Uh, the constant mass shootings that have occurred over the past year wherein, 100% of the time, the perp was already known to police and FBI and had a very public troubling online presence detailing their years of mental instability and virulent racism?
>intelligence agencies don't talk about their activities, even their successes, for very good reason.
The hell are you talking about? The FBI is constantly publicly congratulating themselves when they "foil" a "plot" their agent provocateurs have cooked up.
https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-31-fake-isis-plots-and...
The NSA doesn't like to brag as much as the FBI does but they're clearly just as responsible for dropping the ball on domestic terrorism every other week when yet another mass shooting happens...
Crossing into incivility like this isn't ok on HN and will eventually get you banned, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this. Please don't do political flamewars on HN either.
So yeah, even if #2 wasn't in play I'd still be against it.
I think your point is sound, but I'm not sure this is the best example. Regular shootings are causing a lot more deaths, although I doubt the NSA has any interest in stopping either one (and of course, their official charge doesn't include either one).
I think that sums it up.
> why is it spying on citizens
...is that it's doing that to prevent foreign attacks, not eg. mass shootings.
Furthermore, even if it were doing anything useful with its domestic spying, such as preventing domestic crime, obviously we'd all rather address plain ole' shootings, which take many more lives than mass shootings.
Yeah... foreign terrorism only occurs when foreign entities stand at the border and throw things into our country. LMAO.
On one hand, scoring touchdowns (in this metaphor, preventing domestic crime) isn't their charge.
But on the other, they are also engaged primarily in self-serving funny business instead of hitting home runs (ie, protecting people from foreign aggression and securing the telecommunications systems of the USA).
Such as?
Domestic terrorism isn't the NSA's purview. Their job is signals intelligence against the rest of the world.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the surveillance either, but domestic terrorism isn't their job. Sure, if they notice something, they will pass it along, but it's not what they are looking for (I believe). If there's been a proverbial ball dropped, it's probably more accurate to blame the FBI than the NSA.
Intelligence agencies DO NOT trumpet triumphs.
The NSA is not the FBI.
There's no arguments to be made here, there's just ignorance of incontrovertible and uncontroversial facts which can be easily looked up.
It's like reading a post by someone bitching about the modern Hollywood blockbuster culture by citing Superman's plot arc in the new Avengers movie, except that somehow it isn't a trolling attempt. What sort of attention does that blatant misconception and willful ignorance deserve?
What's yours? Is there something to gain from a post that effectively just says "you're wrong"?
Try having even the tiniest bit of an idea what you are talking about.
What would work much better is to wait until you can comment neutrally, and then comment neutrally with information we can all learn from.
The concept of using this data to stamp out more systematic terrorism, espionage and other nation state attacks doesn't occur to them.
Keep in mind that they need court ordered approval to access the data so without that existing context it's off limits.
You should be more concerned with what your service providers and companies like Google or Facebook are doing with that data because they aren't limited by FISA courts.
Also, I'd like to point out that the fisa courts do not limit anything. They are a rubber stamp, that never rejects anything.
> 534 million records of phone calls and text messages
But we don't know how that breaks down to "phones" as you say. I don't even like to use my phone but I bet if you count my texts and calls in a year it would be in the 1000s of records.
No I don't believe that there are "500 million phones going to suspected terrorists in the US" but there may be 500 messages from individuals who have suspected connections to terrorists and foreign agents. And you would never know for sure unless you can look at their metadata to analyze those suspected connections.
You're right that the FISA approval rate is incredible. But it's still a record of requests made (which helps prevent abuse). and as I understand it that number of requests is only in the ~2000 range.
Again, it's a much better situation than the level of scrutiny you're holding to companies like Google/Facebook/Microsoft or ISPs. And those companies aren't even offering national security as a service.
I guess if you just make 1 fisa request that says "give me everything" then that's good enough, right?
At least with those other companies I have a choice to use them or not. If I don't like Google I can use duck duck go, or something else.
The government doesn't give me a choice of whether I am spied on or not.
It's also a situation where having useless data costs next to nothing (economically at least, philosophically is a different debate), but missing even a small detail could be critical.
I have no reason to believe that that has changed, that they have stopped collecting all of this data that is so easily available to them.
With that in mind, I do not believe that "it is very unlikely any call" by anyone in my family was included in the catch. I believe it very likely that many calls by many people in my family was -- and continues to be -- included in their "net".
A town near me recently installed ANPR license plate readers. Their justification was to catch criminals, particularly those engaging in property crimes which were going unsolved.
Did ANPR help solve some property crimes? Almost certainly.
Were property crimes up significantly prior to the installation of the ANPR readers? No. Are they down significantly after? No.
How do you know that?
>Were property crimes up significantly prior to the installation of the ANPR readers? No. Are they down significantly after? No.
I get that this comparison sounds similar, but it really doesn't make any sense. The most powerful nations in the world are constantly trying to gain as much access to our secure systems, communications, and infrastructure. Even though these efforts are almost entirely hidden from every level of the public, we still have plenty of stories of things like Stuxnet or the Chinese obtaining classified engineering data.
The NSA exists to combat this. They aren't fighting crime. They aren't fighting what is essentially an economically guaranteed statistical effect (property crime). They are an intelligence gathering and signal analysis agency tasked with thwarting foreign actors, which we know are actively pouring massive resources into activities hostile to us. That is why they exist, and that is why their successes (and failures) are almost entirely unknown to the general public.