Actually, they used to. Then they wised up and started using couriers. Both worked to the disadvantage of Al Quaida. When they stopped using electronic communications their organization suffered. Then, it was the movements of a courier that gave away Bin Laden.
So, regardless of whether you think it's OK for the NSA to spy on everyone, this push did break down Al Quaida's organization.
Whether it affects cell oriented terrorism (or 'lone wolf' terrorism) is another matter. For example, for the Boston bombers one of them did mention something about terrorism and came on the radar, but the FBI misjudged the threat.
When you have a government throwing billions of dollars into locating you, how exactly are you supposed to hide? Especially since Osama's courrier was only discovered because he was sold out (or tortured out) by his associates. In security you can only be as strong as your weakest link, and when dealing with a global organization you will surely have weak links.
> In security you can only be as strong as your weakest link, and when dealing with a global organization you will surely have weak links.
This is the point that this, bandwagon, article misses completely. They may be judging right, the smart criminals (or terrorists) understand tradecraft and how to avoid using obvious means of detection. However there are always many more low level folks that wil slip up due to lack of competence and lack of experience. When this happens we (non-terrorists) are able to establish a foothold at some, any, level of the organization and start to pick it apart.
To prevent further attacks. The situation re: radicalization has not changed, and will not change until the economic and social situation in Arab countries improves and/or Saudi influence changes/decreases.
Radical Islam is still around, as you can see by their infiltration of various populist movements in the Arab countries.
Monitoring of social media (as someone mentioned elsewhere here) is probably a very cost effective way of keeping tabs of the flow of money and influence of radical groups.
Except that terrorist attacks on the US were rare before this program, before its predecessors, and before the Internet. "Radical Islam" is not a specific threat by any stretch of the imagination. Most Islamic terrorists are fighting in the Middle East, not in America.
Further, this program is not focused on Islamic groups. It is broad, wholesale surveillance. Everyone is being monitored.
Sorry, but the "we are doing this to keep you safe" line is getting pretty old.
Re: Terrorism. Yes, most of the death count is at the homes of terrorism (which perversely gives the greatest hope that it will stop). However, radical Islamic terrorism is exported all over the world.
Re: Why have espionage agencies, and what should be their scope. Yes, this is a good debate but along the lines of "How big should our military be?" I believe the answer is very complex. As a citizen of a country I would hope my country has a military and an intelligence agency. I would hope both are independent of political influence, yet are under the leash of civilian government.
What should the scope of a spy agency be? By the very nature of the business it needs to be secret from the general public (i.e. other nations). Countries have spied on each other through out history because you really want to know what the other fellow is up to, especially if you can do something about it.
Snowden's statements re: spying on China/Russia whatever are not surprising. If you are a US citizen I would hope that you hope your intelligence agencies are keeping an eye on China/Russia, just as a Chinese citizen you would hope the Chinese government is trying to get information about the US.
It's a delicate game that all countries play to varying degrees of success.
Where Snowden has crossed the line is that he was working for the government and then decided to embarrass it re: other countries.
If Snowden had said, look China spies on the US, Russia spies on China, and the US spies on both. I think this is illegal, he would have been an interesting person to follow though a little naive.
From what he has done, I would think, there is a pretty high chance he is on some payroll, probably Chinese. Again, as others have mentioned, his timing and his statements are not that of a person trying to correct a wrong. It really sounds like some one who's a pawn in a diplomatic game.
Don't the people that the terrorists need to recruit use Skype, and GMail, and Facebook? Find the recruiters & PR types that have to be where the people are, and that's one more in you have with a nascent terror cell.
Indeed. If the objection is that people drop off the easy to see communication systems and start having more shielded communications as they radicalize, then the objection carries within itself a description of very pattern that one can use such a internet traffic surveillance program to search for.
A naive version would generate plenty of false positives, but following up on random entries in the list generated would quickly reveal classes of other reasons that people's comms go dark (having children, new job, moving to a new town, major injury or illness, depression, etc.), and one could start filtering using that. Also one might get some use out of looking for clusters of people going dark in various social-connection graphs, and commonalities of what people fitting the comms-going-dark pattern read and say online.
There seems to be two NSAs in the media right now: the extremely competent one that can access your email from a desktop without any oversight or trouble and the bumbling idiots who don't know more about terrorists than reporters.
Or there are different groups within the organization with varying degrees of secrecy, importance and competence. In particular, the mathematicians working on cryptography are probably hidden far away from the regular employees in the organization.
What does that even mean? People usually say this when they want to sound wise but to me it sounds like nonsense cowardly pseudo-intellectualism. So you've determined the truth is "somewhere in the middle" of two vast extremes. How does that contribute to the conversation? It's like playing the "guess what number I'm thinking of" game and the options are between 1 and 1,000,000 and you guess "somewhere in the middle" and proudly walk away. More importantly, it adds to the idea that there is one truth, that the whole thing can be boiled down to any easy and simple truth. This isn't the case, reality is far more complicated than that.
Wow, people are reading so much more into that than I intended.
I only meant that portrayals of the government, particularly on HN lately, sometimes seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them, or a useless bureaucratic morass. I wasn't intending to make a value judgement on anything. I probably shouldn't have used the word 'truth.'
So, if you're a death-dealing junta, you can always soften criticism by advancing a completely contrary lie? Or alternatively, if you want to attack a group of Girl Scouts, make up and tell terrible lies about them.
>seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them
I haven't seen anyone call them a junta, otherwise, it's not without precedent, you know. Hell, the FBI's headquarters still proudly bears the name of its most disgraceful former director (37 years!), who directed every kind of activity we find antithetical to liberty and justice.
So, if you're a death-dealing junta, you can always soften criticism by advancing a completely contrary lie?
Actually, probably yes. Almost always.
But again, Kylekramer was suggesting it seemed odd for these two contradictory portrayals of the NSA to exist. I was just suggesting that there was no real contradiction, because people can tend to resort to extremes to advance their point.
There seems to be no reason in itself to believe that the truth is between two (arguably) suspicious portrayals, and merely splitting the difference won't lead us closer to any truth.
"The fact that one is confronted with an individual who strongly argues that slavery is wrong and another who argues equally strongly that slavery is perfectly legitimate in no way suggests that the truth must be somewhere in the middle."
Politicians think the public service is a literal genie, which will do exactly what they are told (but will screw up if they are given the wrong instructions). From within, everyone has a hammer, and they tell the people above them that every problem looks like a nail.
The NSA can do sigint, and data mining. Every problem requires lots of data, and if they have enough raw data they should be able to predict anything and everything. So the politicians give them more data, and the resources to process it.
