 years ago

Even regardless of the outcome of each program, just the fact that we're starting to have this discussion in the open is a big step forward, in my mind at least. I do understand that by discussing some of these plans we are in essence hampering their effectiveness, but my feeling is that in the grand scale of things it's a price that I think I'm willing to pay. Just my feelings.

ye2• 13 years ago

If we spent all the billions of dollars on healthcare or medical research, we would have saved million times more people.

timsally6• 13 years ago

It's not just about lives saved. This type of analysis is complicated because the costs are not always straightforward to analyze: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606.

Cushman5• 13 years ago

Is it that complicated? An American life is generally considered (by our government) to have a value somewhere in millions[0]. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that from an order-of-growth analysis, it may well be just about lives saved. (Roughly, each million lives saved saves a trillion dollars in economic value.)

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_... As a lower bound, the lifetime earnings of an individual are $1m and up: http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf

Ramsus• 13 years ago

This is straightforward: We've spent more than 5 trillion on the war against terrorism, homeland security, NSA, and other measures as a response to 9/11.

http://nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/

If you want to talk money and not lives, then by your citation we're spending the equivalent economical impact of a large terrorist attack every month to prevent something that is more rare than being struck with lightning from happening.

rtpg2• 13 years ago

Spying isn't just about saving lives, it's also about protecting national interests.

ye2• 13 years ago

I don't want my national interests to involve most of the shit NSA & Co does, including rendition, torture, spying on everyone, secret courts, secret rulings, secret laws, etc.

RexRollman• 13 years ago

Well for that matter, do we really need to try to solve every medical issue?

higherpurpose• 13 years ago

NSA, DHS, TSA, NYPD's "intelligence office", FBI's terror plot manufacturing - it's all one big security theater, and everyone is playing along with it.

If the Utah data center is not closed down/sold off, where they plan to keep all the data on everyone on Earth, forever, then they haven't ended anything, regardless of what Obama will say on TV next week.

3stripe• 13 years ago

"Fear is lucrative. Fear is big business".

Now that's actually a quote from a presentation about bike helmets and the culture of fear around cycling (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9UhHf7GsQ) but I think equally applicable to the culture of fear surrounding terrorism.

joshuapants• 13 years ago

Ignoring the privacy concerns, we spend an awful lot of money on the NSA. Tens of billions for sure. Maybe if they'd been thwarting a 9/11 every week (or if we were at risk for a 9/11-scale event semi-frequently) I'd feel that we hadn't quite wasted that money.

f_salmon2• 13 years ago

You say "billions". But if you know this [0], then you start asking yourself if all that money can really be just "lost".

[0] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/11/8-5-trillion-taxpayer...

EliRivers2• 13 years ago

The money isn't "lost"; what's gone forever are millions upon millions upon millions of man-hours that could have been used to do something useful. Saying the money is lost is just a handy shorthand for expressing what a waste it all was.

middleclick• 13 years ago

This fear mongering was expected. Let's suppose that this is true for the sake of the argument. Does this still justify mass surveillance? No it doesn't. But the NSA knows how to play this. Most people think the NSA is doing a good job and since people think they have "nothing to hide", they would keep on supporting the NSA because it "keeps them safe".

Zigurd• 13 years ago

Fencepost error

f_salmon2• 13 years ago

But security officials are arguing strongly against curtailing the substance of domestic surveillance activities.

Right. How about just having a sane and humane foreign policy instead of blowing up people all over the World? How about NOT creating hostility against the US in the first place? Did that ever cross your simple minds?

Oh sorry, I forgot - this would make the NSA/military less important, so that's no option, I suppose.

Theodores2• 13 years ago

So the one 'attack that might have been foiled' was some bloke in San Diego sending some money to someone in Somalia who might have had contact with extremists, extremists that are in Africa, a whole continent and a dozen time zones away.

Liberal left wing types that supported the bombing of Afghanistan on humanitarian grounds ('we have to bomb them because if we don't then they will all starve') did not imagine for one moment that the talk of 'terrorist training camps' was utter bullshit. It was all true - to them when Donald Rumsfeld was telling them. They thought that bombing them would only encourage the terrorists.

So where are they?

