William Binney (former NSA employee turned critic/whistleblower) in 2013 said there were 3 billion phone calls per day in the US[1]. In 2010 Pew[2] said 82% of adults made an average of 5 phone calls per day (~800 million calls), so 3 billion seems reasonable considering business calls, telemarketers, etc.
151 million in a year out of 365 * 3 billion is pretty small.
"The N.S.A. took in the 151 million records despite obtaining court orders to use the system on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, along with a few left over from late 2015, the report said."
Needle meet haystack. I wonder.how.many were actually brought up on charges?
Not to defend the NSA on ethical grounds, but at least on practical grounds, I would personally find that many records to be a decent trade-off for 42 arrested and convicted suspects who were likely to commit violent acts at some point. As for whether that's the case, who knows.
Also, they likely provided intelligence that led back to overseas cells and organizations, which the NSA is supposed to target but which we can't exactly prosecute.
It would be a huge blindspot if we couldn't follow the network graph of an organization based abroad because they route comms through the US.
"Those who would trade their freedom for safety deserve neither freedom nor safety."
"Likely to commit crimes" is not just grounds, especially under the US constitution, to remove a citizen's constitutional rights.
'What signify a few lives lost in a century? The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.'
Just so you are aware, clever tyrants always have taken liberties from their subjects in the name of moral righteousness.
The people who established the concept of unalienable constitutional rights here in America were accustomed to the idea that a few lives lost lost in the process of was unavoidable.
If I'm reading this right, the context still says that one should not give up their rights in exchange for safety. If it was strictly pro defense, he would've taken the money and given up on governance.
Having tax authority is essential for the government, and it shouldn't give it up for the sake of temporary defence money; privacy is essential to citizens, and shouldn't be given up for temporary protection from terrorists.
Prescriptivist linguistics is pretty silly though -- words mean what people use them fo
The above cited manipulation in the NPR article on Franklin's quote is frustrating. I used to listen to NPR 10 years ago, but today I tend to tune out[1].
Yes Franklin said a quote in a context, it does not mean he did not mean what he said. The quote is about giving up essential liberties to purchase temporary safety deserve neither. That's virtually the exact quote. If he wanted to say something that wasnt about giving up liberties for safety then he could have said that, instead, but he didnt do that.
1-stories glorifying transgender 9-year-olds is the type of thing that is now somehow standard on NPR: www.npr.org/2017/03/03/518206326/transgender-boy-finds-his-bros-and-himself-at-camp
I don't want the NSA accessing data like this without a warrant, but their job needs to get done somehow and by someone. Ideally with a lot more oversight, but calls to outright disband the organization are shortsighted.
I'm also thinking long-long term. Terrorism isn't a seriously considerable risk to an individual American, but what about in 50 or 100 years? What if in the distant future, terrorist groups or weird death cults like Aum Shinrikyo are able to more easily develop or obtain biological or chemical weapons that can dissipate into a large urban area quickly? What if multiple attacks like that start to occur? We need to have some kind of counter to that.
In terms of pure risk vs. reward trade-off, the current state of affairs isn't really worth it, but it's not hard to envision a future world where terrorism is truly a constant and valid fear in a first world country. That future hypothetical doesn't justify anything NSA does right now, no, but I think it (along with various threats from competing superpowers) does justify the need for some implementation of a security agency and intelligence community in every modern country.
Also, you're kind of mixing up different quotes that aren't really related to the specific issue.
A future with some ominous terrorist threat is not a justification for now or then. The NSA should never violate the Constitution ever. Especially when ordered not to do so. I think the quotes are both entirely relevant. You are suggesting trade-offs, the quotes say it is never worth it.
In terms of risk, you have a greater chance of being killed by lightning, drowning in the tub, being buried alive, [1] killed by cows, hot tap water, falling down the stairs, dogs, vending machines, bees, texing and driving, swing sets, wind, football, roller coasters, lawn mowers, your bed, [2] being crushed by furniture, or being shot by a toddler.
But by all means, let's spend trillions of dollars (not being hyperbolic here), and take away everyone's constitutional rights.
The NBC article gets its data from a CATO institute report.[1] In it, they touch upon the problem with extrapolating from previous data: they note that 9/11 accounted for 98% of all foreign terrorist fatalities in the past 40 years. Terror attacks obey a power law where extremely rare events account for most of the deaths. Considering the weaponry that exists today, it's fortunate we haven't had anything worse than 9/11.
Moreover, you're not accounting for the US response to terror attacks. I think we can both agree that the reaction to 9/11 was far more harmful than the attack itself. So if you want to reduce total harm, reducing the likelihood of terror attacks seems like a good idea. If that means collecting 0.1% of phone records and (under judicial oversight) occasionally checking if foreign terrorists are in those call logs... well I'm willing to make that trade-off.
Thought crime (goes against the wishes of those in power)
to say it but its true: reign in the military and CIA, stop bombing and meddling in other countries, close the borders and use the budget to fund a mission to Proxima Centauri.
Anyways did you know 3 buildingd in NYC fells on 9/11? Look into that.
> I'm also thinking long-long term. Terrorism isn't a seriously considerable risk to an individual American, but what about in 50 or 100 years? What if in the distant future, terrorist groups or weird death cults like Aum Shinrikyo are able to more easily develop or obtain biological or chemical weapons that can dissipate into a large urban area quickly?
All the more reason to stop with band-aid solutions like spying on the entire world, and engage in real efforts to bring education, infrastructure, and stability to the regions most prone to creating terrorists.
The NSA is part of a broader picture of US military and intelligence agencies that involves selling arms without oversight, overthrowing democratically elected governments, funding rebel groups that later become terrorists, congressionally unauthorized military action, a network of unscrupulous military contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp, relationships with brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia, and political fear-mongering and propaganda in the US and abroad to afford a thin veil of legitimacy to these activities.
