If there is one thing these leaks have done then it is to register in the mind of the general public that these institutions are not just benign clubs of mathematicians that boldly crack evildoer codes that no man has cracked before but that they are collecting any kind of data they can get their hands on, including yours, to decide later on if it was useful or not.
The fact that that alone and the potential consequences are now (slowly) sinking in to the public consciousness made these leaks more than worth it.
That debate needs to be had and it needs to be had in the open, the hypocrisy of politicians (Merkel comes to mind) when they address the subject is telling.
That 'terrorists' (who are these guys anyway, didn't you mean criminals) are using the leaked info is a statement of fact which is hard to falsify (terrorists won't own up to it) and probably even harder to prove so it should carry very little or no weight at all.
It's the Big Lie phenomenon at work. Someone revealing a specific embarassing private email between two law-abiding citizens? That would be a story. But reading and processing every email is just too big to contemplate, and to those who don't know how databases work, I'm sure that it seems impossible. Surely no one could or would do that, right?
I'll tell you what, though: young people are absolutely paying attention.
The house Judiciary hearing last week was interesting. As is the bill working its way through the Senate. The US tech companies are feeling the effects of the loss of trust and it looks like they are putting pressure on congress to do something.
And members of the Judiciary Committee seemed genuinely surprised by the scope of these programs. They were obviously fed a line of bullshit from the past several administrations about what these programs actually do if they were told anything at all. That fact isn't particularly comforting since these programs have been hinted at publicly for years and anyone who has been paying attention understands what the intelligence community is up to.
If you read Hayden's op-ed in CNN last week you'll also see evidence that the tech companies and the backers of TPP are two forces having the big impact on the debate right now since he addressed both issues right up front.
We are a long way from getting meaningful change, but it sure looks more likely now than it did three months ago. And there is more coming on this story. For example, Greenwald says he has NSA training manuals that prove that NSA analysts have the technical ability to tap communications from their desk just like Snowden said they do. Right now the administration is hiding behind the fact that they are restricted by policy from doing that, and many members of the Judiciary Committee seemed to be confused by that. They seem to believe that analysts don't have the technical capability when the admin says "they can't" do it.
Also, even Cheney seemed genuinely mind boggled by the fact that a low level contractor has access to the details of these programs. He insisted that he must have had the help of a higher placed source to get access to the documents he leaked. People really don't understand how computer networks work and what it means to be a system administrator.
I think the tech companies will be "allowed" to release select information out about the number of requests, etc. I think that they are chomping at the bit only because the number of requests will seem relatively small and make the spying seem less onerous and more benign. The companies' goals are to reassure their users, so they wouldn't be pushing for this release unless they believed it would do just that.
I believe the NSA is specifically calculating that it's better to delay and appear to put up a "fight" over releasing this info. Then, when it finally comes out, it will have the psychological effect of making people think that if the NSA is fighting so hard to protect something so "trivial", then maybe there's nothing to worry about. Maybe all of their programs and activities are just as "trivial". So, nothing to see here. Let's keep it moving.
But, of course, the specific number of a certain type of request for a small number of tech companies is only a small part of the picture with respect to this overall issue. So, ultimately, such a limited release would work in the NSA's favor.
I agree, those releases are meant to cover up more than actually reveal anything. If it stops at that, then they will achieve nothing. But I have hope that it will go farther than that for the first time in a decade.
I watched the entire Judiciary Committee hearings and they were more than just the normal political posturing. There was a lot of that of course, but there is an undercurrent of deep concern that congress has been had by the executive and judicial branches. That is a good thing. The more documentation that comes out, the more likely there will be real change. Especially if Congress becomes convinced that thousands of analysts across the intelligence community have the technical ability to bypass any legally required procedures and do what Snowden said they can do, and that the technical auditing of that access is less than complete. Looking at the architecture of the system that the NSA has built, and hearing that the number of system administrators with access similar to Snowden's is in the "hundreds", then I suspect the truth is that there are hundreds of people who have total access to all the data the NSA has and that they can access that data in a way that would be very hard to detect unless someone in command was looking for a specific case of abuse. And even then, how could you trust the audit trail when at some level at least some system admins have to have full access to that data too?
But that will not really solve the global problem for the tech community since Congress will never prevent the NSA from monitoring foreign traffic. It will be interesting to see how Google handles encrypting Google Drive. The only hope they have of gaining back the trust of international users in the long term is to make it easy to ensure that this sort of wholesale surveillance is much less likely to bear fruit. Google has conflicting incentives in this area though since they want to be able to read the content to serve relevant ads.
