They are not stupid and they must have been discussing it. There must have been strategic decision where they prioritized the expansion of intelligence collection over internal security (effectively cutting the work that skilled people with security clearances can do to almost half must be real cost and resource bottleneck).
If I had to guess the situation, I would say that for every whistle blower there is two spies who spy for Russia or China and they have collected all documents they can. Russians&Chinese spying US spying the world. The cost of setting up good HUMINT must be fraction of the cost of the NSA infrastructure.
That's an exaggeration, IMHO. This is not the Cold War, where many actors were moved by ideological considerations that crossed national borders (like the Cambridge Five, for example). Nowadays, national and cultural lines are extremely well drawn, so motivations for "traitors" boil down to money and/or blackmail, which are usually easier to defend against at the top level.
1. Ideology has not been the major modus operandi in long time (since 50's). Nowadays idealogical reasons are replaced by cultural and ethnic loyalties. Wast majority of people who spied for China have had Chinese heritage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_intelligence_operation...
2. Money and personal problems/reasons seems to be major reason for spying against US and for Soviet Union/Russia during and after cold war (Hanssen, Ames) According to American counterintelligence Russian espionage reached Cold War levels already in in 2007.
Though I also believe this to be true, what we know for sure are that most of the people CAUGHT spying for China had Chinese heritage.
The notion that a spy is only someone loyal to a country is just quite frankly, silly.
I partially agree with your point 2, but "according to American counterintelligence" the sky is falling every other day unless the spooks get more money and less supervision. Relying on government sources in a thread about Snowden feels a bit weird.
No, it's not a "political" problem.
They are smart enough to make spying into a profitable business instead of just a mechanism to move tax dollars to the right people. And with respect to using it as a tool of oppression, we simply don't have anything new to teach them, as they just don't need to know anything about FISA courts or parallel construction.
This is the 21st century. There's no need to put yourself in physical danger by entering the country you wish to spy upon. Everything is done electronically.
I prefer to think that everyone should always question everything I say, and independently verify my claims with their own trusted sources. Then, if they find contradictory information, they are free to share it, so that I might possibly disabuse myself of my prior misconceptions. (As you see, I also have need for wishes.)
Of course, if you have actual research funding for me, that's a different story. I'll give you as much evidence as you can afford.
Talk is cheap, and proof will cost you. If you want evidence, you might have to grab a shovel and start digging.
Workers in foreign countries and spying in those countries are not necessarily related in any way, aside from the occasional discount windfall that states get from assets with the right sense of patriotism, personal weakness, or political alignment.
There isn't really a trade happening there. The Chinese spying hurts everyone who is not a state-owned copycat company, regardless of their country of origin. The American spying hurts everyone who conducts business over the Internet or travels internationally. The ordinary Chinese people and American people get screwed both ways, because they're unimportant nobodies to the superpower state actors. So let's not get all defensive and start pointing fingers at each other, ok?
Neither the companies nor the Chinese engineers profit from this arrangement.
I'm not so sure about that - it strikes me that spies motivated purely by ideology are pretty rare and were only created in rather unusual circumstances (e.g. pre-WW2 UK) while those who are motivated by fear/greed/ego could occur anywhere.
And I'm sure the US has 1 or more sources in many other countries' signals intelligence agencies, too.
We would only ever learn about that if there's a CIA leak/whistleblower, though.
Considering the fact that the US was completely caught off guard by the scope and effectiveness of ISIS I have to question the effectiveness of SIGINT programs like the NSA. I have to assume honestly that these programs outlandish budgets are not for tracking terrorists but to control the domestic populace.
I must disagree with this interpretation. I think that only the American public and (some) American media were caught off guard by ISIS. However, the warning signs about ISIS and speculation about the impact of instability in Syria go back a while, for example to early 2013. It would have been difficult to determine the exact sequence of events (in contrast, Lebanon has been more stable than some would have anticipated), but the expansion of ISIS operations is not so much of a surprise given 1) stated goal of ISIS to operate beyond Syria; 2) rising political tensions in Iraq encouraged by Maliki's disregard of opposition; 3) past actions of local Sunni militias and leaders, etc.