You are scared of terrorism, and so is the other side. As one small example of many, did you know that during the "Shock and Awe" phase of the US invasion of Iraq, the Oxford Research Group estimates there were over 6,000 civilian deaths? [1] That's more than on 9/11 itself, and the implication of terrorism is literally in the name "Shock and Awe" as well as in the stated definition of this military doctrine:
"Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels" [2]
This is a great post that contains the type of information we should be educating the US population about. That is unfortunately not happening, though.
Thanks. I should clarify to that "Shock and Awe" is another name for the "Rapid Dominance" doctrine mentioned in that quote, in case anyone didn't catch that.
I very often push back against those who spread incorrect information and conspiracy theories regarding the IC, all countries have intelligence agencies and engage in SIGINT collection. Ours should be doing the best work possible. However, there are two issues with your post:
1. The NSA does a whole lot more than monitoring suspected terrorists, even if it a hot topic right now, that is a strange point to bring up.
2. I have not read the specifics on this case yet (media seems to still like using "IC is the boogeyman!" slant), but more generally, it is important for there to be a hard line against domestic surveillance of US Persons versus standard foreign intelligence collection. Warrantless domestic collection would be too easy to abuse and more importantly may raise constitutional issues.
I am unsure about this case though, probably will need to dig through source material. The linked article is unclear on if this data is minimized (anonymized) or not, as my understanding is that US Person information must be anonymized under all normal circumstances (and additionally USPI cannot be directly queried without a warrant). Very curious to understand what is actually happening.
It's arguable that it would be a reasonable trade-off; how ever there's no evidence any or all of these 42 suspects were ever arrested, let alone convicted. As you said: who knows.
I may be mistaken, but I don't believe the article said anything about convictions. The 42 "terrorism suspects" had their call records etc. sent to the NSA under court order. There isn't even mention of a trial. Was there due process? Was they considered innocent after reading the call record data? We don't know anything other than the NSA claims some people were "terrorist suspects", the FISA court granted a warrant, and phone records were collected.
> who were likely to commit violent acts at some point
That's an unwarranted assumption. All we know is some people were labeled a "terrorist suspect". Even if the investigation was for a violent act, they are suspects; no guilt has been established.
A larger problem is your assumption that "terrorism" implies "likely to commit violent acts". That hasn't been true for some time. Drug trafficking[1] and the Occupy protests[2] were both "terrorism" according to the FBI. The term "terrorism" was diluted down to meaning "crime some people find frightening". The TLAs tend to use it now mostly for funding/budget purposes, as yet another "think of children!".
"The U.S. government has prosecuted 796 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never even got close to committing an act of violence."
https://trial-and-terror.theintercept.com/
Imagine they would've each killed 50 citizens on average. I think that's a very high estimate. I think 5/terrorist would be high, but lets pad the estimates.
That's 40.000 deaths since 9/11. Was it worth it?
Was that worth harming your culture, making your country more hostile to vistors and citizens alike, while spending (very roughly) $660.000.000.000[0] on "counter-terrorism"?
Couldn't that money have been used more effectively, for instance on cancer research or programs to reduce obesity?
40k deaths over 16 years is nothing. It's how many Americans kill themselves in a year, while orders of magnitude more Americans die of heart failure, diabetes and cancer.
And that's a very high estimate of the additional deaths-by-terrorist that might have potentially been prevented, maybe.
> who were likely to commit violent acts at some point
Wow. Given what happened with MLK and others at the time, why are we so willing to trust these groups with such power? The court system exists for a reason.
I've actually defended the NSA a lot as it seems incredibly naive to leave that information sitting on the table so no sane government would do so given the probability that their enemies could grab similar information.
But isn't your trade-off kinda weird? Not that it's bad to catch 40 terrorists, but how many terrorists generate 3 million different phone calls in a year even in their extended network?
Well we should certainly distinguish ourselves by our behavior, eg not imprisoning people without trial or [autocratic stuff]. On the other hand, passively vacuuming up information doesn't actively harm people.
Just for context, I assume all my calls are logged and have been for years, not just in this country. I don't feel bad about this, both because I can understand why securocrats would be curious about me, and out of a basic optimism that this won't be actionable unless there is a security incentive - ie I assume who I talk to an the phone won't be shared with Dept. of Parking Tickets or other civil authorities.
oh but it does actively harm through self-censorship and more directly to those who gets in the crosshairs a posteriori because of their activism, dissension or business activities.
Regarding your second paragraph, parallel construction comes to mind.
I'm aware of those factors, but there's a balancing of legitimate interests. I disagree with your notion of active harm because the degree of self-censorship I engage is my choice.
Suppose I wish to immanentize the eschaton, and step one of this plan is the overthrow of the United States' government. Obviously the government as an entity has an interest in not being overthrown, so if I announce that goal and try to recruit people to it it's going to watch me increasingly closely in proportion to the degree of my activism.
Well, you say, doesn't that have a chilling effect? Maybe. it depends very much on the nature of my eschatology.
Perhaps I am a very peaceful person and my brilliant plan is to persuade everyone who wants to to meditate for 15 minutes a day at noon, thereby raising everyone's consciousness so effectively that everyone behaves angelically and the need for government evaporates. Unlikely, but fundamentally harmless. You're going to have a hard time finding any jury that will convict me for suggesting that people sit still and calm their thoughts for a few minutes every day, but only if they feel like it.
Suppose on the other hand that I'm a miserable old bastard and my plan is to build an army, storm every state capitol, kill 2/3 of the population, and then rule with an iron fist while bathing in the blood of virgins every day of the week, and that I have a cadre of trusted lieutenants and a vast trove of resources to get my project off the ground. Most people would prefer not to participate for reasons that I hope are obvious, and so operational security dictates that I be very covert indeed.
Obviously, the bulk of political activity takes place in the center between these similarly unlikely extremes. Equally obviously, extremism exists and some of that extremism manifests as threats rather than opportunities. It is, inarguably, the government's job to protect people from reasonably foreseeable threats, and gathering information on the environment is an unavoidable necessity in the pursuit of that end.