There are plenty of immigrants fresh from Afghanistan in London, the ones you meet work hard for a living driving taxis and doing jobs white people don't like doing. So if the NSA/GCHQ have not caught any of them for being unduly fundamental-extremalist and none of them have come here to join terror cells so they can blow up thousands more innocent babies and puppies, what is going on?

As a taxpayer I expect more from this clash of civilisations. I have not had any days of work due to terror bomb threats, no postcard sites have been blown up and I have no idea what the colour coded threat level is for the day.

mjolk6• 13 years ago

Liberal left wing types that supported the bombing of Afghanistan on humanitarian grounds... to them when Donald Rumsfeld was telling them.

I think you're confusing your political parties.

There are plenty of immigrants fresh from Afghanistan in London, the ones you meet work hard for a living driving taxis and doing jobs white people don't like doing.

Nice casual racism.

As a taxpayer I expect more from this clash of civilisations. I have not had any days of work due to terror bomb threats, no postcard sites have been blown up and I have no idea what the colour coded threat level is for the day.

While I question the notion of a "clash of civilisations[sic]," you're saying this like it's a bad thing.

vinceguidry2• 13 years ago

Nice casual racism. How is that racist?

notdrunkatall3• 13 years ago

Nice casual racism.

That's not racism.

While I question the notion of a "clash of civilisations[sic]," you're saying this like it's a bad thing.

I don't see where he assigned a value to this prediction. It seems to me that you've done that for him, both in this comment and the one accusing him of racism.

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

I think you've missed a particularly oblique piece of sarcasm.

ollysb• 13 years ago

I think you're confusing political parties

In the UK liberal refers to more socialist and inclusive policies (I think in the US it refers more to people being allowed to take care of themselves?).

EliRivers2• 13 years ago

So where are they?

A great many went to Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/opinion/iraq-a-school-for-... and many more.

rwmj• 13 years ago

At least the NSA is issuing an honest statement.

thisiswrong2• 13 years ago

Obama will follow the recommendations of a review group he set up, which suggested that the responsibility for the bulk domestic call records database should be transferred from the NSA to a third party, such as the phone companies

Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.''

It seems each 'reform' that these authoritarian sociopaths put forward just further enables/legalizes their crimes.

warmblood2• 13 years ago

Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.''

The word "corporatism" in this context is not a very good translation. It's a real quote, but "corporation" in Mussolini's time would be more accurately translated as "guild" or any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests. Corporations as we know them (commercial enterprises) weren't a thing as far as Mussolini knew.

As much as I appreciate the sentiment this quote carries, it's just not applicable to anything today. Snopes thread about this:

message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=36218

thisiswrong2• 13 years ago

any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests

From the Guardian article: ''Obama’s White House staff were meeting representatives of tech firms on Friday, concluding a packed week packed of meetings with surveillance stakeholders''

I damn well think you could call corporate surveillance stakeholders a ''guild'' or an ''arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests''.

jbapple• 13 years ago

Here's a transcript of the NPR interview referenced in the article:

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/10/261282601/transcript-nsa-deput...

Regarding the subject of the HN headline, "at most one terrorist attack might have been foiled", Inglis said:

"There's a candidate for that, which is the plot that was exposed in San Diego. I think we were able to essentially tell the FBI that an individual was materially involved in terrorism that they had, three years prior, investigated based on a tip and kind of laid that case to rest.

And but for the 215 Program, which we essentially tied that individual to some foreign terrorist activity overseas, the FBI would have let that case lain fallow for quite sometime. Now I cannot tell you that that wouldn't have turned up some other way. There wouldn't have been some other tool in the tool kit."

mercer• 13 years ago

While it seems like a good thing that the mass surveillance seems to not actually stop terrorist attacks, I feel a bit uncomfortable about this line of argument 'against' the NSA.

What if they did foil many terrorist attacks? I might feel different if me or mine had been affected by such an attack, but I'd like to think that I would still be against mass surveillance, simply because the dangers of that are not offset by being safer.

memset• 13 years ago

I was mugged earlier this year. I live in a neighborhood that used to be quite rough in Brooklyn but is getting better. It was 2am and I was walking around by myself and I got mugged.

He didn't take much from me: my phone (big deal) and wallet (easy to cancel credit cards.) Along with that phone he got a lot of photos - memories - of things and at that moment I wish I had automatically backed up to a private G+ album. But I didn't because I'm pro-privacy, I think.

