How about - how would you rather spend your money, spying on foreigners living in destitution, or fixing our roads? The international spy network the US maintains is probably a paltry drop in the bucket of the preposterous defense budget in this country, but honestly anything to curtail that black hole of taxpayer dollars is a win in my book.
If we weren't destroying the lives of millions around the globe with our imperialism, we wouldn't have enemies to suicide bomb us with planes to require massive spy networks to try to catch American dissenters planning to commit jihad against us. The military industrial complex only exists insofar as the American people are complacent to being global police forcing their will upon anyone who does not fall in line with what the US wants. And that is after we already have trade sanctions that can decimate countries overnight.
This isn't 1970 anymore. We don't need to have a dick waving contest with the next largest nuclear arsenal trying to ruin the lives of billions of people in a juvenile game to show who is the coolest kid, whose god is the best, or whose economic model should rule the world. Maybe its time to just back the fuck off and take our tendrils out of every nation on Earth for once and maybe try to be good to our fellow man.
Oh good, binary arguments.
If we weren't destroying the lives of millions around the globe with our imperialism, we wouldn't have enemies to suicide bomb us...
So what about every country in Europe being suicide bombed? Are they just complicit?
Your notion that if we play nice and mind our own business, we will be left alone, is not really borne out by history.
I'm not saying there are enemies around every corner, but you can never please everyone so we will always have enemies.
The countries with the worst problems with Islamic extremism are the ones most closely allied with the US war machine. The UK and France, for example. Consider the smaller eastern states, Scandinavian countries etc: much less of an issue for them.
Usually when you dig into the motives of Islamic people engaging in political murders it's triggered by western wars. E.g. the Charlie Hebdo attackers went after cartoonists, probably because they were easy targets. But interviews with them showed their path to radicalisation started with seeing what was going on at Abu Ghraib.
About ten minutes before the explosions, a threatening email was sent to the Swedish Security Service and the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT).[9] It referred to the presence of Swedish troops in Afghanistan and Swedish artist Lars Vilks' drawings of Muhammad as a roundabout dog:[3] "Now your children, daughters and sisters will die in the same way our brothers and sisters die. Our actions will speak for themselves.
.... so less of an issue but not zero of an issue.
For the second article, I concede that it doesn't mention any political motivation (I don't count purely religious motivation like "i hate cartoons" as political). Although, as the suspects ended up dead, it may be that there was one and we would never know.
This is in logical terms a wrong dichotomy, but anyway a couple of points:
1) having information about foreigners living in destitution is also called "awareness of the world", and it would be a great help e.g. in development aid. A lot of aid money is wasted simply because those who want and try to send help do not understand at all the people (often in destitution) they try to help. This is not the point of foreign intelligence, of course, I just say that if intelligence agencies could contribute to an understanding about the life in destitution, they would serve all humanity.
2) I don't think the US spy agencies spend any real effort on foreigners living in destitution. You maybe have an incorrect perception of life in poor countries. A vast majority of people may be poor, but there are still also middle class and wealthy people. Targeted intelligence operations usually concentrate on individuals of political or economical significance. Osama bin Laden, for instance, lived in relative abundance. Mass surveillance on the other hand mostly targets middle class people: those who access the Internet, use Facebook, use a credit card to purchase things. Not the poor people in destitution (even though mobile phones also have become important for them).
Let me ask you: do you think it is better or worse that we _know_ about ISIS?
Mind you, Obama knows enough about ISIS that he is confident to keep troops out of the Middle East. Would he have that confidence if it weren't for the spy network?
Or would it be closer to a George Bush ordeal with Iraq War. George Bush was working off of a CIA that was cut by 20% to 30% by Clinton. He was practically flying blind. (Yes, when you lose 25% of your _workers_ between 1990 and 2000, the CIA will begin to make some pretty crappy decisions)
Here's another question. Do you think Israel would have continued to stand down against Iran if it weren't for the intelligence sharing programs between US and Israel? Intelligence stops wars. Intelligence tempers decisions. When leaders fly blind, they instead make hasty decisions and over-react to threats. Lets say the US stops spying on Iran... what do you think Israel will do without any information?
Hell, there's a reason why the US spies on Israel, and Israel spies on us. Even allies spy on each other: its the most reliable source of information. Even _with_ information sharing agreements, countries will spy on each other behind each other's backs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard
Frankly, I'd want to know what Israel's plans are if we stopped giving them information. Don't you? I mean, yeah, we support them and all... but lets hope they're not gonna do anything crazy (like... use their nukes, or something).
Or do you think Israel will actually tell us these details, even if they are our Allies? Nah man, the only way you make decisions as a leader is to spy on other leaders, figure out what they're thinking, and then make plans based on that.
Can we assume white knights are in charge here?
CIA moves a bit beyond "intelligence" work with Seal Team 6 and the trigger on drone strikes. CIA is closer to "Paramilitary". But the pure HUMINT work that the CIA does is extremely important to understanding the world.
