The NSA fear killed a project I was working on. I got it to the point of working (proof of concept) because the nonsense they are trying against the Megaupload founder (I'm not on his side either, but I felt we need a safe harbor software suite).

I had my brilliant russian buddy (grew up studying in the ussr) poking holes in my logic from a discussion level.

Then I started thinking, what if this pissed off someone spying on us. They could hack my machine (windows) and throw some CP or something on there that would ruin my life (I have no fear of anything I've got on my computers as a result of my own downloading).

So I killed the project.

Just like the article posts, with the fear of Hoover. I have the same fear of the government. Funny thing is I'm a pretty liberal person for the most part.

Our government operating like it does, from local police being above the law all the way up to the 3 letter agencies and congress themselves. Is really disheartening.

The NSA's utility overseas during combat in Iraq and Afghanistan with cell phone targeting <--> drone strikes was incredibly valuable IMO. They've put other countries signals agencies to shame by comparison, which is a very valuable national security advantage and provide an effective deterrence from superpower threats such as Russia/China, beyond simply nukes.

In war time I believe there is no doubt of their value.

But the lack of tangible tactical results in terms of data (in the broader fight against terrorism, domestic and otherwise) they have so far provided to the public is almost sad and embarrassing... considering the expenditure. So far they can only point to a small number of "real" terrorists or threats which they neutralized.

Results should be the only thing that matters.

Most of it would be in trade deals and other global political diplomacy that we'd never know about. Regardless of the technical capabilities that Snowden revealed.

The singular thing that scares me - that I can say with absolute certainty is immoral and dangerous - are secret rubber-stamp FISA courts.

The issue is that we do not have the full data set. We only see those cases where the NSA fails and select cases of success. Most successes, if there are any, are hidden to maintain secrecy in operations. I'm not saying there are any successes. What successes we do see are ones that are 'scrubbed' of intelligence or were made with intel that is now known to be useless and only then years after the fact. Again, if there are any successes to begin with. To make an educated conclusion, we need the facts, something we cannot have. Things could be worse or better, we do not know.

This is a fatally utilitarian response. You want to be able to calculate whether an equilibrium lies between good and bad outcomes of a process. That is a somewhat defeatist analysis to make because it implicitly denies the gaping moral and ethical risks of the system.

Yes, completely. But to make an assessment of moral risks, you have to have the data. Something we are unlikely to get. Everything else is just conjecture, perhaps well founded and correct, but still conjecture. Perhaps then the issue is with over classification of intel, not the people in charge. We may never know as a consequence.

edit: In the end, it is reasonable to assume we do not have adequate data on the successes of these programs. 2 paths then arise. 1) Then you wait for more data. 2) You examine those people that you reasonably know to have access and take a look at their moral history and actions to determine the ethical issues; it's the only somewhat good data you can add to the set to maybe get a conclusion.

No, you're missing my point by saying "you have to have the data," and it appears that you are missing some fundamental concepts in normativity.

You do not need data to make a moral argument based upon principle. There is no conjecture involved. (You could read some Kant on this, if you like.) You need data only to determine a particular consequentialist ethics that involves a balance of good and bad outcomes often understood in lay terms as "effectiveness." I think most commenters here would agree that effectiveness is the wrong way to evaluate this system, since epistemologically we cannot know its effectiveness. (... Although many doubt it could ever be truly effective in the presence of creative adversaries.) We can only know that is it categorically wrong.

Morally and ethically, the NSA is still accountable to Congress. If anything really big surfaces, they'll receive all manner of unwanted attention, and if it's big enough, no bleats about security will suffice - the committee that does oversight will be invested of quite extraordinary powers.

Do you disagree with 'btilly or are you saying you're agnostic?

I'm saying it is possible that successes are hidden for real reasons and that we are biased by only seeing the flaws and failures. There may be a morally correct reason for all this nonsense. I'm not saying I agree with what I wrote, but that there is that possibility.

The issue with this idea is that it is a tautology. You can neither prove it nor deny it from the outside where the public sits. You simply do not have the access to the data and cannot reveal it. Those that have pay a heavy price.

