[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/31/cia-admits-...
And senior congressional officials, including people like Feinstein, Grassley, Burr, Schiff, and Warner, are effectively briefed on all intelligence matters. Not every member of congress is. America did a decent job after Watergate implementing supervision of intel.
NSA is probably not perfect, but it's better than the alternative. You know the old quote "Democracy isn't a great way to govern but it's better than the alternatives" -- probably fair to say "Western intelligence agencies aren't perfect but they are the best way we know to navigate today's surveillance economy and secure democracies."
If you don’t like the way NSA is governed, change it. That’s the power of a democratic system. But when the choice is between autocratic and democratic intelligence agencies, the choice is clear.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/07/nsa-lexicon-how-...
How is that?
> with its democratic controls and checks and balances
Its what?
Richard Clarke talks about his belief that stuxnet had numerous checks in place to limit collateral damage: "it very much had the feel to it of having been written by or governed by a team of Washington lawyers."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/richard-clarke-on-who...
I think that purposefully built malware will have those checks hard coded into them in order to limit exposure. Will there be programatic flaws that cause it to spread farther? Yeah, that can happen. Q&A always is the first thing that gets cut.
I would suspect that the usage of more open ended tools/implants will have scope applied/enforced at the human layer. You don't want an employee going wild and knocking over everything just because they have a new 0day.
Thus avoiding detection as much as possible. It's why the flu strain that kills everyone within an hour doesn't spread very far.
I tried not to smile at that, and I failed. Pretty sure nothing is 'checking' them from collecting data on every U.S. citizen.
Stanford law review https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/is-the-foreign-inte...
The win rate is misleading for a simple reason: The requests the FISC receives are not a random or representative sample of all cases in which the executive branch believes it would benefit from a warrant. The number and type of government requests are responsive to the level of oversight the court exercises—just as a plaintiff’s decision to litigate is responsive to changes in the law. Because it is costly to make an ex parte application (in time, resources, and reputation) and because the executive has long-running knowledge of how the FISC treats applications, there is little reason to expect agencies to submit losing requests. And while the rarity of ex parte proceedings might make this outcome seem unprecedented or extraordinary, other ex parte proceedings—like those for Title III wiretaps and delayed-notice warrants—display equally lopsided results: the government “wins” almost 100% of the time.
On a more serious note, the above could be true, though I believe there is plenty of evidence of approved warrants that should not have been. That would rather undermine the thesis.
Great. So because the NSA has crappy security (contractors!) the democratic West has just weakened itself against autocratic regimes that seek to control their people.
People that care about self-government and individual freedom have to start to recognize that the NSA - with its democratic controls and checks and balances - is far superior to an autocratic or dictatorial spy agency. And we only get to choose one.