I've been noticing this for a long time. Any facet of government is described in this extremely inconsistent way. Think about it, the idiots that can't be trusted to do anything right are the ones in charge of the jack-booted thugs who will ruthlessly come exterminate your family for (abortion|gun ownership|bad religion|scare topic of the second). We can't trust the government to hand out lollipops to children because they will enact UnAmerican(tm) enforcement of socialist conditions on the recipients with an iron fist, that money is better spent on law enforcement and our military heros (you know, the afore-mentioned jack-booted thugs).
Somehow the organizations that align with one's ideologies are painted as efficient do-gooders in a horribly inefficient and bumbling system, while the ones that align with opposing ideologies are capable only of a incompetence at a level usually reserved for high comedy.
I think ultimately it comes from this notion of "the" government. It is easier/lazier to assume that government is a monolithic entity rather than a large organization of people, therefore complex and not at all monolithic. Since people are used to this sort of treatment, it becomes a nice dramatic vehicle for people to tell stories and push agendas, and it is so ingrained, people rarely say "hey wait a minute..."
Just for fun, pay attention and call people out on it sometime. The anti-jackbooted thugs rants and law enforcement needs more money (from the same person) crowd is pretty common in tech - note the switches in perceived competence, and position, and call people out. The mental gymnastics of retaining the position are awesome. Seriously, if there was an olympics of cognitive dissonance, people who like US politics would win the gold every damn time.
" the idiots that can't be trusted to do anything right are the ones in charge of the jack-booted thugs who will ruthlessly come exterminate your family for (abortion|gun ownership|bad religion|scare topic of the second)"
To be fair, the thing you described sounds like they're doing they're jobs, but that they're also idiots, so it actually makes sense to me.
I can relate to the phenomenon you describe (people who can't, for example, decide if they are Libertarian or not). But some populations have worked out a complete, internally consistent alternate reality. Talk radio and Glenn Beck, for example, do not contradict themselves very much.
The jack-booted thugs are "the government", the ones being ordered around by Godless Communist Obama; they are taking away our guns while intentionally giving guns to Mexican gangsters and black panthers, using the IRS, preparing the Peace Corps as a Marxist militia and sending drones to kill Americans just for opposing him. No incompetence, just pure and concentrated tyranny and malice intentionally resulting in the apocalypse, because Obama and his supporters literally hate America and are literally violating the rights of Real Americans and literally preparing to exterminate them.
The ones who should get funded are types who will support us, particularly right-wing groups like Oath Keepers and militias, who won't comply with the Obama agenda and will help us defend ourselves from Obama's tyranny and restore the glory of America as a Christian state, as the founders intended. This isn't "the government," but rather "the people."
Obama and his supporters are winning right now by treachery (a brainy kind of competence) and support from archvillain "elites" like George Soros and almost every college professor, but in the long term they are corrupt and weak; the strength and purity and common sense of Real Americans will win and the cancer will be purged.
"Strength", "purity", "glory", "purged". It's frightening that people frame their thoughts in that way, as that bears remarkable parallels to the beginnings (and vocabulary) of some of the most horrific things in history.
Having worked in several large (public and private) organizations, I always find it amusing when people act like it is somehow inconceivable that an organization could demonstrate both extreme competence in one set of activities and extreme incompetence in a another set of activities whose domains overlap those addressed by the first set.
>The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success and merit will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability.
Secret government agencies don't tend to tell you what they can or can't do. So, even if they have hacked into the bad_guys computer and decrypted the messages instructing people to place the bombs you're not going to hear about it.
In the UK we've had some weird private courts (where NOT EVEN THE ACCUSED KNEW WHAT THEY WERE ACCUSED OF (caps because really come on even I think that's bad)) and in the US I guess the intelligence is passed onto to other agencies who then claim the arrests and other evidence is used for convictions.
I know that NSA and GCHQ have very smart, capable, people working for them. I have no doubt that if GCHQ wanted to get access to my hard drive they'd find it trivially easy to do so. Whether those people are allowed to operate at that kind of level (because of oversight or internal politics or they're just doing different work) is another matter.
How competent do they have to be if they have a feed at the major providers? I don't think they are bumbling idiot; i think they are very good at maximizing their budgets and keeping their budgets safe. That's what bureaucrats do. If they have to spy on all americans to maximize their budgets they will.
I've heard this argument several times and I disagree with it.
Organizations are basically groups of people; it's entirely possible that some people in an organization are more competent than others. There could be extreme differences in the level of competency. Or maybe some people are competent in some areas (e.g. the technical details of surveillance) but lack competence in other areas (e.g. common sense). This could be even the case amongst the key decision-makers of an organization.
I've always found that when large organizations start a large project or begin a radical shift (like pre- to post-9/11 NSA's surveillance program), the goal is every bit as competent and well thought out as any could be, but the implementation is always rushed and rickety.
That's probably what we have here. A very sophisticated surveillance program that siphons data from all the major networks, that also misses 99% of the communications it was designed to catch because that last 20% of implementation isn't worth the expenditure.
The form of the argument depends on the two not meshing. The Snowden leaks provide evidence of the former case. The contradiction between that and the latter case suggests that perhaps the NSA is not being completely forthright with the public about the scope and purpose of its domestic surveillance. It's not that hard of an argument to follow, and given how tight-lipped the executive branch has been so far it's a pretty persuasive one.
That they can access my email from a desktop without any oversight is an example of extreme incompetence. Mandatory Access Control is something the NSA of the 1990's and early 2000's thought important enough to demand and to add to Linux (with their contribution of SELinux).
Has it occurred to you that the NSA's competence in signals intelligence might be used for industrial espionage, with counterterrorist surveillance being a convenient cover story?
There was a time when the CIA was intimately involved with drug traffickers as part of the Contra program. It didn't go to the top and it wasn't deliberate CIA policy, it was just a matter of the CIA building tremendous infrastructure to supply the Contras that led to airfields and weapons ending up being used by the same CIA-supported individuals for drug trafficking. They ended up producing a massive cocaine import industry.
With this level of spying infrastructure and the poor oversight of agents and admins within the NSA, corrupt usage of this technology is effectively inevitable.
That reminds me of a story of someone (I think it was one of the Cambridge Spies) joining MI6 and being faced with a complete shambles of an organisation - they assumed that, given MI6's reputation for deviousness that this was just a front and that once they had been there a while they would be introduced to the real MI6. Of course, that day never came...
What technical organization could you name which didn't have those two aspects?