What then? You have to take Occam's razor, that the simplest explanation is the correct one. Combine this with Hanlon's razor to not attribute to conspiracy what you can reasonably contribute to stupidity, and you may have an answer that passes the sniff test.

This does not undermine your point, but perhaps we also miss some failures i.e.: the NSA does something evil and we never hear about it. Certainly they are not incented to let everyone know.

I think I fit into this category. I had an incident with my employer (fairly) recently that forced me to return to anonymity, but I'm not using a throwaway account, and I do generally believe the work the NSA is currently doing is more helpful than harmful.

I'd elaborate, but I doubt anyone wants to hear it. Whenever I do comment on HN about it, as long as I stay nice, I get a few upvotes, but the replies are extremely hard-line responses that make it difficult to have a conversation.

I'd be interested to hear. I doubt I'd have any points to bring to the discussion further, but I've not really heard someone speak for the work the NSA is doing.

(I skimmed your comment history for the elaboration, but found nothing in my brief search. Sorry!)

I don't have much to say about it, other than the specific belief that I don't think this comment will ever be directly connected to me by the NSA or anyone else, almost regardless of its content.

A lot of the concern over the loss of privacy from a 1st Amendment standpoint revolve around the idea that the US government will eventually start to silence dissenters. I don't worry about this, because I can write this comment, and as long as I don't literally make a direct or actionable threat against someone, no one on the planet but me will know who wrote it. Even after everything I've read about what the NSA is doing, I still don't think they have the capability of identifying someone in a position like mine without a warrant.

The idea that this comment is safe makes me think the US government isn't yet at a point where the article writer seems to think it is.

Thanks. I don't agree with this (Ben Tilly's take on NSA surveillance is practically identically to mine), but I'm glad to know there are people that have coherent arguments in support of NSA, rather than just a crowd of HN commenters bickering about who opposes NSA more.

An NSA becomes a (part of a ) Staasi after the leadership has risen to power basically through murder - murder to the point to where it's impossible to identify the threat any more, for generations.

This ignores the relatively sanguine nature of Russian politics in general. You don't get an Ivan the Terrible every day.

It's nearly impossible to explain just how bloody the Russian Revolution was ( even if you could cleave it cleanly from WWI, a blood-soaked thing of there ever was ). I don't care how noble and popular a "movement" in the US could be, I do not think the American people will ever tolerate armed insurrection on any scale.

I'm also gonna say that while the US is not categorically dictator-proof, it's damned close. If a POTUS used the military while under impeachment proceedings, I'm pretty sure what would happen next. I don't think there's a commander alive that would go along with essentially war crimes under an unstably footed CIC.

Never say never, but Congress can pass a resolution and oppose whatever military force POTUS used. I'm pretty sure of which way that would break.

To a certain degree I do. I believe - which is that I will operate under an assumption that rests entirely on (probably flawed) logic, not evidence - the NSA's unspoken mission is not against average citizens, but rather to keep tabs on other parts of the US government. And perhaps keep tabs on the financial transactions of very wealthy people.

We as readers of HN should not assume we have a monopoly of wisdom about subjects such as the Roman Empire. Certainly more than one US govt official has read a few books on the subject and decided a good bit of the Empire's instability was caused by rebellious legions and fickle praetorians.

As a country we have been rather lucky in that our obvious political crises - coups, putsches, and rebellions - have been infrequent. Now maybe under the veneer things have been a little less tranquil - think the movie "8 Days In May" - but that's something not likely to be made public until after the fall of the US.

To me the question is whether the NSA will become a fickle praetorian in its quest to thwart the rebellious legions.

I don't think it's right to use historical numbers on terrorism to do a cost/benefit analysis of whether surveillance is worth it. The technology of today is vastly empowering, and that power can (and eventually will) be used by terrorists to inflict casualties orders of magnitude larger than what we've seen in the past. While the NSA currently seems ham-fisted, I do believe that we'll have to accept greater government scrutiny and less personal privacy in the future.