I don't feel my liberty to be compromised by this, primarily because I have no plans to extralegally reduce anyone else's liberties. Is it possible that corrupt individuals, factions, or whole institutions within government might recognize that I am a peaceable person, but decide to make my life miserable anyway? Yes, of course it is.
But that is a risk I must accept as it is a basic problem of human relations. My personal philosophy on such matters is basically a Stoic one, that I am primarily accountable to myself, and even if my liberty or life should be threatened by others, what maters above all else is my relationship with my own conscience. There is no way to legislate moral goodness; people can observe the letter of the law but still have evil intentions towards others and even act upon those (indeed I'd say that describes how a large part of the USA functions right now).
Adding more laws to constrain government from doing things that might be used for evil is not the answer. First, such laws are easily circumvented. Second, laws are easily suspended, by fiat or by consensus, in times of emergency, and the belief that they won't be is facile. Third, such laws would impinge upon legitimate actions taken in pursuit of legitimate objectives, ie the detection of threats. Fourth, given the existence of other powerful nations with powerful intelligence-gathering capabilities, for a country's government to put itself at an informational disadvantage relative to others is to put the citizenry at a strategic disadvantage, which is to endanger them, which irresponsible given government's obligation to protect.
It's foolish to only consider one side of an argument or to only prosecute one's own interests. Natural, but foolish. I think policing is badly corrupted in many jurisdictions, but a policing power is an essential role of government that has been instituted because it works better than ...
Maybe we shouldn't unilaterally disarm ourselves in a world of co-equal, spying, sometimes despotic countries who would like to delegitimize American democracy (though we're already doing a great job of this ourselves.)
We have every right to audit the information flowing over our borders from foreign persons, just as we have every right to inspect shipments arriving in our ports. That's part of the concept of sovereignty.
This past election, our sovereignty was unambiguously, overtly threatened by a foreign power - and we will be suffering the consequences for this for years to come. But one of the tools we had to stop this - and one of the reasons we know anything about this at all - is foreign surveillance.
The stakes are very high, but many are inexplicably arguing that we should just stop foreign intelligence gathering if there's any chance at all a domestic person gets caught up on one end of the conversation.
The Russian strategy to interfere in our election to bring about the result that occurred and that they wanted to occur clearly involved many parallel strategies operating in tandem, including targeted social media advertising in swing states, but also including possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and foreign agents, some of whose interactions were captured in foreign surveillance.
The surveillance gives us the best chance of stopping something similar in the future. First it does so by letting us know that collusion was happening.
Second, because the Obama administration made the surveillance public, the national security apparatus is in a political position to investigate this independently even though our country is under control of a new regime, due to political safeguards put in place designed to protect the independence of our law enforcement apparatus. Not even Nixon could get around being investigated by his own Justice Department. I'm not saying this will happen (Trump is a corrupt individual, after all), but knowing about collusion thanks to surveillance puts it in a better position to happen.
Thank you for your perspective. Could you perhaps give me some reading material?
Are you of the opinion that the amount of surveillance conducted on citizens is reasonable in the context of the balancing of civil liberties and the dignity of individuals vs. geopolitics and struggle for power?
I would like to see these issues improved by decentralization (regulation to prevent the centralization of power in private enterprises) and transparancy (making it easier to spot subterfuge for everyone), but I don't yet know exactly how to built such a system and if it could work. The CIA/NSA approach is antithetical to that.
Edit: I personally doubt the efficacy of surveillance because I think it disproportionately impacts citizens, while high-level state actors will generally be able to work around by having good opsec and using high-quality encryption. That's also how I ended the GP, but you don't seem to have responded to that. What is your opinion on that?
And adjusting for Americans as ~5% of global call volume = 0.0041 * 20 = ~0.081% which may or may not pass a sanity check of one phone call per 2 Americans per year. Assuming say 1 / 2 calls per person per day * 365 * 2 people ~= .07%.
I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round.
There are about 200,000,000 US adults.
So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose seems consistent with what we know.)
So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls?
Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases).
Ed:
I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.
One would presume that SMS and MMS messages get caught up in this too. I send an order of magnitude more texts than phone calls. The % of users caught up in the dragnet must certainly be smaller than your estimate.
It's not a random sample of 0.1% of calls, though. Rather, they're collecting all the call metadata of a small fraction of subscribers; the number of people targeted may be relatively small (though not small in absolute terms), but each person targeted has their privacy significantly invaded, as the NSA learns quite a lot about their life. And to be targeted, you only have to have once talked to someone for whom the NSA has a "reasonable suspicion" they might be involved in terrorism. No need to do anything suspicious yourself.
But we're talking... one in a thousand people, likely targeting mostly those involved heavily with international relationships.
Even if you confine it to the Arab population, they're still not tapping everyone (closer to 1 in 6, if it were all Arab targets, which is unlikely). If you confine it to immigrants, it's 1 in 200. This suggests that they're using some actual basis for their selection (as you seem to be aware).
It's unfortunate, but if they're collecting metadata for network analysis and if their selection criteria is that it's foreign related (and preferably tracing back to known networks), then it doesn't really strike me as a problem.
Also, your last line isn't true -- talking to someone who is strongly suspected of being a terrorist is suspicious until analysis reveals the nature of the relationship, particularly if you go on to contact others.
I suspect that people who only ping once (or even very intermittently) are quickly pruned as not being useful to observe.
A couple years ago, I handled dialer traffic for a modestly-sized dialer wholesaler. The total number of bookkeeping entries due to their traffic was 2-3 billion per week, representing perhaps 500M-1B call attempts. And I was basically a nobody.
151M call records is incredibly tiny, though they will be targeted and thus probably represent near 100% of the calls for some group of people.
"Morally good" is dependent on perspective. I'm sure there are patriotic, moral NSA workers who believe that they are helping make America safe, and that it is morally better to lie to Americans and save their lives, than to tell them the truth and let Americans die.
Of course, I'd disagree with that entirely -- there's no way of knowing how effective the NSA program is at stopping terrorism and no way to know that it's not being used for nefarious purposes... but the idea that there is a moral "good" and a moral "bad" ignores the nuance inherent in making such judgments.