I still think it is highly unlikely that we'll get any real reform. But I have more hope than I have in years, and that is great.
At the end of the day, we need more tech like Tor. And we need the tech community to actively resist restrictions that governments will always want to place on the effectiveness of such systems. I personally would like to see a requirement that data centers in the US must allow users to host Tor relays and exit nodes on their networks without hassle or restriction. That is unlikely to ever happen, but that would go a long way in really protecting users since it would allow users to fund a network that would actually protect their privacy. At a minimum, there needs to be legal protection for users who do choose to host relays and exits. Short of a requirement that all DCs allow Tor exit nodes, as a community we need to actively support companies that allow users to host Tor exit nodes. And we should set up a legal fund to fight any battles that result from the hosting of relays and exits.
This is nothing more than a combination of fear mongering and pouting over the loss of the secrecy that their little fiefdom once enjoyed. These are government servants at their worst.
Well, doubting that leaks of information won't have a negative impact on our security is pretty obtuse also. I'm not afraid, but I also wouldn't be surprised if we have a greater number of terrorist attacks in the coming years. It's in their interest to complain for multiple reasons.
Snowden merely confirmed a widely held suspicion that the feds are recording and analyzing most modern communications. The notion that terrorists didn't already assume this and use encryption online and burner cell phones is dubious to me. If anything, Snowden may have stopped some would-be terrorists by showing them just how many ways there are for them to get caught.
There's also another layer to this: The terrorists that actually exist are not 10 feet tall and not all geniuses. If I told some of my non-technologically oriented friends how to encrypt and anonymize their communications, they couldn't do it. If I went one step further and configured their computers and explained to them how to use it, they would probably still leak information by misusing it.
Are the terrorists changing their tactics? Probably. Is it going to do them any good? Unlikely.
It's not like the collection of vast amounts of information on everyone everywhere had a positive impact on the US citizens security either...
The shining example that pops up is the Boston marathon bombing. If the NSA, with its vast dragnet couldn't catch two amateurs, does anyone really think it would catch someone who actually knows how to pull of a bombing?
Most terrorist attacks in the US are by US citizens, such as bombing of abortion clinics and the like. I doubt that the Snowden leaks are likely to change their frequency that much, especially when compared to other factors.
I hate to state the obvious rebuttal, but: maybe the programs were working? Maybe that's why Obama didn't cut them. Maybe he decided he couldn't be the guy to pull the plug and have $avg_fatalities people die every year. Maybe.
On the other hand, you would think he would say so if that were the case.
It's a no-win perception issue for Obama. If even a few Americans die in a terror attack, his administration looks weak (look at how badly Fox has gone after him on Benghazi). If he does "whatever is necessary", he looks like a warmonger with no respect for the Constitution.
But people die in all sorts of preventable ways. Dropping the national speed limit would save hundreds or thousands of lives. So would nutritional subsidies for kids, or all other sorts of things we could spend our political capital on. But those things do not have the same broad support as anti-terrorism measures, because the public is not willing to pay the cost, even though more lives are at stake.
You could say our fear of The Other comes from Bush's fear-mongering, or the shock of 9/11, or a genuine clash of civilizations, or just human nature. But whatever the origin, that irrational fear is the real root of our disproportionate reaction to the theatrical murder called "terrorism".
Our culture has been conditioned to be afraid by reflex, and it has to end. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.
It’s a no-win situation for Americans who are forced to pay $10,000,000,000 annually to fund an agency to spy on us and find “terrorists” or $160,000,000,000 annually for wars if they don’t find actual terrorists.
Neither of those expenses has its desired outcomes, nor are they mutually exclusive.
This is probably completely naïve of me, but I would think that if he just came out and honestly said, "I couldn't be the guy to pull the plug once I saw how effective the programs are," then that would be a brilliant way to start the national conversation. Not only about spying, but Gitmo- which he has been very slow about closing.
It's also telling how clumsily he's stumbling over his words. Whether Obama fears speaking freely for political reasons, security reasons, or just plain deception is something I can't answer.
(And obviously, much of what he's saying is demonstrably false, or at least misleading. But it also wouldn't surprise me for the NSA to be misinforming the President.)
Around page 6, a little under 10K fatalities in 2011 somehow involved speeding. (about 1/3)
Around page 7, 87% of fatalities involving speeding were not on interstate highways. So about 10% of about 10K is about 1K people died from driving "too fast" on the highway.
Around page 7, around half of drivers who killed someone while speeding were drunk. so about 500 people were killed by sober drivers who were going over the current speed limit. Drunks are going to kill someone anyway, no matter what the law is. You can consider this a fixed constant death rate regardless of speed laws.