When I filed the police report, the detective walked up and down the block with me, seeing if there were any cameras to see where the person went, or to identify them. Ordinarily I would be part of the anti-mass-surveillance crowd, what is this, England? but at the time I might've appreciated a few cameras along that block so to maybe deter my mugger.

I often think about this when it comes to discussions of surveillance. I, like so many hackers, want privacy, anonymity, and for the government to just go away and let us enjoy the ability to live private lives. I want Google to stop trying to save all of my personal emails, photos, text messages, and location data to the cloud.

And then I say "but it would've been nice if there were a police security camera on that block." Or "I guess I have principles about google plus but I'm still out my photos."

I don't think it's so unreasonable, in a sense, for someone to feel that, if in fact these efforts are foiling peoples' ability to do us harm, that they're fruitful. What is the essential difference between wanting a stronger police/watch/community force in my Brooklyn neighborhood versus the surveillance we're talking about here?

Obviously there is some difference. But what is it?

Nursie• 13 years ago

The cameras don't seem to have much deterrant effect in the UK, nor do you often hear of them catching people or convicting them through this footage. Which makes me wonder wtf they are for...

rtpg2• 13 years ago

Beyond the usual security/freedom dichotomy we can go on for ages about, there's also a question about effectiveness.

We tell ourselves that having security cameras will deter criminals, because we say "well, it won't entice them will it? ". But there are two points about this:

- How effective is this? If installing cameras all over the city of London stopped one person from being mugged, is it worth it?

The big issue with trying to measure this is two-fold. Firstly, the notion of "stopped" is a bit hard to measure. Obviously, the number of people caught thanks to evidence on the cameras counts, but if there were eyewitnesses as well, does it still count? Inversely, what about the chilling effect brought on by the cameras? How do you count the number of people who don't even think about mugging thanks to the cameras? And who's to say that the crime isn't simply displaced? Society is pretty bad at figuring out general supply demand curves (an example: We would think that raising wages would entice people to work more, but a decent amount of arguments exist to say that after a certain wage level, increasing the wage would decrease the number of hours we work (substitution effect with leisure) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_bending_supply_curve_o...)

-How do we measure effectiveness? I get mugged and lose a $200 phone. I think I would be slightly irked by it, and quantifying this as merely a $200 loss might insult me (especially considering I'm not very used to being mugged and I would consider it a traumatic experience).

A terrorist attack has a similar quantification problem, there are widespread psychological effects (even just the loss of loved ones, beyond the macro "security theater" stuff which induces circular reasoning). And the economic damage can be longterm.

uslic001• 13 years ago

To me it does not seem to be worth the huge cost/enormous effort/loss of privacy/loss of guaranteed constitutional rights.

Istof• 13 years ago

I would rather know how many politicians they blackmailed

res0nat0r• 13 years ago

Actual article title: NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers

pslam• 13 years ago

Interesting logical fallacy they're employing: by inverting the inequality such that the upside is capped, they're strongly implying that the value is non-zero. This shifts the conversation away from the value being, in fact, zero.

At most 1 person may have been killed by the official making that statement.

At most 1 child may have been abducted by journalists mentioning Snowden's name.

Nice trick. Wonder if it'll catch on with other officials?

leoc• 13 years ago

I'm a little skeptical of the conclusions drawn from these questions, especially when they're phrased in terms of surveillance data directly preventing specific attacks. From experience elsewhere it seems (I claim no expertise here) that you rarely begin looking a terrorist's or potential terrorist's communications at just the right time (neither too early nor too late) to discover a planned terrorist attack for the first time. What happens more often, apparently, is that you start looking at someone's communications and you gather information useful to turning them or someone else into an informer. Then you discover attack plans drawn up in the future because your double agent calls you up and tells you about them directly.

If the US is in fact using domestic surveillance effectively to generate informers, and thus prevent terror attacks, then US alphabet-soup spokesmen might plausibly be very slow to mention much about it in response to questions asked about specific attacks being directly detected through surveillance, both because a) the question as phrased doesn't cover such operations and b) you want at almost any cost to say nothing about them. Though on the other hand, if you aren't having success in those operations you wouldn't feel like saying much about it anyway, partly because it means you're failing at counter-terrorism ...

NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers

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