Yes, and? A computer stuck in a loop also is working perfectly fine "according to its own logic or perspective". That is its perspective, just like the moral judgement of others is their perspective. This does not lessen my own perspective and judgement one iota, and changing adjectives doesn't really help. That is, I wouldn't have said "morally good ones", I would have said people who weren't abused to created an bottomless hole in their mind. But what is abuse? What is a hole? A matter of perspective, and it's not like I can point to any results of my own ideals and actions other than the heat death of the universe... so who's to judge? I am, and you are, and then we simply append "IMO" to everything when someone forgets to explicitly mention it.
Also, yes, sometimes people are thinking they are helping others. Sometimes they are not, and sometimes they revel in that. Are you sure those don't exist? Why do you just mention people who mean well? That's fantasy, not nuance. Where are the lines between those people, and people who hear voices telling them they need to murder babies to avoid some space monster from eating Earth, and from people who know they are hurting and destroying people, but are convinced they deserve it, who have an inner reservoir of fear and pain that, in their mind, dwarves the lives of anybody else who ever existed? And even all that is not even beginning to touch nuance.
When someone implies everybody would be tempted by power, that's lacking nuance, too, and even just going "nah, I personally disagree" does restore some of it, any further qualifiers are a bonus. I agree that "this is evil" does not carry very much information, but neither does "some might mean well". Not well enough to stop the ones who don't mean well, so let those take a number. It takes one bad apple, and a lot of good apples who don't have hands or suck at throwing, to spoil the whole damn barrel.
I think trendia's point is not that those people are correct, but that people are influenced by their surroundings; that it is the orgsmizstion we must change, not the people in it.
Though if you subtract the working people for it from an organization, what remains? Not that I disagree, in the same sense that it's too easy to solely blame soldiers for the wars civilians enable politicians to send them into. Of course the folks at the NSA didn't wake up one morning and just decided to be a bit too creepy on their own.
But at the same time, no person is a completely passive receptacle for the social pressures of elusive active people, to a degree everybody is responsible for what they take part in. Otherwise, anything/anyone you could point to in criticism and for the purpose of changing any organization could in turn say "don't change me, change my environment", in an endless circle. But it's all made up of people in the end, so why not everybody own their own shit right away? Free will might be pretense anyway, so why not go the full mile.
Many things are also gradual processes, and often kind of a feedback loop. In this case I think it's safe to assume anyone who mentions during the interview they'd proudly blow the whistle on any seriously evil stuff they happen to come across, if the official path through superiors gets blocked, would not get hired. Can this be fixed iteratively, or would it make more sense to make a whole new set of organizations, attracting people from wholly different buckets of the population, and once those are up to speed turn the old ones off? Not super realistic, but maybe still more realistic than waiting for people who are entrenched and off the deep end, with a full support network and lots of bucks on the line.. they seem to get worse, not better.
I am also at a point where I don't trust anything coming out of the NSA or the US government. Maybe it's true or maybe they 1) transferred more domestic spying over to GHCQ or some other Five Eyes partner 2) transferred these responsibilities to some other agency 3) everything is still stored and they don't count that as "collecting call records".
Does anyone hear seriously believe they only "took in" 151 million of anything? That's a single flashdrive. NSA operates datacenters. The things they collect are measured by numbers well into billions.
> The Utah Data Center, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center,[1] is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger.
Collected, as defined by the NSA, is only the data that they looked at, not the data that they have. And they probably don't count the data that was looked at by a program.
Again, please understand that the NSA uses a non-English definition of the word "collect".
The NSA calls getting data and copying data to its datacenters "interception".
It calls having a human NSA employee read that data, "collection". 99.999% of the data it copies to its datacenters is not "collected".
The NSA copies all your phone calls and emails and web browsing and so on. ALL. It only reads some of them. Each of these articles is always written about one particular narrow NSA program, ignoring other very-similar programs, in order to minimize the apparent spying going on. For this article, the 151M records being talked about are one tiny program to query telephone call records generated by US phone companies. This is like 0.01% of what the NSA pays attention to. The NSA is already intercepting the full call anyway! But that's a different program...
The distinction does make sense though. If an intercept is taken, never looked at, and eventually deleted, then from a 'privacy violation' point of view it may as well not have been collected at all.
But these still need to be intercepted in the first place, because you don't know in advance which of the 0.01% of records are of interest.
From a privacy standpoint, the fact that they make a copy of your data is alarming, as this multiplies the attack surface for your data.
Also, all the data is "looked at". Sure, not by a human, but if the algorithmn can flag you as a terrorist and then humans look through the data, what's the difference.
You also seem to be under the impression that they delete the data once they're done. But why would they ever delete that copy of your data unless they need the space for something else? They never will, and that's why they're building a huge datacenter in Utah, to store EVERYTHING INDEFINITELY.
As to your last point, I'll flip the table: if only 0.01% of the records are interesting and only 0.01% of those records lead to any meaningful insight into terrorist activities, why should we continue these programs knowing that they are, on average, 99.999% ineffective?
"...But these still need to be intercepted in the first place, because you don't know in advance which of the 0.01% of records are of interest...."
They do not, and the reason why is interesting.
In free countries, there is an order to things. This order is important.
First there is an event. A person applies for security clearance, there's a robbery, somebody reports a crime, and so on.
Second there is an investigation. Based on the nature of the event reported, facts are gathered to determine whether or not the state needs to intervene. More importantly, the people are identified that need intervention. Based on the investigation, sometimes the state might intervene with force, as in when a SWAT team shows up at your door.
The order is clear, and necessary. Event > data gathering > investigation > people. We start with an event and end up with people who might be criminals. That's because everybody is guilty of something. It's important to limit the state to only go after people where there is a clear, independent prompt for something to happen, ie, an event.
But what if we change it around? What if we collect data all the time? Well then we are no longer limited to having a good and independent reason for taking action. Instead, now we can start with the person and then figure out what they're guilty of until it justifies the action we've already selected. And guess what? Everybody is guilty of something.