Can we assume white knights are in charge here?
With the presidency comes command and control of the largest, strongest, most advanced nuclear missile stock on the planet. And control of the largest navy. And control of the largest army.
Believe me, intelligence is needed to keep those guys pointing their guns at the right targets.
Isn't that the problem? Good by the definition of the individual voting? Good by the definition of a particular belief system? Good by being marginally "better" than the opponents?
"Good" isn't explicit enough to actually provide information to make a decision. (Also, it's a pretty limited palette of "goodness" to select from).
> Lets keep the white knights in charge
Are the White Knights in charge right now? They all seem to be embracing war by action, if not by word.
> intelligence is needed to keep those guys pointing their guns at the right targets.
Once again, who are the "right targets". Is it ISIS, is it Al Qaeda, is it the next disillusioned group of malcontents who are sold on the propaganda of their leaders?
Do you not realize that the flip-side of this argument justifies the behavior of the "enemy" as well as it justifies the behavior of the US?
How about we try to look to a solution where we stop pointing guns at "targets"? (I presume by "targets" you mean "humans").
The wars will continue until the economy improves.
In particular [3], which deals with a NATO commander in Afghanistan is telling: Considering the British have been involved in the area for hundreds of years, the US has been involved for decades -- one wonders how one could possibly construct mission parameters that are clearly pure fantasy.
I'm still not sure if it is the result of gross incompetence, or stems from ulterior motives (or a more likely; a combination) -- either way the idea that the intelligence services help prevent wars (at least the parts concerned with sigint) -- is hard to take at face value.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Kill
I think another example where we will observe this sort of forced bias imposed on what should be an impartial community is climate change research. Scientists are asked and given budget to prove that there is a climate change, and that it is man made, and that it will have disastrous consequences. Any study who challenges this is attacked as motivated by financial interests or as conspiracy theorist and is starved of budgets and discredited. And I am sure that we will find that this political pressure will result in completely biased conclusions. And who will be blamed in 20 years for this? The scientific community of course!
Am I the only one that remembers that the Iraq war was not based on "faulty" intelligence but outright fabrications? This was pointed out at the time and so well-known international politicians quickly backed down from using the US intelligence as justification for the war (going back to handwaving and talking about solidarity).
You're kidding right? "Faulty intelligence" was not responsible for the Iraq war. A lie was. More or "better" intelligence wouldn't have changed that (and didn't).
Also FISA is already used in a "reverse" way to spy on Americans. If you "communicate" (as little as liking on Facebook) to a "foreigner" (anyone who either is located on a non-American IP or uses encryption), then FISA can be used to spy on you.
First, you are confusing data collection and data analysis. It doesn't matter how much and what type of "intelligence" (a misnomer if there ever was one) if you're simply talking about raw data collected from a variety of sources. The data must be parsed and made sense of. In the CIA/NSA/FBI of the 1990's and 2000's, there was a very obvious failure (again, for a number of reasons, some due to simple mistakes, some due to bureaucratic incompetence, some due to political reasons.) to correctly interpret this data. Oops, but hey, it's only a few billion dollars and few tens of thousands of lives.
Second, post-9/11, given the amount of resources spent on intelligence collecting in the Middle East, it's hard to believe that there was anything more that could have been done in terms of signal collections than going full on Big Brother and installing a data collecting device in every person's bunghole in the entire region.
Third, note I said "signal collections," because one of the things people say isn't that it was simply faulty intelligence gathering (or analysis as I discussed above) but also an over reliance on the exact type of data we were gathering, ie, things that float through the ether. We didn't have enough of the old school, human intelligence of the early cold war, that could have helped in making a better determination of whether or not Saddam actually had WMD's (or was building them, whatever). The Human Intelligence they did have, was from special interests that had their own reasons to get rid of Saddam, and there was very little (at least seemingly from the outside) checking on these human sources. So, too few human resources, as well as resources who had their own agendas. That's never going to work out well.
Finally, none of that mattered. The data we had, through the political will of the Administration of the time, was massaged to fit the story, not the other way around. They had a narrative ("Saddam has WMD's"), and then they cherry picked data to support that "conclusion." Only after the fact did the whole "faulty intelligence" story come out, because, you know, it's easier to blame that than saying "yeah, we had a hard on for the guy and we wanted to take him out regardless of what the real story was." But you said it yourself: "It's not like we can take everyone's word for it."
I had a few more points to make, but I'm tired, it's late, I've written enough.
But now Saddam and his WMD's are gone, we have ISIS taking over Iraq, so I guess it all worked out in the end. So the NSA should keep hoovering up all that data, what could go wrong?
Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war, it's difficult for me to encourage less intelligence surrounding foreign intelligence gathering. But I'm partial, as an American who prefers to know who and what and why we are actually fighting. It's not like we can take everyone's word for it.