There seems to be little doubt - as you point out - that the NSA has also abused their mandate a bit by spying on Americans.
The largest share of the data they collect is about Americans. This is done without legitimate, meaningful oversight or probable cause. Most of their measurable activity is illegal and violates the rights of Americans. The difference between data collection in the PRC and in the USA is that the USA hasn't extensively acted on this information against its own citizens so far.
This overall tone and emphasis is similar to hand-waving away mass police brutality and oppression by saying "buuuuut they keep us safe".
Could you provide a citation on this?
> Most of their measurable activity is illegal and violates the rights of Americans.
This is a useless metric: it's true of both healthy and unhealthy spy agencies; the former because we wouldn't hear about the useful and legal things they do, only the occasional whistleblowing, while the latter because of the point you're trying to make. (I also disagree it's true.)
However, without a solid metric on their total classified activity, there's no way to determine if it's unhealthy or healthy.
Let's not pretend the NSA is fighting a war on terror. It's an economic espionage machine, and an assault on the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution. The same constitution many men died to protect and uphold.
If honor, country, and integrity mean anything to employees of the NSA, they should perform their civic duty and do as the patriot Edward Snowden has done.
This seems to be completely unfounded, and out of line with my experience of the people who work there.
> they should perform their civic duty and do as the patriot Edward Snowden has done.
The truth is that you and I are part of a minority in the country: most people are actually vaguely okay with the idea of the government spy agency trawling through domestic networks looking for people trying to attack the US.
The NSA has owned the globe on a shoe string budget in response to a civic outcry about two decades back. They did their duty, as the people of the nation asked them to.
Now, you can argue that it was a poor national strategy -- that it's going to lead to a civic-society corrupting influence, and problems like parallel construction. But it's a bold allegation that people didn't do their duty because they struck a hard compromise that the majority approved of, but you personally don't.
> patriot
I wouldn't describe anyone who leaked legal spy programs or who took a laptop full of classified secrets to both China and Russia a patriot.
There were technical means by which Snowden could have better secured the materials, and there's the simple fact that he leaked a lot of perfectly legal military spy programs to the entire world, intentionally.
I'd certainly describe Snowden as an idealist, but he's not particularly a patriot.
As you may infer from current headlines - "The president told me to do it" is not exactly legal justification. We're a nation of checks and balances. If domestic spying is what the people wants then congress needs to act on that. For people intelligent enough to "own the globe" I don't see what's so confusing about this.
Bypassing the cornerstone of our democracy is not a heroic act. Spying on Americans by routing traffic through five-eyes is not clever or heroic. It's incredibly dangerous and represents an existential threat to our democracy. You can't even begin to imagine how blackmail will be used to silently and invisibly form the political landscape for the next 50 years.
Maybe Snowden isn't a patriot - but the NSA is a traitor to the American public.
And they have, repeatedly.
For all their bluster, the legislation that they've passed immunized the corporations who participated, left standing the punishment against Qwest (who didn't), and created new avenues to collect information in secret.
They held no one from either the Bush or Obama administrations, both of whom supported such programs, to account.
Congress did approve, modulo some theatrics, the actions of those administrations, because it's what people, that is, their constituents wanted.
> NSA is a traitor to the American public.
This kind of rhetoric when people didn't do what you personally wanted, but which much of the public did, isn't helpful and is a large portion of why the current politics are so toxic.
As far as anyone has been able to document, the NSA largely spends their time fighting terrorist organizations and hacking other nation-states -- doing things that legitimately keep safe Americans, in a world that isn't all that nice of a place.
It's trite to snipe at how the guards do their job, safe under their watch and without anything at risk -- particularly when you're also safely the minority, so don't run the risk of your opinions being put into action.
> can't even begin to imagine how blackmail will be used to silently and invisibly form the political landscape for the next 50 years
Good, I'm tired of lizard people.
Also, "Hoover-esque" comes to mind. Of course, the real danger for your conspiracy is the private consultancies and large corporations, which have considerably better access to information and substantially more sophisticated systems.
I'm personally considerably less worried about the NSA (or other government) archives and systems than the privateer ones, particularly in the age of rogue billionaires with aspirations of nation building -- to the point I'm willing to risk it to enable the nation to defend itself from, eg, another 2016-style PSYOP campaign.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Waving your hands and mouthing the word "Snowden" doesn't support just any defamatory statement you want to make about the government spy agencies -- and making up allegations cheapens the legitimate charges against them.
Scroll down to "United States", click on the reference links next to each illegal domestic surveillance programs. If the link yields another wiki page, keep clicking on the reference links util you find the relevant documents.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_government_mass_surv...
Neither snark nor a Wiki labyrinth are a specific citation for what you said: "The largest share of the data they collect is about Americans."
Nothing on that Wikipedia page supports that claim, and certainly not with a citation from the Snowden documents.
You're just bullshitting, and you're bullshitting on a serious topic like national security. It's transparent you're doing so, because you're citing non-specific things like a general Wikipedia page on the topic, after alleging a very serious thing was supported by the Snowden documents.
If you were serious, and being honest, you'd have cited a specific document. Or set of documents. Or an analysis which supported your position.
But you're not.
(Nor is that Wiki page: several things listed as mass surveillance are nothing of the sort, and just regular ol spy work against foreign targets.)
But improving IT security is less sexy than destroying adversaries' nuclear capabilities, and its easier to sell the (decidedly mixed) value of the latter stories than e.g. improving capabilities to identify and monitor foreign attackers.