All we've done is create a machine where we can identify people we don't like, push a button, and then find reasons to put them in jail or apply force to them in other ways. Free countries cannot continue operating in an environment like that. Because we've made the law do our bidding, there is effectively no rule of law. And people are smart enough to figure that out.
If you can go ahead and mail me a duplicate of your debit card, I'd like to intercept it. I promise not to collect it.
The fact that the infrastructure is in place and rampant abuse has happened in the past make the distinction essentially meaningless.
If someone is going to justify interception they need to justify collection, because we all know it's going to happen unjustly to at least some citizens.
Yeah yeah the NSA data mines everyone and their dog. Welcome to 2013. Now why doesn't the NYT investigate what other illegal skullduggery the NSA and its 16 sister agencies are involved in? Wasn't there a massive leak of intel agency info to Wikileaks a few months ago? Oh yeah I forgot...the NYT, along with the rest of the mainstream media, act as neoliberalism's propaganda department and are about as interested in truth and honesty as, say, Donald Trump.
Isn't Facebook still doing this? You have to explicitly restrict FB access to your microphone or they will use convos to inform advertising ... or conspiracy theory?
They do listen. I believe this is openly on their help pages. They dont store 'raw audio' so must turn this into text or meta data. FB use the information to help identify what you are watching/listening to to help improve your posts... so yeah pretty much going o be used for advertising.
I wonder how many people would remove FB if they knew this. I'm one of the people less bothered by internet advertising (I commented to this about 3 days ago re ad-blocking and cookies) and to me it seems amazing people accept this level of intrusion.
"Facebook says explicitly on its help pages that it doesn’t record conversations, but that it does use the audio to identify what is happening around the phone. The site promotes the feature as an easy way of identifying what you are listening to or watching, to make it easier and quicker to post about whatever’s going on."
Vatican Shadow is an artist that makes music about the War on Terror. I would recommend "Remeber Your Black Day" or "Death Is Unity With God".
It's a spiritual continuation of the work of the deceased UK artist Muslimgauze who's released 90+ releases so far, and who has dedicated over half his short life to making music to protest the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are still quarterly+ releases of his work 18 years after his death because he left a huge back catalog of unreleased work. At his peak he was making an album a day, and if you gave him something to listen to he'd return you an "improved version" the next day.
Muzlimgauze's intent was to call attention to, and make people read about the Israel-Palestine conflict; I think Vatican Shadow has a similar intention.
My first thought was that 151M call records is not a significant amount considering that we're talking about the population of the United States.
Rough calculations based on some very round numbers is that this would account for between .019 and .033 percent of the adult US population. (~150M call records/year ~= 50-80,000 people, US Adult Population ~ 242,470,800)
Extrapolated, that number is a little concerning. By my estimate, that means between 2 and 3 of every 10K people is under some sort of surveillance.
But then again... apply that to say... San Francisco - population ~900K and you get between 180 and 270 people. Or NYC with 1.7M people and you get between 340 and 510 people.
151 million records sounds like a very, very low number of phone records for US. Suspiciously low, in fact. I would expect that amount to come out from the records of the domestic surveillance organisations of Luxembourg.
Almost definitely because that's the number of records inspected directly by a human, not the number that are stored, or the number that are inspected by algorithms.
My opinion regarding the NSA has changed over time. During the Snowden revelations (Snowden is still a hero of mine), I was greatly opposed to foreign spying, e.g. on Petrobras and Angela Merkel.
Over the years I've realized how powerful and important such information is for peaceful diplomacy, and that the United States has a post-WWII responsibility to maintain that peace.
However, the recent debacle regarding potential political spying has vindicated my earliest fears - that this can be used to subvert the domestic democratic process. Doesn't matter whether the spying did or did not occur (probably both sides are stretching the truth). We're living in an age where it is at least conceivable by a large portion of the country that the NSA's tools were improperly used against US citizens. It's time for a vigorous debate on clear guidelines regarding these powers.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] thread151 million in a year out of 365 * 3 billion is pretty small.
1. http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-yo...
2. http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-americ...
Needle meet haystack. I wonder.how.many were actually brought up on charges?
It would be a huge blindspot if we couldn't follow the network graph of an organization based abroad because they route comms through the US.
"Likely to commit crimes" is not just grounds, especially under the US constitution, to remove a citizen's constitutional rights.
'What signify a few lives lost in a century? The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.'
Just so you are aware, clever tyrants always have taken liberties from their subjects in the name of moral righteousness.
The people who established the concept of unalienable constitutional rights here in America were accustomed to the idea that a few lives lost lost in the process of was unavoidable.
Please stop (mis)qouting this. It means almost the exact opposite of the point people tend to try to make with it.
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous...
Having tax authority is essential for the government, and it shouldn't give it up for the sake of temporary defence money; privacy is essential to citizens, and shouldn't be given up for temporary protection from terrorists.
Prescriptivist linguistics is pretty silly though -- words mean what people use them fo
1-stories glorifying transgender 9-year-olds is the type of thing that is now somehow standard on NPR: www.npr.org/2017/03/03/518206326/transgender-boy-finds-his-bros-and-himself-at-camp
I'm also thinking long-long term. Terrorism isn't a seriously considerable risk to an individual American, but what about in 50 or 100 years? What if in the distant future, terrorist groups or weird death cults like Aum Shinrikyo are able to more easily develop or obtain biological or chemical weapons that can dissipate into a large urban area quickly? What if multiple attacks like that start to occur? We need to have some kind of counter to that.
In terms of pure risk vs. reward trade-off, the current state of affairs isn't really worth it, but it's not hard to envision a future world where terrorism is truly a constant and valid fear in a first world country. That future hypothetical doesn't justify anything NSA does right now, no, but I think it (along with various threats from competing superpowers) does justify the need for some implementation of a security agency and intelligence community in every modern country.
Also, you're kind of mixing up different quotes that aren't really related to the specific issue.
But by all means, let's spend trillions of dollars (not being hyperbolic here), and take away everyone's constitutional rights.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/you-re-more-likely-die-c... [2] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/you-re-more-likely-die-c...