What about Facebook? I think we could all name things they do which are brilliant, and things that are... not so much. How much worse would it be without the market to discipline them, with official secrecy to cover their every mistake, and limited to the pool of engineers who can pass a security screening?
The picture I get of the NSA is that the poles are just more extreme. Large scale architecture is done by someone like Binney, and then there are thousands who are like Snowden, with marginal academic credentials.
Not only that, but it assumes the bumbling terrorists (the ones using cloud services) would never compromise their more clever counterparts.
Basically, if you can glean information on the clever ones by the exposure offered by the bumbling ones, then this is an obvious indirect way to track the competent ones. Not only that, but it assumes the competent ones are always 100% competent and never make a mistake.
As they say in the SE world, it's a signal. One of many.
An organization with government weight to throw around can get access to a lot of things. That does not imply competence. Both very competent and very incompetent organizations are capable of making a database 'accessible via desktop' and are capable of working without oversight. Your comment makes no sense.
It meshes perfectly with every iffy organisation in history.
They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles, while being from questionable to insanely violent with some unpleasant agenda behind those smiles. Initially deal with a mafia, and it all smiles and pasta. Behind the scenes, its a different story.
So yeah, the NSA and he government are trying to present a Church of England tea and cakes at the afternoon garden party type of image. Of course they are. Meanwhile the people questioning this setup are trying to present an image people need to be worried about. The media then just present these extremes, and the citizens are expected to pick a side. As both sides become increasingly extreme, the issues loses credibility and gets swept aside by the next big news splash. while the relatively few people who actually care eventually disperse wonder what the hell just happened. This is the exact same pattern we see on almost every issue. Where is Occupy now?
This issue's only real relevance is as another example of the broken bond between those who govern and the people. And Im not sure there ever was any such bond. Lets face is, the government is basically the formalization of the rule and maintenance of the powerful over the population. There was a balance, they did used to realism they had to keep us broadly happy, in order to keep their power in place. But I think now, they are so arrogantly confident in their manipulations that they no longer care.
Heh, its like the old saying: No matter who you vote for, the government always get in.
> They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles
But they haven't... They've made it clear that they are a potent force that fights the evil terrorists. No part of the NSA response has been smiles and cakes. They're calling for Snowden's blood and telling America that this is serious stuff.
This article wasn't written for the NSA's benefit, it was written for the average person who might actually believe that terrorists are plotting their next attack on Gmail/Skype/Facebook and thinks the NSA is justified in performing this surveillance.
This implies two options: the NSA really are idiots and don't know this (unlikely), or they are well aware of this but are using terrorism as an excuse to do the surveillance anyway.
To what end? I don't believe the US government or the NSA are saints, but it just seem odd that to think entire agencies' purposes are intentional lies in order to achieve some vague goal that surveilling everyone achieves.
The NSA can competently access your citizen-grade e-mail, that's it. When it comes to real terrorist communication, they are bumbling idiots. They are wasting their time and our money.
How is the Kinect any worse than every phone, tablet, laptop that have cameras and/or mics, which people carry with them 24/7, even to showers? For example, I would be much more embarassed by someone posting the video and voice feed from my phone on the internet than from my living room.
Criminals (I hate to use the word "terrorist" because it has a distracting political bias - we're talking about people doing bad things to other people) are not some sort of hyper-disciplined super spies. They do some pretty dumb things. A while back I met a guy looking to put together a Twitter system designed to combat drug cartels, who, yes, communicated via Twitter. This was several years ago, but still.
The whole reason I'm so upset about what the NSA is doing is because it works, and over time it will work much better than it does today.
This sentence made me bug too. One should not mix up the web and the internet. Google only indexes the web (well, and a part of usenet). Found this: http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/how-much-of... which support the claim in the article.
A shockingly high percentage of the internet is spam or other junk that is never seen. I don't know about .004%, but I don't doubt that Google doesn't index the absolutely huge volumes of crap out there.
Google may index a lot of the spam as relatively useless since it is often found at top levels. If the number is correct what it is probably missing is all of the content that lies in databases, easily accessible, but not necessarily on the front pages of web sites, or found without entering a query of some sort.
It's probably because Google mostly indexes public-accessible text and images. I have a home server with a few TB of Internet-accessible storage, but it's not public. I can say the data is on the Internet, but cannot be indexed as it's not directly accessible. My cloud backup of that storage is on the Internet but it's not public and it's encrypted, so it cannot be indexed (maybe the NSA is crunching my 4096-bit key right now). Based on the infographic agilebyte provided (sibling post), I contribute to ~10TB of data that cannot be indexed by Google - and that's already 5% of the data Google had indexed by 2010!
We all better hope that Bloomberg/Vice is more authoritative on this subject than the intelligence community or else the NON-ZERO number of terrorism cases involving these types of comms just went dark.
Btw, wasn't it UBLs courier who was caught through his cell phone?
That's crap, anyone paying attention knew that modern communications have been compromised by various governments over a decade ago, if not longer. The smart ones never used such unsecured communications in the first place. Nothing Snowden released changes the fact that only stupid people communicate over third party services when they are trying to keep secrets. It would be like the US military issuing unencrypted cell phones to troops on the front-line.
being smart doesn't preclude you from having someone stupid in your ranks. This applies to anyone trying to hide their activities. And im glad you're so sure about the comsec of all terrorist/spies/criminals.. totally separate, stand-alone communications networks, end-to-end encrypted, one-time pads, etc. why do anything at all? why? because its a ludicrous assertion and you know it. This goes to the point of the top comment.
Sure, there are stupid people in their ranks. That's why you have need-to-know rules for those people. If they get caught then only the things they know can be compromised. Such people are easily replaced. Why do you think such things go on forever? It's because the authorities are in a never-ending battle of dealing with underlings that know very little. It's the same principle with police dealing with organized crime or drug cartels. Most of the time the reason they can break up such a group is by getting someone on the inside that can get the info they need.
I don't believe I said that terrorist organizations were building their own "totally separate, stand-alone communications networks, end-to-end encrypted, one-time pads". I said they are most likely not using an unsecured third party service. I fail to understand why people cannot comprehend the idea that a small group of people need not use fancy technology to communicate to each other. They can simply meet.
I don't agree that it's a ludicrous assertion simply because I was arguing against the point of the top comment; that all the world's terrorists have suddenly dropped off easily compromised communications specifically because of Snowden. My assertion is that the top of the chain in the organizations have not used such communications for years and I fail to see how that is ludicrous.
Everything you say is valid. And I'm glad that you specify "top of the chain" as it is less likely than some mope at the bottom.
