The NSA is incapable of building the type of mass surveillance infastructure we see today. That infrastructure is built and maintained by private tech companies. The NSA comes along repurposes that already collected data to their own ends.

Further, the NSA's usage of said information has never been linked to any population wide mental health crises, unlike big tech.

There is also a wide range of work the NSA does, and most people working there don't know much beyond their own need to know.

This is false, the snowden releases showed they have extensive infrastructure that aggregates data from many different sources.

At the end of the day, worldwide profit scales systems faster than even national security dollars.

Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements.

And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them.

All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348156

"AT&T has a fiberoptic splitter copying our data to NSA" (eff.org)" (2011, 200 comments)

However there's also the massive Ogden Utah data storage center run by the NSA and contractors, which has a constant demand for 65 MW of power, I think that counts as mass surveillance infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

Seems pretty Orwellian.

Assuming the NSA catches and stores the traffic (i.e. it passed a keyword/subject filter), they still have to break the encryption.

And even if they have devices capable of doing so, they don't have capacity to do so on an unlimited volume of messages.

They're still pushing this stuff today, not surprisingly:

https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/NSA-director-pushes-C...

> "WASHINGTON (AP) (Jan 12 2023) — A top U.S. intelligence official on Thursday urged Congress to renew sweeping powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats."

"Other threats" such as what, populist movements unhappy with the increasingly feudalist-aristocratic nature of the United States and the gross corruption seen in Congress and the federal bureaucracy?

At some point, the metadata is (user X talks to SaaS service Y), and then the trail goes private.

If ATT had really pushed back, the NSA would have been hard pressed to install and run tapping equipment. And that's on hardline voice, where CALEA obviously applies. But as far as I know ATT didn't really fight, once they were legally covered from liability.

The modern large scale cloud or social providers are younger companies, have fewer government ties, and (critically) have worldwide business.

I would automatically assume they all have data sharing agreements with the NSA, as a maximal threat assumption, but as a likely threat I expect it'd be a lot harder for the NSA to co-opt them.

I.e. why the NSA instead chose to tap Google's private fiber between their data centers

You still think that the "security" certificates make you secure ? that s in https stands for security ?

Why would a spy agency collect TB of data without a mean to decrypt it ?

And the NSA is doing that because they can break a percentage of it, or anticipate they can in the future.

And it's order of exabytes of data.

Yes. When we elect our officials we grant them significant power. We have rules they must abide by to protect us from that power (I.e. using this data to interfere with elections to continue/advance their power.)

This is substantially different than private industry. Don’t get me wrong, surveillance capitalism is its own shade of gray. But the government laundering away constitutional rights through collaboration with private industry and protecting themselves from prosecution for their crimes by labeling these collaborations a state secret?

Between their clandestine organizations, their militaries, and their law enforcement - the government is capable of perpetuating more crimes against humanity than their private industry counterparts.

  The NSA is a big old bitch,
  "so are your fangs and VCs"
  says the crowd who has the itch
  for cool projects but sees
  all really as prostitution. Stitch
  up the foul mouth hey, one who pees
  in the water is bound to filth drink,
  work, make, grow rich but don't think.

Also the scope of the NSA is much more broad and you'll also have the possibility to work on stuff that could be closer to ops stuff as well.

For example I don't think palantir works on shit like stuxnet or deploying stuxnet.

Last I read about palantir it was some boring ass search graph relationship thing.

You mean they don't help prevent a hostile state from developing nuclear weapons? All withou causing anything approaching the collateral damage (and risk of open war) that a traditional attack on infrastructure would cause?

Setting aside the fact that the NSA work sounds a lot more interesting from a technical perspective [0], a lot of people would find the work far more fulfilling than convincing people to buy widgets they don't need.

[0] Especially considering that the day to day work of working for a large government organization is far more boring, even without the extra headache that comes with working with classified materials.

I think the parent comment fully agrees with you on this. Their whole reply is just saying that despite paying more, Palantir isn't nearly as layoff-proof as NSA, and you don't get to work on such a wide range of "cool" things (such as stuxnet) at Palantir either.

Stuxnet was developed in a way that Palantir or other people outside the ultra secrete government cyber weapons labs, could have been contracted to work on parts of it, government may have merely assembled parts of code sourced from private industry to create the malware.

Saying that though, working for govt in any form comes with its own risks. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:NSA_GCHQ_and_the_Death_... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6585263/Damning-new... https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Chelsea_Manning https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Julian_Assange

Sometimes being in the public spotlight is the less dangerous path, which these NSA jobs are not. https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Bill_Clinton

Accidents happen. Prison happens. Intelligence gathering comes in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is for certain, it was previously thought being on the right side of the law was a psychological advantage, its not any more, it could be extremely risky. This is the era of psychological warfare, and the best candidates are those who volunteer for their trauma as any Emergency Response (Police/Fire/Ambulance) person knows.

Psychological trauma is a life long condition with no visible scars.

How you survive working for the state largely depends on your own intelligence, but you can bet your bottom dollar you will be experimented in ways that science dictates that subjects are not too be made aware of any said experiment.