In other words, if you raised the speed limit such that no one ever got cited for speeding during a fatal crash, aka we go total full motion autobahn, about 500 people would die legally instead of illegally.
Of course a lot of this involves police high speed chases, driving too fast for conditions, suicide by car, road rage, mental illness, stuff like that. I feel confident that out of a total sample of about 500, a realistic change in speed limit up to perhaps 75 would probably kill at most 100 people. I think this is a overestimate, but feel confident it would not actually turn out to be 10x higher.
This analysis pays no attention to the death toll from increased car exhaust fumes due to reduced mileage, or increased soldier death rates in the middle east due to needing to burn more oil, or any of the other secondary effects, which may very well be greater than the primary death toll, I really can't estimate those very well. For example, if you raised the death toll in Iraq by 20% on both sides to get 20% more oil, that would swamp the relatively minor increase in death toll on the interstates back home.
This helps you identify political axes to grind... someone claiming "10" or "zero" is obviously distorting reality in one direction, and "100s" is obviously equally distorted in the other.
Frankly I wouldn't be concerned. The odds of death by lightning are about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher. The odds of death by poor diet are around 5 orders higher. Death by poor exercise habits, probably the same around 5 orders higher. Higher highway speeds are not a very serious threat in the big picture of risks. I'd worry a lot more about "not talking a walk after dinner" or "drinking too much corn syrup"
To be clear, I'm not in favor of altering speed limits. Just pointing out how little sense it makes to turn our whole society upside down for terrorism deaths, when we clearly don't do that for non-terrorism deaths.
Not entirely disagreeing, but an Occams Razor approach would imply the profit motive is more at work.
Which results in more election campaign funds for a politician, funding a new constituency of child fondlers at airports, or administrative fooling with speed limits?
One interesting analysis of speed limits is do people drive to live or live to drive? If, conservatively, one billion person hours per year are wasted sitting in a drivers seat, and increasing speed limits 10% caused a reduction in wasted human potential of 10% aka 100 million person hours per year, and an average remaining lifetime of a typical driver is far less than a million hours, then if less than a couple hundred extra people die per year due to the higher speed, total loss of human potential would be lower at higher speed, despite the somewhat higher death rate, which is somewhat counter intuitive.
"conditioned to be afraid by reflex"
Cowardly. No sense tiptoeing around it. America is a nation of cowards. Very heavily armed, dangerous, and violent, but none the less fundamentally a nation of cowards. A strong man with a gun is an asset to everyone around him; including himself. A shivering coward with a gun is a danger to everyone around him including himself. We (as in the whole world) are not in a good situation.
I never fail to be impressed at how brave the .uk people were during WWII and during the IRA troubles, at least contrasted with the Americans. Despite the supposed special relationship between the .uk and .us. Maybe the .uk men could send us whatever makes them so comparatively brave, tea or soccer or monarchy or whatever it is.
Paradoxically, I think it's because we are so comparitively safe. The slightest threat to that safety (real or otherwise) bursts the bubble, and is a shock to our veil of normalcy, as opposed to the "shit happens" outlook in parts of the world where danger is more frequent. (I wonder if those who live in the worst inner cities, surrounded by gang warfare, waste any time worrying about terrorism?)
But in fairness, those flames have been pro-actively fanned for decades by government and business alike. It's near-impossible to realize how pervasive the propaganda machine is here unless you go out of your way to detach yourself from it.
I'm sure he was told that if he ended the programs it would cost lives, but it's not like we had lot of terrorist deaths before the government threw out the 4th amendment without telling anyone. There were attacks before and after, there will be more in the future as well. Most terrorist attacks get stopped because they actually aren't very sophisticated (see the shoe or underwear bombers), not because the NSA has everyone's email.
Most terrorist attacks get stopped because they actually aren't very sophisticated
Perhaps you are right, but some are stopped because of intelligence. It could be that the bad guys are getting more sophisticated, even though there are still lower-probability lone-wolf types out there.
Just a side note: the Boston bombers and the Times Square bombers are much better examples. The shoe bomb plot was actually very sophisticated, planned and built by something like terrorism's version of Q. Luckily, they sent more of a Johnny English than a James Bond.
It's not the programs that prevented attacks; it's this magic stone that I have and pray to. It keeps "terrorists and other groups" at bay. But now, since I've divulged its existence, it may not be as effective.