But that's my point. it is these lower level people, maybe even up to mid level which are the weak links. Analysis and targeting, it's what led folks to UBL in the end.
There is nothing more damaging, in my opinion, than confirming your abilities, or lack thereof, to an adversary. That's why things are classified, there is strength in secrecy.
I guess I should have specified that I meant the smart ones were at the top, I assumed an understanding of this in there somewhere. My bad.
I agree, the weak links are almost always at bottom of the chain. Sometimes you can get a middle guy that's working his way up but that's luck. In the end, these things are done by getting someone to give someone else up in terms of turning or gathering info. So far from what I've read, I see no indication that the programs in discussion would actually have helped in the matters they cover. I'm sure it helps identify some of the lower links of the chain but all that does is point the way to people to use the traditional methods on.
The way I look at it is that the police could put a tap on every phone in the city but I seriously doubt that would help them arrest the local crime boss. It would point the way to find people to lean on to get the information you need to pursue him, but I doubt you'd get real evidence that way. You'd probably have to end up planting bugs to overhear conversations in private homes and businesses. In that case tapping everybody's phone is probably not needed as you could simply ask the cop that's been on the beat for twenty years who they should be looking at as the low-level flunkies and he could probably name ten of them of the top of his head.
I also agree that the leak of such programs most likely harmed national security in some way. As you say, there's a reason to keep things secret. The thing is, for programs like this there is supposed to be oversight and so far it appears that oversight has failed. To me, the biggest issue isn't that the existence of such programs were confirmed, it was that they existed to the extent that they do without apparently any real oversight. If we've lost a bit of security then I'm fine with that if it means our liberties are intact, or in some cases we're now finding about, if it means our liberties are restored.
Stupid terrorists are like stupid bomb makers. A self solving problem. If they didn't use encrypted communication before I can't imagine they will start now.
Even if the higher echelons are better at security the shock troops (disposable) are not always so.
And to reverse what the IRA said the NSA/GCHQ "only have to be lucky once you have to be lucky always" - BP would not have broken tunny if a bored/lazy wireless operator had not broken the rules and screwed up a message.
Just because you don't understand doesn't make it wrong. I agree that dumb terrorists are capable of killing and injuring innocents, in fact I would say the dumb ones are the most dangerous because they are rather difficult to identify beforehand; regardless of spying capabilities our government has.
But none of this has anything to do with my disagreement with the top comment in that all of the world's terrorists suddenly stopped using Verizon to discuss their dastardly plans just because of Snowden.
Apologies, I misread your comment. I've seen a lot of people trot out "well the smart terrorists already knew this" line in defense of these leaks purportedly having harmed national security, that it's proof that these leaks could not have harmed national security.
(which then is a bit ironic to claim that these leaks are not dangerous because terrorists already knew this, but that these leaks are important for civil liberties because apparently Americans did not know this)
First off, I don't necessarily feel apologies is warranted for this discussion.
Yes, I find that defense somewhat questionable in some terms because I do believe the leaks do in fact harm national security. The problem is that it seems that these programs are dangerously close to crossing the line of leading into a surveillance state and that the reason it may have crossed that line is because the people who have the responsibility to reign such things in have apparently failed to do so.
Therefore, yes, national security was harmed but I'm willing to sacrifice that somewhat to make sure our liberties are still intact. I don't feel the need to trade liberties for security if that security is essentially making the populace prisoners to the state for "their own safety".
I also enjoy seeing the contradictions such as you describe. The reports are full of "but" moments that no one seems to be addressing. The media is a big fail on all this.
The smart ones never used such unsecured communications in the first place.
I think the OP's point that it may have sent them off the grid with paranoia is valid. The weird thing is many of these folks have semi-normal lives. They might be using secure communications to talk about blowing something up but they also have their day to day lives of sending totally irrelevant e-mails to friends and family that perhaps were not secured. We already knew the CIA has used intercepted e-mail recipient lists to build social graphs of the fringes of these organizations. Identifying who is 2-3 steps removed from these organizations actually does have value especially to identify funding and support networks.
I'm undecided on the issue, however it seems completely logical to me that terrorists wouldn't use venues that are being monitored by the NSA. Would that still be the case if those lines of communications weren't monitored at all? In addition, if the NSA started monitoring whatever the terrorists use at present, would they continue to use it? Doubtful.
I don't think this article comes to the clever conclusion that it thinks it does.
I think the next leak will show they've redefined 'terrorist' and that a terrorist these days is anyone who does anything the US doesn't like and is vaguely related ultimately back to national security. So, I think already we've established that any drug crimes (even low-level ones) are national security threats. Bitcoin miners will soon be terrorists I think. People encrypting email are highly suspect and probably a national security threat. People running free web hosting will soon be terrorists. It directly serves the interests of the government for everyone to be considered a terrorist. It's probably one of the biggest loopholes our country's seen.
Exactly the point I was going to make. That's how Petraeus was communicating with his mistress, and they found her by cross referencing checkins at all the hotels revealed by IP addresses that were at the other end of the conversation.
The author is focusing on the wrong issue. He is mostly concerned with whether or not the surveillance is effective.
If effectiveness were the only consideration, he would have a weak argument. Even if most terrorists are smart enough to avoid Gmail, Skype and cellular networks, it might still make sense to eavesdrop in these places.
After all, smart criminals sometimes get caught because they make dumb mistakes. For example, my understanding is that Sabu (a member of Anonymous) was caught because he forgot to use Tor in one instance when he logged into a social network.
But we can argue all day about whether or not PRISM is effective. I think the author would have a stronger argument if he focused on the fact that the program is unconstitutional, regardless of how well it works.
Why limit your argument to one or the other? Some people will think PRISM is effective, others may not. Some people may think the privacy issues are important, others may not. But surely they balance each other out - if the NSA cannot catch any terrorists, then it doesn't matter if the privacy issues are not important, PRISM is clearly a waste of money, case over. And presumably somewhere along the line it could go the other way - if 50% of letters contain anthrax, would you not be happy sacrificing some privacy to let the NSA to screen them for you? Or a wider example, what if there was evidence that without PRISM, terrorists would be killing 1000s of Americans on a weekly basis - would we all be so against it still?
You're welcome to make any argument about PRISM. But if your goal is to discredit the program and ensure others like it won't be established, the legal argument is stronger and more direct: Government programs can't violate constitutional rights, regardless of their efficacy. Period.
Why dance around your opponent when you know where to place a powerful right-hook?