Moreover, you're not accounting for the US response to terror attacks. I think we can both agree that the reaction to 9/11 was far more harmful than the attack itself. So if you want to reduce total harm, reducing the likelihood of terror attacks seems like a good idea. If that means collecting 0.1% of phone records and (under judicial oversight) occasionally checking if foreign terrorists are in those call logs... well I'm willing to make that trade-off.
1. https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa798_...
Anyways did you know 3 buildingd in NYC fells on 9/11? Look into that.
All the more reason to stop with band-aid solutions like spying on the entire world, and engage in real efforts to bring education, infrastructure, and stability to the regions most prone to creating terrorists.
The NSA is part of a broader picture of US military and intelligence agencies that involves selling arms without oversight, overthrowing democratically elected governments, funding rebel groups that later become terrorists, congressionally unauthorized military action, a network of unscrupulous military contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp, relationships with brutal regimes like Saudi Arabia, and political fear-mongering and propaganda in the US and abroad to afford a thin veil of legitimacy to these activities.
You are scared of terrorism, and so is the other side. As one small example of many, did you know that during the "Shock and Awe" phase of the US invasion of Iraq, the Oxford Research Group estimates there were over 6,000 civilian deaths? [1] That's more than on 9/11 itself, and the implication of terrorism is literally in the name "Shock and Awe" as well as in the stated definition of this military doctrine:
"Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels" [2]
[1] https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/pdf/a_dossi...
[2] http://www.dodccrp.org/files/Ullman_Shock.pdf
1. The NSA does a whole lot more than monitoring suspected terrorists, even if it a hot topic right now, that is a strange point to bring up.
2. I have not read the specifics on this case yet (media seems to still like using "IC is the boogeyman!" slant), but more generally, it is important for there to be a hard line against domestic surveillance of US Persons versus standard foreign intelligence collection. Warrantless domestic collection would be too easy to abuse and more importantly may raise constitutional issues.
I am unsure about this case though, probably will need to dig through source material. The linked article is unclear on if this data is minimized (anonymized) or not, as my understanding is that US Person information must be anonymized under all normal circumstances (and additionally USPI cannot be directly queried without a warrant). Very curious to understand what is actually happening.
I may be mistaken, but I don't believe the article said anything about convictions. The 42 "terrorism suspects" had their call records etc. sent to the NSA under court order. There isn't even mention of a trial. Was there due process? Was they considered innocent after reading the call record data? We don't know anything other than the NSA claims some people were "terrorist suspects", the FISA court granted a warrant, and phone records were collected.
> who were likely to commit violent acts at some point
That's an unwarranted assumption. All we know is some people were labeled a "terrorist suspect". Even if the investigation was for a violent act, they are suspects; no guilt has been established.
A larger problem is your assumption that "terrorism" implies "likely to commit violent acts". That hasn't been true for some time. Drug trafficking[1] and the Occupy protests[2] were both "terrorism" according to the FBI. The term "terrorism" was diluted down to meaning "crime some people find frightening". The TLAs tend to use it now mostly for funding/budget purposes, as yet another "think of children!".
[1] https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/testimony/internation...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/fbi-occupy-wall-str...
That's 40.000 deaths since 9/11. Was it worth it?
Was that worth harming your culture, making your country more hostile to vistors and citizens alike, while spending (very roughly) $660.000.000.000[0] on "counter-terrorism"?
Couldn't that money have been used more effectively, for instance on cancer research or programs to reduce obesity?
40k deaths over 16 years is nothing. It's how many Americans kill themselves in a year, while orders of magnitude more Americans die of heart failure, diabetes and cancer.
And that's a very high estimate of the additional deaths-by-terrorist that might have potentially been prevented, maybe.
[0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/11/u-s-spends-o...
Wow. Given what happened with MLK and others at the time, why are we so willing to trust these groups with such power? The court system exists for a reason.
Yet we keep creating them.
But isn't your trade-off kinda weird? Not that it's bad to catch 40 terrorists, but how many terrorists generate 3 million different phone calls in a year even in their extended network?
(Based on an estimate of 10B calls per day worldwide)
Maybe we should compare ourselves to a country where a Constitution applies and unreasonable searches and seizures doesn't happen.
Maybe we can strive to be better rather than race to the bottom.
Just for context, I assume all my calls are logged and have been for years, not just in this country. I don't feel bad about this, both because I can understand why securocrats would be curious about me, and out of a basic optimism that this won't be actionable unless there is a security incentive - ie I assume who I talk to an the phone won't be shared with Dept. of Parking Tickets or other civil authorities.
Regarding your second paragraph, parallel construction comes to mind.
Suppose I wish to immanentize the eschaton, and step one of this plan is the overthrow of the United States' government. Obviously the government as an entity has an interest in not being overthrown, so if I announce that goal and try to recruit people to it it's going to watch me increasingly closely in proportion to the degree of my activism.
Well, you say, doesn't that have a chilling effect? Maybe. it depends very much on the nature of my eschatology.
Perhaps I am a very peaceful person and my brilliant plan is to persuade everyone who wants to to meditate for 15 minutes a day at noon, thereby raising everyone's consciousness so effectively that everyone behaves angelically and the need for government evaporates. Unlikely, but fundamentally harmless. You're going to have a hard time finding any jury that will convict me for suggesting that people sit still and calm their thoughts for a few minutes every day, but only if they feel like it.
Suppose on the other hand that I'm a miserable old bastard and my plan is to build an army, storm every state capitol, kill 2/3 of the population, and then rule with an iron fist while bathing in the blood of virgins every day of the week, and that I have a cadre of trusted lieutenants and a vast trove of resources to get my project off the ground. Most people would prefer not to participate for reasons that I hope are obvious, and so operational security dictates that I be very covert indeed.
Obviously, the bulk of political activity takes place in the center between these similarly unlikely extremes. Equally obviously, extremism exists and some of that extremism manifests as threats rather than opportunities. It is, inarguably, the government's job to protect people from reasonably foreseeable threats, and gathering information on the environment is an unavoidable necessity in the pursuit of that end.