I'm not saying that they are going to subcontract out everything or the important things, but their advantage is being able to leverage private industry for specific knowledge and expertise.

Sort of true, but not exactly true. Thomas Drake was a whistleblower. Snowden might have started out as a whistleblower (without going through the proper process), but has released a lot of detailed information beyond what is necessary to be a whistleblower, which could even possiblt cause net harm.

Edit: why disagree?

How many lives were cut short as a result of his betrayal? How much were the influence operations that brought us the three ring circus of the 2016 election assisted by the information provided to the Russians?

To be fair I think the NSA has done more to harm Americans than Snowden ever could have (and didn’t). If you want to call someone a traitor maybe point your finger at clapper and the other pieces of shit at the NSA that target Americans.

Ditto for everyone else here that grew up in the age of the internet and the patriot act

You’re demonstrating a two dimensional, emotionally charged view of complex topics, which doesn’t reflect well.

My apologies for the modest challenge my comments created for your worldview.

I also don’t see how the disclosure of NSA sources and methods had any impact on the Russians ability to get John Podesta to click on a phishing email.

Yes, how many ?

Also the whole "Russia fixed the 2016 election" line is nonsense. The real issue was that the neoliberal economic policies championed for decades by Team Clinton devastated this huge region of American now known as "The Rust Belt" and it was disenchanted voters in that region that flipped the election to Trump (not that he did anything to reverse those policies, of course). Without the Rust Belt flip, Clinton would have easily won. Incidentally Obama's diehard 2016 TPP promotion was a major factor in that outcome, not that any Democrat wants to admit it.

As far as why the Democrats pushed "Russia did it" so hard, it's because in normal politics, such a devastating lost to a reality TV clown would have led to a shake-up in party leadership, and that would have meant FDR-style Democrats taking over leadership positions, but that's not what the financial oligarchs who control media and the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party wanted, hence Russia nonsense. Of course the 'intelligence community' got on board, because conflict with Russia is good for keeping the bloated budgets intact.

Also, the USA neocon crowd on the Republican side has been pushing for war with Russia since about 2003, when Putin rejected joining the petrodollar recycling club, as per Saudi Arabia. If he had, i.e. if Russian oil money was banked with Wall Street, there'd never have been the 2008 Georgia war or the 2014 Ukraine coup, and if Russia had invaded Ukraine, it'd have been treated just like the Saudi war on Yemen.

Notably the one thing Snowden couldn't get from his position is the budgetary outlay of the NSA, i.e. just how much money went to all the private contractors and their hangers-on. Pork city no doubt.

Snowden exposed a lot of gross corruption and un-Constitutional behavior within the US government, that's undeniable. He deserves complete amnesty and a medal for good citizenship.

You mean his government.

Civil disobedience or w/e against a surveillance state culminating in fleeing to Moscow says all you need to know about Snowden’s commitment to freedom and opposition to surveillance.

You said he "sold" his country out, but you got it backwards. He didn't get paid for his whistleblowing, but did get paid to help break the constitution before that. It's those still working for the NSA that are selling you out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been doing this repeatedly - e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34659122. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the rules and fix this going forward, we'd appreciate it

Then almost a year to the date of the first publishing of the Snowden docs, along came heartbleed, which clearly showed the Snowden documents were legitimate. As more technical leaning documents came out, they also proved it. Without those documents though, we'd be told it was all a fairy tale.

But either way, it's the same thing.

If the paycheck is ok

For the NSA I'm sure you'll literally be able to look up personal details on anyone.

NSA is waaay worse then Google. Or waaay cooler. Depends on your perspective.

This is contrary to everything I’ve heard about their internal controls, especially after Snowden. He was able to get as much as he could because he was a trusted administrator, and that was reportedly tightened significantly afterwards.

The government does shady stuff, but would you really have more trust in a corporation?

I have less trust for the NSA and CIA because of past infractions. For example how the CIA was selling coke to the US to fund their programs. That's next level shit that not even a corpo will do.

I think it's still easier to rationalize working for the CIA than Purdue, and easier to work on mass-surveillance for the NSA than for Google. National security vs private yachts. I mean, I'd understand if you say you wouldn't work for the CIA or NSA because you don't believe in their approaches to things, but I doubt you'd say "... but I have no problem writing software to push more oxy into rural communities and kill a few tens of thousands citizens a year as long as my bonus comes through".

Without a warrant? That would attract all sorts of creeps and stalkers to the organisation.

Nice. Not thrilling, but nice. I'm really sure that how they are working because i read it somewhere. /s

Then again ? Why do they need to tape telecom operators ?

So if I don't "know" that he's an idiot, then I am computer illiterate. Great argument.

There's really no such proof for this kind of casualization. To get in to big tech you mostly need to grind leetcode, a known set of problems that have already been solved and well documented. I met plenty of people who can grind leetcode but aren't really good at many other basic things in life like boiling some pasta or understanding why women's bathrooms have tampons. Just because you can grind leetcode, doesn't make you smart at everything else.

I mean, I know it's a Blind meme, but I assume they just made it up.

Ha, ha! It's the little things that mark a poster as natively non-English speaking. But I see you corrected it quickly!

https://youtu.be/mJHvSp9AKYg