Clearly the right-hook hasn't knocked them out yet - which is perhaps why even the strongest boxers supplement their fist power with at least a little foot movement.
Also, if terrorists really do avoid Gmail, Skype and cell phones because of surveillance than the surveillance has a definitive effect of making the terrorists less effective because they are using inferior communication.
Article seems to kind of miss the point. While the NSA's STATED reasons for these programs is to "fight terror" that doesn't necessarily mean it is their actual reason. If they want to spy on activists and everyday citizens this seems like a pretty solid strategy.
Depends on your end goal. If the goal is actually what's stated, I.e. stopping terrorists, there is no value.
If the actual goal is to produce a massive database of citizen activities for later (ab)use, then there is a huge benefit for the government.
Since all of the evidence seems to point to scenario #2 (since there is no good reason that tracking those eeeevul turrists) requires all this information from innocent people, I think we can safely assume their excuse is a shitty facade.
One man's "activist" is another man's terrorist, basically. Activists are liable to convert to extremism with the right set of triggers. This can therefore qualify as "counterterrorism", because if they access all your communications they may be able to flag you as a potential clinic bomber, etc.
Also, I seriously doubt the assertion in the headline that terrorists simply don't use common online services, and even if this were true, the ripples that can be correlated from their associates who do use these services would still be of interest to law enforcement.
According to another whistleblower, it also means people who control budgets and power
"...including senior Congressional leaders, the former White House Press Secretary, high-ranking military generals, the entire Supreme Court, and even then-Senator from Illinois and future President, Barack Obama."
Well apparently both Al-Qaeda and some CIA employees uses public email accounts like Gmail to communicate in secret.[0]
The method is a little bit different than normally email. They used Gmail as a electronic dropbox by saving messages in the draft folder, but now that NSA have direct access that are probably picking up that also. So be careful not to make a draft with text like "the drunk monkey sings at midnight", or the NSA may come knocking :)
For the definition of 'terrorist' that includes well-informed, trained cadres, and not the definition of 'terrorist' that includes rampant amateurs, the kind that get stopped before they do anything serious. The author has a fairly naive view of what a terrorist is
The NSA isn't focused exclusively on terrorism. It has ~40k employees who work on a wide range of areas, drug cartels, human trafficking, money laundering, counter intelligence, espionage, and hundreds of others. It's mighty presumptuous for people not "in the know" to speak on what is and isn't valuable to the NSA's missions.
As for terrorists, if someone were a skilled terrorist their entire life, they probably wouldn't live digital traces within the US. But this isn't the case; people become terrorists, and some of those become skilled terrorists. There is immense value in having intelligence on people before they become a terrorist and needless to say, before they hone their tradecraft and drop from the grid.
Yea, I think what some people are worried about though, are the (a) possibility of many false positives and (b) the collateral damage with "common crimes". In the latter I mean: how far into the realm of everyday rule-breaking will these agencies go? Will you get a ticket mailed to you because you rolled through a stop sign and your license plate was captured? Will you get police officer (with warrant) at your door to search your premises because you purchased a book about marijuana growing?
>.. may only be good for gathering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists
Yes, of course. And 99% of them are in stupidest, lowest-ranking part. As for the smartest and highest-ranking ones, there is undercover agents and informators.
Some clearly terrorist elements have used all three of the services in the headline. It still doesn't make NSA's domestic surveillance, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, right.
I've really nothing more to say about the NSA at this point. I'd just like to give a shout out to Vice for being one of the most vital and relevant news organizations of the modern era. Whenever people say journalism is dead, I just point them to a Vice article. They make me proud to have a journo background.
Indeed, but more than that, they cover some amazing material and actually put people in places and shed light on some really uncomfortable topics. They manage to make news as informative as it is enthralling. I can't imagine a better way to cover news.
As someone whose mother was born and raised in Karachi and who visits the city with some frequency, my jaw dropped when I saw their reporting from there. The local media won't even go near half the people they managed to get interviews from. They were a bit jumpy but their brio more makes up for it. That and the Mexican Mormon drug war were the real kickers.
Well to be a bit more accurate, the media will interview them but with kid gloves. The last time a TV station aired someone obliquely criticizing the MQM political party (as Vice did), all the cars in their parking lot got torched and the windows got shot out of their studio while they were broadcasting live.
Vice has done some really good work, but this isn't an example of it. This article doesn't cover anything more than the Bloomberg one it uses as a source.
Well, I'll have to disagree in full with the points the author is trying to make.
"A recent Bloomberg piece points to a 2012 report on terrorism which found that most serious terrorists steer clear of the most obvious platforms—major cell networks, Google, Skype, Facebook, etc."
The 2012 report cited wasn't some senate oversight committee, a DIRNSA (director NSA) report, or a truly credible intelligence source. It was from the Dutch Intelligence agency, an agency focused on leftist activity vs. right-wing Islamic terrorism.
"In 2010, Google estimated that it had indexed just 0.004% of the internet—meaning the vast majority of the web is open for surreptitious message-sending business. Terrorists simply aren't dumb enough to discuss their secret plans over Skype or to email each other confidential information on Gmail."
Do you think that it's feasible for terrorists to use couriers/tradecraft to transmit all messages to their group members around the world? If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it? Let's say you answer that you'll just use steganography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography) to hide the message. How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down?
Armchair intelligence analysis is the same as armchair anything -- you have no basis for what you're talking about except a bunch of redacted reports, news articles, and spy movies. Intelligence analysis is a very straightforward thing, though, which a lot of folks working in tech would be really good at, but articles like this are the equivalent of commenting on the merits of using PHP having never written a line of code in your life.
I understand peoples' frustration with what (if true) would be an egregious slight on the public trust. But, is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little. Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community.
Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community.
Could you give an opinion as to whether or not the PRISM slides were made by a BAH contractor or by an NSA employee? So far we have seen very little in the way of corroboration from Snowden -- I'm inclined to believe that he may have made off with assets from BAH's internal network instead: four slides which look terrible if that's all you know of them.
That's an interesting thought. BAH employees spend on a lot of time on what they call "the beach" while they're waiting for a switch to a new job. A lot of that time is spent on reading/writing training materials. You wouldn't be working with classified documents though, typically.
It looked to me more like something some Air Force captain who was looking for a promotion put together. There are all sorts of junk slides floating around like that, which don't necessarily reflect active programs...just proposals to show that the people writing them can think outside the box and whatnot.
For obvious reasons, I can't comment on classified things, but I was very knowledgable about things and I had never even heard of PRISM when all this stuff came out. Take that with a grain of salt, though, since there are plenty of compartmented programs.
> Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community.
I can't speak for everyone, and I've certainly been doing a lot of Devil's Advocating on behalf of the NSA and the government, but I think people would feel better if there were much more transparency into things like:
* Why a given collection technique is useful.
* Why that technique can't be replaced by other existing techniques.
* Why good policy-based protections cannot be reasonably lifted into the law.
* And especially whether there are good technical protections in place to protect these masses of data being collected to ensure they are used only for valid investigations. I.e. there is undoubtedly a policy saying not to mis-use the data; is there any superior technical controls also in place?
Because while I'm sure that the vast majority of the 4+ million of you all are upstanding people just trying to do the right thing, we've seen in the past month the damage that just 1 "disgruntled worker" can do...
While getting into specifics of collection shouldn't necessarily be public discussion, as it renders those collections effectively useless (think the old school mafia knowing what they can and can not say to be rendered into evidence in court), a framework is definitely a necessity. There is already a framework in place, but it doesn't address what the public concerns are. We should publicly answer questions like:
-Is it okay to collect intelligence on foreign governments?
-Is it okay to collect on allies?
-What are the boundary markers for the government abusing its power?
-Can we amend the constitution to reflect privacy concerns of the 21st century?
-How many civilian casualties are the threshold for being a tolerable amount in America?
Just questions to get you thinking about things. I feel like the majority of people's indignant outrage, if not translated into action in fixing a perceived problem, is passively accepting the status quo.
The author seems to ignore two things: real anonymity is hard and people (even terrorists) are lazy. So, if the criminal elements slip up once, it might be saved within Prism, Tempora or one of the other programs we need yet to discover. If it is saved there, algorithms or analysts can detect it and work backwards - or just overlook it because of the sheer amount of data.
I do not condone Prism or any other secret surveillance program in any way, please let me make that clear. But to say "haha, the NSA are idiots, terrorists surely are smarter" is an equally moronic (and dangerous) assumption. I think one of the problems is, that those projects have to be secret to work. Nobody outside a small circle knows if and when they helped to disrupt a plan that would have cost lives. On the other hand, the lack of a democratic oversight makes it easy for people involved to misuse their powers.
I think, Snowden and all the other whistleblowers are like the symptoms of a disease. If you see the symptoms, the self-healing of the body doesn't work anymore. and with self -healing i don't mean the cover up of stuff, but the clean up of something that went clearly wrong or too far. I think, every democracy as a whole should embrace whistleblowers and use the information to act on, not fight them.
Just curious: Does communication need to be done instantly? Couldn't people communicate via something like packages sent via mail or persons traveling between countries?
I always assumed that when these groups communicated, the information was not time-sensitive. Plans can take months or years to discuss or finalize.
Also: Wouldn't it be feasible for communication to be done on a private/custom platform connected to the internet, yet located in a country where the US has no control?
That's if you assume terrorism is all about executing a suicide car bomb. There are other aspects like the funding, the discussion about group goals, the acquiring of arms, the distribution of resources, etc.
It could be feasible, but now your custom platform is a lighting rod drawing all of the attention of intelligence resources into cracking it.
There is possible evidence that a crime may have been committed (by both the US Government and Snowden). It is for the legal system to decide if people are guilty. You are putting this evidence within a narrative which is interesting, but irrelevant in deciding who is guilty and who is innocent (which I hope the courts will be allowed to decide).
You have to admit that legal grey areas have been allowed to emerge in recent years that are dangerous? If you want to be given the benefit of the doubt, the legal basis should be open and clear.
I don't think the situations you put forward and the conclusions you are drawing from them necessarily follow.
In the first example, how often is it that you must communicate with someone far away in an hour without any prior coordination? Assuming that is the case, then wouldn't the NSA also have to intercept, decode, translate and mobilise within less than an hour? In that case using those systems may be fine. Or perhaps use those systems to point your cousin to cryptocat or redphone. Anyway I think there is a difference between what might be used for long term planning vs. the immediate communication scenario you outline.
In the second example, another poster on a different thread worded it much better than I will here, but I don't think it has to be 4+ million people working towards a conspiracy. I think intelligence work is hard. I think people with the best of intentions will always look for a way to make their job easier. Each individual incremental step may seem small and inconsequential, but over time it leads to a massive overreach. One person then looked up to see the forest instead of the trees and felt it was wrong and spoke out. In that scenario it isn't 4+ million in on a conspiracy or one person wanting to see the world burn it's what I think is typical human nature in large organizations over time.
As an insider you have a different view from others. I wonder though if you do not see the forest for the trees. Does knowing more than others about the inner workings of the NSA make the effects of the NSA actions on the country less apparent to you?
But, is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little.
Those aren't the only two choices for what is happening here. There is also the idea of a government bureaucracy without a credible internal counter balance to its desire for more and more information. I have to wonder if an analyst there ever got promoted for saying something is wrong. That the something in question goes against the People's right to privacy.
With the CIA, FBI, and other organizations I've worked for, you'd probably be right. The NSA is the only meritocracy that I've encountered in government work, although I only have a total of 10 years of experience so I haven't "seen it all" per se.
When you work for the NSA, you can take a managerial route or a technical route for promotion. This means that you can achieve the highest rank (GS/GG-15) being either a manager or just being good at your job.
I once wrote a report which countered reports that other people had written, resulting in some angry phone calls demanding me to redact my correct report so as to not make them look bad. I responded with a no to all of them, and when circumstances proved the validity of my analysis, I was rewarded for standing my ground and not punished.
All in all, the people working there on the whole cared about doing what is right, is what I found. In that light, NSA stood in stark contrast to the FBI culture of major bureaucracy and lazy/inefficient practices.
As an example of the culture, I learned to program at NSA because when I said I was interested they said, "Here's a book and some servers.".
IMO, that's the tragedy of this whole situation. We're blaming the civil servants for policy decisions.
I think the core problem here is that the scope of what the NSA does was blown out dramatically, because the nature of the threat shifted from the Soviet bloc to various extremist groups that may or may not have state affiliation.
So we went from a world where we were spying on the Russians (which nobody has an issue with) to a world where we're spying on people with extremist beliefs, who could live next door.
We expanded the scope, depth and breadth of the mission, but there isn't a level of oversight present that is trustworthy. When we ask the question "Who watches the watchers?", the answer is both nebulous (in that you never get a straight answer to any question from anyone) and antithetical (secret courts, blurred and cozy executive/judicial lines) to the way that the American system works otherwise.
Thanks for your perspective. The point I'd like addressed, is that everyone could be working to do what was right, but still build infrastructure that is dangerous to democracy.