Nothing new was even revealed though! There were articles in major publications over 5 years ago about the NSA putting boxes on mirror ports at Internet backbone sites. That's when we started hearing about the CEO of Qwest.
I like that he covers his ass by saying "terrorists and other groups" have been changing their habits. "Other groups" probably means stuff like Occupy, animal welfare activists, other sorts of scary 'fringe' groups, and probably rank-and-file citizens too, but it's a useful way to bulk up his claim a little more.
They define terrorist pretty loosely anyway, so it'd be hard for all "terrorists" to be totally unaffected by the leaks, thus making their statement "true" or, rather, least untrue.
The animal rights movement and anarchists have been referred to as 'domestic terrorists' by the FBI for quite a while now, and Occupy has gotten that mention once or twice. Not to mention the whole Tartan thing: http://rt.com/usa/trapwire-abraxas-cubic-surveillance-251/
"You have seen concrete proof that maybe places where you used to be able to listen to are now silent?"
"We have concrete proof that terrorist groups and others are taking action, making changes, and it's gonna make our job tougher."
Although the lead-in mentions that intelligence collection has been hindered (in the past tense), Keith Alexander is only willing to say that it will be hindered in the future.
Because clearly our entire legal framework should be designed around making the NSA's job easier. Why not put surveillance cameras in everyone's houses? Why not implant everyone with tracking chips? Why not have TSA agents look up our assholes with a flashlight at airport security? All these things would certainly make the country safer.
Just as concerning as the programs themselves are these kinds of idiotic arguments that their proponents make to justify them. I'm not hugely keen on trusting someone who can't avoid extremely simplistic logical fallacies in his reasoning to oversee the surveillance of all humanity.
Don't joke about it. This sort of thing is all to plausible. Think about the data collected by fitness-tracking devices. What about when these are mandated by your insurance provider? After all, some car insurance companies are already promoting the use of tracking devices in your car. There are all sorts of ways that we can be induced to buy and install the infrastructure that facilitates an Orwellian police state. This book does a good job of laying out how it could (all to plausibly) come about: http://amzn.com/1841499390
I think insurance companies tracking your whereabouts is a very very bad thing, but I think them tracking how safe you drive is a very good thing. If it makes drivers drive safer to save money, and thus makes the roads safer for everyone, I can't imagine this to be a bad thing. These devices can also fine tune your premiums. They track how often you drive (drivers who drive less pay less, which makes sense, someone who drives 5,000 miles a year is less likely to get into an accident than someone who drives 20,000 miles a year).
I also think dashboard cameras, Russian style, would help in documenting accidents and curbing aggressive and substandard drivers. As a automotive commuter I'd gladly send videos of the dangerous crap that nearly kills me daily to a central insurance agency.
Yup. There is a lot of benefit to be gained from all of these sensors - both societal and personal. It gives us the tools that we need to manage our lives better, and to make better informed decisions. There is no way that we are going to turn down these benefits.
However, the security services of the US, Russia, China, India, and various European nations will also get this data, as will assorted criminal organizations.
As the other reply said, the provider has remote access to those devices. That amounts to them having a fully functional computer(or 2 or 3) replete with wireless radios and other goodies in your house(at least, in theory).
Ah, the liars are releasing a new statement. Very interesting. And their job is tougher now? Interesting. How did they ever fight criminals and terrorists before mass surveillance! Unimaginable.
I liked how he said 'No one can listen to all the phone calls and read all the emails, the volume is simply too much!' neatly side stepping the fact that a computer is not a person.
Maybe, just maybe, enough lay people are used to using "Google" to query a mountain of crap (the internet) to find a few interesting nuggets that they realize the government could do the same.
Step 2: getting people to realize how badly this can go when correlation = causation, and you are guilty by association.
But there has never been the capability to capture, store, index and query every piece of audio and text communication, for all persons, forever. Comparing historical spies to the modern surveillance state is like comparing the musket to the A-bomb.
Leave it to NBC News to cover the NSA's BS stance, as well as the the programs legality issue, yet completely zone out about the programs effectiveness, expense, expanse, or actually question the NSA chief's statement, 'it is impossible to listen to phone calls, and read all emails due to their shear number'. But they are recording them all... which is the problem!
Since the definition of "terrorism" has been watered down to the point where it can mean almost anything, a "terrorist" can therefore be almost anyone .. or, to be a little kinder to our lords and masters, the number of people to whom the term "terrorist" can potentially be applied has increased dramatically.
If enough people have changed their behaviour as a result of the surveillance / nascent police-state scandal, then this statement is statistically plausible, so I am not calling out "B.S." just yet - although the usual warnings about rampant language-lawyering apply as per normal.