Maybe it looks like the US government was caught off guard, but I suspect that is not the case. I think US intelligence must have considered instability spreading out of Syria, and modeled a number of scenarios off of that. I think it is likely that the US gov. has not been so quick to respond because it realizes 1) there is little support in America for further involvement with Iraq; 2) there is limited support in the region for US involvement; 3) Maliki's government has leaned towards Iran, so the US may consider the ability to sustain American influence in Iraq limited.
In short I view this as a matter more of limited policy options than a matter of failed intelligence. I also think the more troublesome matter for intelligence is the Kurdish situation, since it is one thing to predict what ISIS will try to do and another to predict what will happen with the Kurdish autonomous region as a result.
Also, you have it backwards, ISIS started in Iraq, (the second I) and spread to Syria (second S). They started with the instability in Iraq, saw the instability in Syria, and went for it.
1) support at home has never stopped the US military from engaging before. 2) We didn't have much before, we have way less now. 3) you find new friends when your old friends stop taking your phone call.
The US and UK never properly seized control in Iraq. We were losing troops on a daily basis. Now we have withdrawn, leaving an entirely predictable power vacuum, things have got so mental that even Iran is collaborating with us, and they are currently the main external force now loosing troops in the area. Also, this new caliphate is completely surrounded by folk who really do not like them. To be honest the whole thing looks like a deliberate trap, that is probably going to be used as a drone proving ground, given the political statements about use of troops.
Most recent geopolitical shifts can be traced back to the Middle East no longer being strategically important to U.S. interests any more. In 2007 we were worried that rising oil prices would trigger a financial crisis that would severely hurt American interests; controlling mid-east oil was critically important. By 2010 the financial crisis had happened, it was clear that gas prices were not coming down, and oil production was moving back domestically. There was no longer any reason for us to be in Iraq, so Obama got us out, and as far as the U.S. is concerned the Middle East can collapse into the Dark Ages and we won't care, as long as they leave Israel alone. So far ISIS has been more anti-Palestine than anti-Israel.
for all we know the effect ISIS is having may have been predicted and even worse, allowed to play out. From a military standpoint, they are burning off manpower and munitions that would otherwise be directed towards elements we want to protect or have interests in. Until that changes, like with all those refugees recently, I doubt we would act.
Lately US foreign policy seems vindictive rather than friendly. As in, when someone does not treat the Administration how they think they deserve or do not do what it wants the Administration gets petty.
This worked brilliantly when the USSR collapsed and we didn't send a crackshot team of experts to secure their nuclear arsenal because we didn't want them to know that we knew they were going to collapse. It was much better to scramble around for the following few years trying to track down all that dangerous inventory.
There is a troubling problem with any increase in government firepower: be it heavy weaponry in our police stations, advanced monitoring capabilities that can be used on the entire populace at once, or drones that can hit targets on the other side of the planet.
What happens when these weapons are used against us?
Let's just assume for a minute that our government has our best interests in mind and is basically benevolent. With a database of potential intelligence against every person in the US, you create a dangerous situation: what happens if the Chinese or Russian government has covert access to this system and strategically leaks information with the purpose of influencing US elections? This feels completely plausible in my mind: there are real risks to having so much information available in one place. The fact that the controls were so weak to begin with makes me almost certain that foreign intelligence has continued access to these databases.
Every weapon we develop can potentially be used against us. In the case of cyberwarfare, those weapons can be used against us without our knowledge. The scariest part of Snowden's leaks is how awful the government is at technology: most people on the Internet were pretty sure the government was spying on everyone anyway. Geopolitics gets messy, so that stuff is forgivable. But when a single government contractor is able to walk away with so much information and they don't even know what he has?
This is probably already happening, though it isn't China or Russia. http://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-have-offered-...
16/24 or 14/21 combos for the font-size and line height work well for me, depending on widow width.
Right click a paragraph other than the intro -> "inspect element". In the right column, you can untick the "font-size: 21px;" and "line-height: 37px;" rules, to get 16/24 or set them to whatever you like.
"I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii—in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries."
As a substantive comment on the article, let me say that I find it interesting that Snowden himself thinks it is appalling that NSA's internal security auditing is so poor that NSA can't even tell which documents Snowden disclosed to journalists, nor can it tell how many other leakers may still be on its staff. This seems to be a completely plausible claim, and that would be a reason why many American voters or leaders of countries allied to the United States might desire the current leadership of NSA to resign and be replaced with more competent leaders.