If the infrastructure is put in place to monitor everyone's communications and infer all their contacts, it may be used for good at the present time, but it will be the perfect tool to quash dissent in the future.
People die and the world changes with time. Misguided people have taken positions of extreme power in the USA within the memory of current generations. How can you be sure that won't happen again, that another Nixon won't misuse the tools of state authority, this time so vastly powerful that the misuse would be guaranteed to produce some sort of blackmail information on half the population?
Ok you touched my heart, lookup Breno Salgado in your prism(I'm brazilian so no need to hold yourself!) and you can have all my data and conversations, lets get to know each other better! Kisses, <3
> is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little.
In this case, I trust the disgruntled worker more than the people still getting a salary.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
One point I have to disagree with is the complexity of transmission. We are not talking about a cousin that is not expecting to hear from me for another decade. Likely, there are in person communications and some pre-agreed upon methods. One immediate "throw-away" method could be just doing a point-to-point WebRTC chat. Google prototyped a super simplistic method using AppEngine and some public STUN servers to get the link going. Security by obscurity, but that's what the article is claiming.
Also, there are a bunch of other services that offer communications. Even something like Twilio/Tropo/Plivo can be leveraged using their WebRTC clients and calling inside their own networks (as opposed to hitting PSTN). A FreeSWITCH server will get you similar capabilities between extensions and you can spin one up in minutes on a VPS and then just as quickly throw it away.
Sure, but look at the complexity of just describing this stuff. But I think the issue even with a good system is that even the pros will screw up all the time. Sending every message via throwaway accounts, from a different location, with a different computer, from a non-fixed radius from your residence is technically possible but humanly unsustainable and logistically expensive. I could only imagine how exhausting it would be. Most humans with this level of competence simply have better things to do than be terrorists.
The argument in the article is that you will only catch the stupid ones with this big drag net, it is reasonable to make the reverse argument - it is very important to catch the stupid ones because if stupid people can easily coordinate terrorist activities, anyone can.
This is just patently not true. If you read up how Osama bin Laden practiced tradecraft, you'd know that he did not even so much have a land line at his compound when they offed him, definitely not a cell phone. If you'd like a credible news source for these sorts of things, read Stratfor. They're relatively cheap as far as these things go. Terrorists do not use gmail, skype or cell phones.
You are right that armchair BS isn't going to get us anywhere here. To that end, your comment is ironic because do know that the real terrorists know they're being snooped on.
While I can't comment on the UBL part, I will say that the stratfor part made me pee a little in my pants. I don't mean this to come off as condescending, but stratfor is one of the biggest jokes by people who do real intelligence. It's like saying "if you want to know what's really going on in the world and what's really important, watch Fox News.".
You know... it's a joke, but it's still less of a joke than everything else out there, kind of like Hacker News or /r/programming. ;-) The people who actually do "real" anything tend to think that everything beneath them is a joke.
I'm guessing all Commerical OSINT is. I read http://kgsnightwatch.com nightly and used to read the DHS OSINT open source report daily. (Both are available to the general public.) I want to be informed as a citizen and as a human being living on this planet where the events of the world do effect us.
On top of those we have Twitter, which is really kind of one sided when you're limited to English language views of the middle east conflicts and social struggles.
yes and that seriously hampered him in exerting direct control over al qaeda.
before he was found there where numerous articles showing that Bin Laden was losing control and getting hacked off about affiliates doing their own thing.
The word conspiracy brings a lot along with it. I don't think the government is conspiring to "take away people's freedoms" any more than the terrorists "hate our freedom". They're both straw men.
What I do think is that the government is doing what it always tends to do in these situations: kill flies with bazookas. Why? Because they can. They don't answer to anyone, so they can exert a ridiculous amount of resources and infiltration that no other body could feasibly get away with.
"If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it?"
That doesn't sound like a situation a reasonably intelligent terrorist cell would find itself in. They know they will have to communicate secretly. The need to exchange messages doesn't just pop up like that.
Why would they not just open a new free web hosting account once every few weeks with some obscure web hoster and upload any messages encrypted and disguised as image files?
To notify each other of new messages they could use "hey, what are you up to tonight?" style SMS messages. They could do all of that using anonymous prepaid phones and use a public VPN paid via bitcoin.
What bazillion is trying to get across is that people are people. They tend towards that which is most convenient and least painful. Sure, HN could come up with the worlds most secure, least detectable, most effective means of communicating with anyone, anywhere at anytime. It will also be a PITA for people to use. Hence, when your mind is occupied with blowing people up or kidnapping someone or hijacking a plane or stealing state secrets, you end up not spending a lot of time on the aforementioned Perfect Comms Path.. you use gmail and pgp the contents (maybe)
I don't think what you say is true for serious terrorists. If they were that naive, they would be easy targets.
It seems more likely that the NSA isn't just hunting hardcore terrorist cells. Terrorists don't act in a vacuum. They are the extreme end of political/religious movements, so if they keep tabs on the radical movements from which terrorists eventually emerge, that could help narrow down the circle of those who are then tracked in a much more intensive and expensive way.
> "If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it?"
Where does this arbitrary 1 hour deadline come from?
> "How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down?"
In person, long before it's needed. Even better, if cousin A isn't reachable for some reason, cousins B, C, D, E and F are perfectly fine substitutes.
> "is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms"
No conspiracy needed, just everybody looking out for themselves within the framework of rationalizations they bought into. And when it comes to that, 4 million are nothing. Even 4 billion are nothing.
"The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist." -- Erich Fromm
Were tens of millions of Germans really involved in a conspiracy to industrially murder millions? Of course. They just weren't aware of it. All their individual little steps and reactions were somewhat rational, the bigger picture decidedly wasn't. Do you really honestly believe worse things than this haven't happened to more and better people than 4 million NSA peeps? Such hybris in itself is a ticking bomb.
> "Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community."
How can working with people who aren't Snowden tell you that he wants to see the world burn? Or do you think that follows from your proposed dichotomy between "it's either all a deliberate conspiracy by everyone involved in it, even as janitor or secretary - or Snowden is a disgruntled worker"?
> "Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community."
I did, but I just saw you criticizing specific claims of Snowden, probably correctly so -- that doesn't mean "the media get it wrong" wholesale, it just refutes those claims. The only other thing that seemed relevant was this: Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. That can't be what you meant, so did I miss it, do I have to go further back, or was that bit about Snowden actually all?
To whomever it concerns: Pressing a downward arrow is easy, if you can, also put your words where your clicky clicky is. Lest you want me to think you're pouting or something.