I don't feel my liberty to be compromised by this, primarily because I have no plans to extralegally reduce anyone else's liberties. Is it possible that corrupt individuals, factions, or whole institutions within government might recognize that I am a peaceable person, but decide to make my life miserable anyway? Yes, of course it is.
But that is a risk I must accept as it is a basic problem of human relations. My personal philosophy on such matters is basically a Stoic one, that I am primarily accountable to myself, and even if my liberty or life should be threatened by others, what maters above all else is my relationship with my own conscience. There is no way to legislate moral goodness; people can observe the letter of the law but still have evil intentions towards others and even act upon those (indeed I'd say that describes how a large part of the USA functions right now).
Adding more laws to constrain government from doing things that might be used for evil is not the answer. First, such laws are easily circumvented. Second, laws are easily suspended, by fiat or by consensus, in times of emergency, and the belief that they won't be is facile. Third, such laws would impinge upon legitimate actions taken in pursuit of legitimate objectives, ie the detection of threats. Fourth, given the existence of other powerful nations with powerful intelligence-gathering capabilities, for a country's government to put itself at an informational disadvantage relative to others is to put the citizenry at a strategic disadvantage, which is to endanger them, which irresponsible given government's obligation to protect.
It's foolish to only consider one side of an argument or to only prosecute one's own interests. Natural, but foolish. I think policing is badly corrupted in many jurisdictions, but a policing power is an essential role of government that has been instituted because it works better than ...
We have every right to audit the information flowing over our borders from foreign persons, just as we have every right to inspect shipments arriving in our ports. That's part of the concept of sovereignty.
This past election, our sovereignty was unambiguously, overtly threatened by a foreign power - and we will be suffering the consequences for this for years to come. But one of the tools we had to stop this - and one of the reasons we know anything about this at all - is foreign surveillance.
The stakes are very high, but many are inexplicably arguing that we should just stop foreign intelligence gathering if there's any chance at all a domestic person gets caught up on one end of the conversation.
Besides, last I heard a certain underregulated U.S. company enabled this mass manipulation. (Hint: it starts with an F.)
And you think the KGB is bothered my these measures in the least?
The surveillance gives us the best chance of stopping something similar in the future. First it does so by letting us know that collusion was happening. Second, because the Obama administration made the surveillance public, the national security apparatus is in a political position to investigate this independently even though our country is under control of a new regime, due to political safeguards put in place designed to protect the independence of our law enforcement apparatus. Not even Nixon could get around being investigated by his own Justice Department. I'm not saying this will happen (Trump is a corrupt individual, after all), but knowing about collusion thanks to surveillance puts it in a better position to happen.
Are you of the opinion that the amount of surveillance conducted on citizens is reasonable in the context of the balancing of civil liberties and the dignity of individuals vs. geopolitics and struggle for power?
I would like to see these issues improved by decentralization (regulation to prevent the centralization of power in private enterprises) and transparancy (making it easier to spot subterfuge for everyone), but I don't yet know exactly how to built such a system and if it could work. The CIA/NSA approach is antithetical to that.
Edit: I personally doubt the efficacy of surveillance because I think it disproportionately impacts citizens, while high-level state actors will generally be able to work around by having good opsec and using high-quality encryption. That's also how I ended the GP, but you don't seem to have responded to that. What is your opinion on that?
151,000,000 calls/year ÷ (365 days/year * 10,000,000,000 calls/day) ~= 0.000041 = 0.0041%.
I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round.
There are about 200,000,000 US adults.
So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose seems consistent with what we know.)
So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls?
Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases).
Ed:
I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.
But we're talking... one in a thousand people, likely targeting mostly those involved heavily with international relationships.
Even if you confine it to the Arab population, they're still not tapping everyone (closer to 1 in 6, if it were all Arab targets, which is unlikely). If you confine it to immigrants, it's 1 in 200. This suggests that they're using some actual basis for their selection (as you seem to be aware).
It's unfortunate, but if they're collecting metadata for network analysis and if their selection criteria is that it's foreign related (and preferably tracing back to known networks), then it doesn't really strike me as a problem.
Also, your last line isn't true -- talking to someone who is strongly suspected of being a terrorist is suspicious until analysis reveals the nature of the relationship, particularly if you go on to contact others.
I suspect that people who only ping once (or even very intermittently) are quickly pruned as not being useful to observe.
151M call records is incredibly tiny, though they will be targeted and thus probably represent near 100% of the calls for some group of people.
So my estimates are off by at least an order of magnitude (since outliers are likely to be targeted for a number of reasons).
I'm just too lazy to fix them.
What humans could resist such enormous power?
Of course, I'd disagree with that entirely -- there's no way of knowing how effective the NSA program is at stopping terrorism and no way to know that it's not being used for nefarious purposes... but the idea that there is a moral "good" and a moral "bad" ignores the nuance inherent in making such judgments.
Yes, and? A computer stuck in a loop also is working perfectly fine "according to its own logic or perspective". That is its perspective, just like the moral judgement of others is their perspective. This does not lessen my own perspective and judgement one iota, and changing adjectives doesn't really help. That is, I wouldn't have said "morally good ones", I would have said people who weren't abused to created an bottomless hole in their mind. But what is abuse? What is a hole? A matter of perspective, and it's not like I can point to any results of my own ideals and actions other than the heat death of the universe... so who's to judge? I am, and you are, and then we simply append "IMO" to everything when someone forgets to explicitly mention it.
Also, yes, sometimes people are thinking they are helping others. Sometimes they are not, and sometimes they revel in that. Are you sure those don't exist? Why do you just mention people who mean well? That's fantasy, not nuance. Where are the lines between those people, and people who hear voices telling them they need to murder babies to avoid some space monster from eating Earth, and from people who know they are hurting and destroying people, but are convinced they deserve it, who have an inner reservoir of fear and pain that, in their mind, dwarves the lives of anybody else who ever existed? And even all that is not even beginning to touch nuance.