Agreed, but the NSA doesn't seem to act like they care about defense, but wielding it only as a weapon.
If they care about defense, I'd be interested to see any meaningful examples.
https://www.nsa.gov/News-Features/News-Stories/Article-View/...
They do do things that meaningfully improve defense. It's just not emphasized or funded nearly enough.
That was General Hayden's call. He dedicates a fair amount of space to that decision in his memoir. His basic calculus was that defense is 1000x harder than offense, so skip defense and punish your adversary through effective offense. I think the Air Force "Air Power" doctrine may have interfered with his thinking, but who am I?
But it really isn't that way with information on several levels. Bulletproof security is hard but scales better. One patch and everything is immune. Needless to say that hasn't happened with bullets.
Is this paranoid/conspiracy-theory-esque? Maybe a little, but I honestly think it's reasonable to consider this in-character for the NSA.
This is easy to verify by asking the phone companies.
> Is this paranoid/conspiracy-theory-esque?
Yes. It's absolutely conspiracy theory nonsense.
Yeah, because nobody at the NSA would know about NDAs.
The founding fathers didn’t have any conception for our information society. Extra judicial activity, With the corresponding regulatory body, is necessary to maintain parity with a morphing technological society
Ethically, I disagree with your argument. See: unlawful asset theft by police departments, which the supreme Court recently confirmed is illegal.
But from a legal standpoint your argument doesn't hold water. The Constitution is THE binding legal document of the USA, from which literally every aspect of the US government, and thus justice system, derives authority. There is nothing but strict adherence to the Constitution, trying to work outside it might work for a bit but will end up with someone standing before the supreme Court to answer for it.
I disagree that common people should have perfectly secure comm technology.
I disagree with Snowden actions and politics.
The math problem is why it’s imperative to indoctrinate our best and brightest to fight for the greater good, and in regard to the power vacuum surrounding that unavoidable math reality
I also support our government going after people making secure communication devices intended to circumvent government controls, too much at stake
Sure you cannot stop evil person with textbook and initiative but you can do the best you can
related: Lack of Forfeiture mechanism is one instance of a deficiency with mainstream cryptocurrencies
Your "best and brightest" paragraph makes no sense to me, but strongly reminds me of the BS spewing out of the mouth of James Comey while he tried to convince the members of Congress that you can have a crypto system that is both secure against hackers, but has a backdoor for government surveillance, which is a mathematical impossibility. Pretty sure he said "best and brightest" as well, as if silicon valley can magic away mathematical reality.
I also think that for nearly the entire history of mankind, barring the last few decades, governments have been unable to observe a vast majority of communication of their populace. Not sure what you mean by "too much at stake"... I've never heard of a major, nonmilitary attack that could have been prevented if only we'd had a backdoor into the communications; however I have heard of many, many crimes occuring because we THOUGHT we had secure crypto.
Too bad you met some snooty NSA employees. You could report them if you think they aren’t trustworthy to do sigint.
Stop assuming what I do or don’t know or can do, have done etc. Have you identified me?
The issue of making crypto “less secure” isn’t anywhere near the deal that some academics are making it out to be.
I’m just a user, not going to implement crypto. Someone else can solve such problems. Make crypto that has a secure skeleton key system that respects privacy without reducing security. “Make up for it” by making it twice as slow maybe, just an idea
You’re plainly biased against my position and ventured towards an attack. Let’s not, please.
The stuff I was reading made it clear that current skeleton key systems don’t suffer from greatly reduced security by any stretch. but still have a chain of custody system / spof issues. I’m sure something much more clever that respects privacy and solves those issues is possible
Since I’m the one out of your league, can you and your colleagues work on it
Putting down people you perceive as beneath you intellectually isn’t good manners, and is usually counterproductive.
No, you’re right. I’m not an expert and maybe I’m wrong. Just seems possible to build a better mouse trap here. I couldn’t build it, you’re right. Wish I had such skills. But I’ve looked into the topic and bit and noodled with crypto as a user and in principle it should be possible to build a skeleton key crypto system that isn’t much less secure. Just seems that way to me. Non expert guess.
I’m sure such tech could be evolved to solve the spof key issue (wouldn’t want your skeleton key leaking) for instance
My response was in consideration of the points here.
Snowden, one of his goals, besides defecting to Russia, was to “start the conversation”. The rumor is that have been involved with shadow brokers btw
If your boss came to you and said, by law, we need to build crypto with an evolved key escrow system that overcomes the security problems noted by IEEE and others, could you do it? Would you do it? Easy to say “no way, it can’t be done” with or without some type of bias towards a desire for perfectly strong encryption, but again I suspect that it is possible to build such a thing, if it doesn’t exist already.
Do you think such a thing is possible?
Also may I ask your view on Ed Snowden’s actions?
You could grow the notion of comparmentalized information in such a society to create a kind of decentralized system of checks and balances. Eg you see footage with faces hidden and review the morals, vote etc
Could even crowd source such a thing. Surely, related AI efforts are in progress, for better or worse, e.g. FBIC (Facebook intelligence community) info gathering mechanisms
The law itself could eventually evolve to be more dynamic, decentralized
Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every comment or two you post? This is in the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. There are legit uses for throwaways, just not routinely.
Lots more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Now we're left playing catch-up, and the NSA is mostly known for cyber espionage against global adversaries and domestic surveillance.