"The reason we use secrecy is not to hide it from the american people, not to hide it from you, but to hide it from those who walk among you who are trying to kill you."
... well in that case, please take my rights and the rights of my neighbors if it gives me a little temporary security.
This illustrates nicely the problem that I have with the way Manning and Snowden went about leaking their information. It seems that they grabbed a bunch of information and sent it to reporters without really thinking what information ought to be released. Do I think that the existence of the NSA spying programs should be public knowledge? Yes. Do I think that I really have a need to know the exact methods they use to implement these programs? No. That part is not necessary for us to make an informed decision and whether or not the programs should exist.
Manning, probably. Snowden? Have you been paying any attention at all? It's been extremely clear that he (and the Guardian) have been extremely conservative in what they've released and have spent enormous effort on making sure it doesn't contain information that would harm anyone or anything other than the reputation of the US government.
In what has been publicly released, I agree with you. I'm also sure he has a lot of information on his pen drive that is being circulated around back channels, whether he really wanted it to or not.
Screw that reasoning. The NSA wants 100% transparency into everybody's comms, I demand a hell of a lot more transparency into their methods.
I am funding them afterall, and there are far more useful things that can be done with that money. We have a completely failing country in all facets aside from the military industrial complex. All military funding needs to be drastically cut.
>The reason we use secrecy is not to hide it from the American people. But, to hide it from those who walk among you who want to kill you.
Fear-monger much? What can you not justify with this line of reasoning? "Well, we're not herding you all up into concentration camps because of anything you've done innocent Americans. We're putting you all there because of the evil Americans who walk among you."
If we buy the mindset that the "evil-doers" are indistinguishable from innocent Americans, then we will allow virtually anything.
And, is this overt paranoia inducement even remotely justified? I mean, really, what percentage of the so-called terrorists are "other Americans that walk among us"? For that matter, how many "terrorists" are really out there?
But, this is a subtle, insidious, and very purposeful shift. It's an example of how they've moved the goalposts and are increasingly morphing these "terrorist-tools" into a hyper-surveillance program to keep tabs on all Americans. There was a time when they'd have to justify their actions and abide by Constitutional protections by pointing to foreign involvement in monitored communications. The line was that they are not monitoring us, as much as they are monitoring those foreigners who happened to be talking to us. Now, he's allowing that Americans are specifically being targeted domestically, but that it must be done because the terrorists "walk among us".
Also love the way the story frames the NSA activity as more benign and highly targeted:
"[a program that] gathers data on numbers dialed and length of calls, though not call content, and another that allows the NSA to monitor overseas e-mails and Internet sites used by suspected terrorists."
Makes it sound highly targeted and less invasive to innocent Americans. But, we've already learned how they get call content, that the distinction between foreign and domestic communication is less meaningful than we originally thought, and other details that go beyond the benign characterization of the story. This story seems to be stuck in the days before so many more revelations came out.
They left out all but the "This message brought to you by the NSA."
I was intrigued by this question and wondered the same. I created this Google spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhTjVTjz9GpldFJ...) with the estimated strength of all groups listed here: http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/crt/2011/195553.htm#ano. As of 2011, it would appear that the US government has calculated there are approximately 50,000-100,000 terrorists worldwide. I did not include the names of the groups in the spreadsheet, but I went top-to-bottom through the list and recorded the "Strength" of each group and put it into a cell. Unfortunately, the estimates are almost entirely vague and nebulous (probably intentionally), so I was very generous in my calculations. The spreadsheet is world editable, so I invite any contributions.
For scale, according to Wikipedia and this site: http://www.citypopulation.de/USA-California.html, all terrorists in the world identified by the US government would fit in a city between the size of Novato, CA (50K population) and Boulder, CO (100K population).
According to the DoD budget here (http://comptroller.defense.gov/defbudget/fy2014/FY2014_Budge...) we have spent $1.5 trillion dollars on "Overseas Contingency Operations" since FY2001. Taking that data into account, we have spent $17 million for every single known terrorist in the world since 2001, at a rate of $1.2 million per year (14 years).
The fact that that alone and the potential consequences are now (slowly) sinking in to the public consciousness made these leaks more than worth it.
That debate needs to be had and it needs to be had in the open, the hypocrisy of politicians (Merkel comes to mind) when they address the subject is telling.
That 'terrorists' (who are these guys anyway, didn't you mean criminals) are using the leaked info is a statement of fact which is hard to falsify (terrorists won't own up to it) and probably even harder to prove so it should carry very little or no weight at all.