When someone implies everybody would be tempted by power, that's lacking nuance, too, and even just going "nah, I personally disagree" does restore some of it, any further qualifiers are a bonus. I agree that "this is evil" does not carry very much information, but neither does "some might mean well". Not well enough to stop the ones who don't mean well, so let those take a number. It takes one bad apple, and a lot of good apples who don't have hands or suck at throwing, to spoil the whole damn barrel.
But at the same time, no person is a completely passive receptacle for the social pressures of elusive active people, to a degree everybody is responsible for what they take part in. Otherwise, anything/anyone you could point to in criticism and for the purpose of changing any organization could in turn say "don't change me, change my environment", in an endless circle. But it's all made up of people in the end, so why not everybody own their own shit right away? Free will might be pretense anyway, so why not go the full mile.
Many things are also gradual processes, and often kind of a feedback loop. In this case I think it's safe to assume anyone who mentions during the interview they'd proudly blow the whistle on any seriously evil stuff they happen to come across, if the official path through superiors gets blocked, would not get hired. Can this be fixed iteratively, or would it make more sense to make a whole new set of organizations, attracting people from wholly different buckets of the population, and once those are up to speed turn the old ones off? Not super realistic, but maybe still more realistic than waiting for people who are entrenched and off the deep end, with a full support network and lots of bucks on the line.. they seem to get worse, not better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222114
Does anyone hear seriously believe they only "took in" 151 million of anything? That's a single flashdrive. NSA operates datacenters. The things they collect are measured by numbers well into billions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
The NSA calls getting data and copying data to its datacenters "interception".
It calls having a human NSA employee read that data, "collection". 99.999% of the data it copies to its datacenters is not "collected".
The NSA copies all your phone calls and emails and web browsing and so on. ALL. It only reads some of them. Each of these articles is always written about one particular narrow NSA program, ignoring other very-similar programs, in order to minimize the apparent spying going on. For this article, the 151M records being talked about are one tiny program to query telephone call records generated by US phone companies. This is like 0.01% of what the NSA pays attention to. The NSA is already intercepting the full call anyway! But that's a different program...
But these still need to be intercepted in the first place, because you don't know in advance which of the 0.01% of records are of interest.
Also, all the data is "looked at". Sure, not by a human, but if the algorithmn can flag you as a terrorist and then humans look through the data, what's the difference.
You also seem to be under the impression that they delete the data once they're done. But why would they ever delete that copy of your data unless they need the space for something else? They never will, and that's why they're building a huge datacenter in Utah, to store EVERYTHING INDEFINITELY.
As to your last point, I'll flip the table: if only 0.01% of the records are interesting and only 0.01% of those records lead to any meaningful insight into terrorist activities, why should we continue these programs knowing that they are, on average, 99.999% ineffective?
They do not, and the reason why is interesting.
In free countries, there is an order to things. This order is important.
First there is an event. A person applies for security clearance, there's a robbery, somebody reports a crime, and so on.
Second there is an investigation. Based on the nature of the event reported, facts are gathered to determine whether or not the state needs to intervene. More importantly, the people are identified that need intervention. Based on the investigation, sometimes the state might intervene with force, as in when a SWAT team shows up at your door.
The order is clear, and necessary. Event > data gathering > investigation > people. We start with an event and end up with people who might be criminals. That's because everybody is guilty of something. It's important to limit the state to only go after people where there is a clear, independent prompt for something to happen, ie, an event.
But what if we change it around? What if we collect data all the time? Well then we are no longer limited to having a good and independent reason for taking action. Instead, now we can start with the person and then figure out what they're guilty of until it justifies the action we've already selected. And guess what? Everybody is guilty of something.
All we've done is create a machine where we can identify people we don't like, push a button, and then find reasons to put them in jail or apply force to them in other ways. Free countries cannot continue operating in an environment like that. Because we've made the law do our bidding, there is effectively no rule of law. And people are smart enough to figure that out.
The fact that the infrastructure is in place and rampant abuse has happened in the past make the distinction essentially meaningless.
If someone is going to justify interception they need to justify collection, because we all know it's going to happen unjustly to at least some citizens.
2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-...
http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/n...
I wonder how many people would remove FB if they knew this. I'm one of the people less bothered by internet advertising (I commented to this about 3 days ago re ad-blocking and cookies) and to me it seems amazing people accept this level of intrusion.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
It's a spiritual continuation of the work of the deceased UK artist Muslimgauze who's released 90+ releases so far, and who has dedicated over half his short life to making music to protest the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are still quarterly+ releases of his work 18 years after his death because he left a huge back catalog of unreleased work. At his peak he was making an album a day, and if you gave him something to listen to he'd return you an "improved version" the next day.
Muzlimgauze's intent was to call attention to, and make people read about the Israel-Palestine conflict; I think Vatican Shadow has a similar intention.
My first thought was that 151M call records is not a significant amount considering that we're talking about the population of the United States.
Rough calculations based on some very round numbers is that this would account for between .019 and .033 percent of the adult US population. (~150M call records/year ~= 50-80,000 people, US Adult Population ~ 242,470,800)
Extrapolated, that number is a little concerning. By my estimate, that means between 2 and 3 of every 10K people is under some sort of surveillance.
But then again... apply that to say... San Francisco - population ~900K and you get between 180 and 270 people. Or NYC with 1.7M people and you get between 340 and 510 people.
When data changes my gut reaction is "better or worse reporting until shown otherwise", and "what are they counting?"
Over the years I've realized how powerful and important such information is for peaceful diplomacy, and that the United States has a post-WWII responsibility to maintain that peace.
However, the recent debacle regarding potential political spying has vindicated my earliest fears - that this can be used to subvert the domestic democratic process. Doesn't matter whether the spying did or did not occur (probably both sides are stretching the truth). We're living in an age where it is at least conceivable by a large portion of the country that the NSA's tools were improperly used against US citizens. It's time for a vigorous debate on clear guidelines regarding these powers.