What happened during WWII is a blue-print for what society should not be (like an anti-pattern). Lets not restrain ourselves from talking about it based on some stupid Internet meme, especially when talking about relevant topics, such as identification, surveillance, discrimination, privacy and all kinds of human rights that should be fundamental for everybody, alien or domestic.
Personally I think @PavlovsCat raised some interesting points. I also hate arguments by authority; if anything @bazillion's experience as an NSA employee and a CIA contractor raises red flags when thinking about his agenda or bias (although kudos for his transparency on the issue - isn't transparency great btw? ;))
What really bothers me about @bazillion's opinion is the logical fallacies he conjures:
1) establishing a protocol for communication is done by meeting with your peers well in advance, which does happen; trying to make this problem harder by restricting what you can do is setting up a straw-man
2) you can still use phone lines, you just need to buy a bunch of prepaid cards, tossing them away after usage, preferably with short messages without going into specifics, accompanied by small chat on weather and baseball games - you can make it so that conversations are indistinguishable from normal conversations or from noise, without using stenography and while still bearing important information. You can also receive incoming calls this way. You buy them in bulk, you communicate the numbers to your peers and you toss them away after each incoming call, with your peers being left to try out the next number in sequence.
3) on the Internet you can use strong encryption, in combination with whatever email accounts you want, including Gmail accounts, you just can't use the web interface. Route that access through easily changeable anonymous proxies placed in countries were the U.S. doesn't have much influence and voilà - you can be immune of NSA's spying and surveillance on the Internet, as they'll have nothing - no words, no name, no IP address. They can't even prevent the message going through, as you can ask for confirmation in your encrypted message and have that confirmation delivered encrypted as well.
Surveillance on the Internet only affects the uneducated, which happen to be normal people living normal lives.
4) the world is not divided between evil men that conspire and maniacs that want to watch the world burn - Snowden's intentions and motives are actually irrelevant. And what NSA apologists don't seem to get is that NSA's intentions or motives are also irrelevant. What really matters is the final result ... people are not safer due to NSA's actions, while these actions are a disaster for privacy and for human rights in general. In fact terrorism prevention only fixes a symptom of the larger problem and one has to wonder why the threat of international terrorism is much smaller in Europe.
> Were tens of millions of Germans really involved in a conspiracy to industrially murder millions? Of course. They just weren't aware of it.
This isn't true. There has been quite a bit of research and when Germans say they didn't know anything they were just making excuses after they lost the war.
I picked this out because it seemed to be quite central to your argument.
It wasn't really, it was just one example of a lot I could have given.
This isn't true. There has been quite a bit of research and when Germans say they didn't know anything they were just making excuses after they lost the war.
"not knowing anything" and "not being aware of mactual details of the industrialized killing they were part of" are worlds part.
I have recently listened to an interview with Hannah Arendt, who was against the Nazis from the get go, and frustrated with her friends of whom many just went along to get along. I don't remember the exact year right now, but between 1940 and 1942 she and her partner first heard of the death camps.
Yes, the concentration camps were known, the persecution of Jews was obviously known, and when it wasn't, it was willfully ignored because the antisemitism got lapped right up. The industrialized killing and the scale of it, that was not known, and certainly not to everybody. At least not to Hannah Arendt, and she did pay attention.
[see caveat at end of paragraph] Then there is the fact that the murdering of mentally disabled children 1942 was an internal secret even to the Nazis, not to mention the public. They only dared to do it under the cover of war. [I'll try to find a source for this -- but I remember it from school ages ago, so if I don't find one, you can ignore this paragraph, it's not like my post rests on it. Edit: maybe I misremembered it: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005200 though maybe not completely -- "Conservative estimates suggest that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war years." (note "during the war years", it's not like they wouldn't have loved to kill them on day one)]
But hey, I'm all ears. If you can point me to research refuting that I would be very keen to hear it, being German and not into Nazis and all that.
Given that the death camps didn't start in earnest until the very end of 1941 I would hope Hannah Arendt hadn't heard of it until then.
I coincidentally just finished a WWII history the other day, Max Hastings's "Inferno - The World at War - 1939-1945" and though he only briefed discussed the Holocaust in general, it was fairly clear that there was at least some level of awareness that something very sinister was going on.
What you can say is that Germany was not alone in its treatment of the Jews. The Nazis provided the impetus for the Final Solution but found many willing co-conspirators, not just the Germans.
My understanding of the events was that Germans were aware of the Jews being discriminated and forced out of their society, but weren't aware of these death traps until it was too late.
In fact, many Jews unknowingly got into trains having an Auschwitz concentration camp as destination, thinking that they'll be deported to other countries or that they'll get sent to work camps. A significant proportion of them came forth by themselves, wilful to leave Germany. Many of them also assumed that the destination is some kind of horrible, but survivable re-education/work camp. The propaganda at that time included commercials picturing these camps to the German public as being camps were Jews are used for the betterment of German society, while living in humane conditions, unworthy of the rodents they were considered to be.
This whole thing started and evolved in small steps. Auschwitz happened after they realised that deporting them is not feasible, due to the process taking too long due to other countries being reluctant to open their borders to such a big minority and killing them in bulk by gas was cheaper than using bullets.
If anything the German public probably viewed murders and awkward things happening in plain sight as being acts taken for security reasons against disobeying Jews or against Jews that refuse to leave their society.
Eventually the German public must have been aware of the genocide, but you also have to consider that (1) they could have been too frightened of the monster they created, with problematic individuals being in jeopardy of being classified as Jews or Jew-lovers and (2) as a species, we tend to not recognize our mistakes after enough sacrifices have been made, so it's easier to think that you are part of a revolution for the good of human kind, then it is to think of yourself as a freaking murderer that believed the words of maniacs.
Well, I don't think there was anything special with the Germans in this regard. E.g. if you were somehow able to reproduce the same conditions starting from hundreds of years beforehand, ravenous propaganda the decades leading up to it, start off the genocide in the U.S. at the same timeframe, I'm not sure Americans would have fared any better. We weren't exactly nice to the Native Americans, for example.
But that wasn't really the question either. Of course the people should have known what was going on, especially by 1943. Even the example of "working the Jews to death" is horrific enough, and what did they really think was happening over on the Eastern Front?
Which was roughly 10 years too late. By 1934, Hitler had all the laws he needed to do whatever. Also consider that the Nazis are a example of hybris and self-destruction, I wouldn't expect anything to follow that pattern again, other than in the third world. Steady does it.
On the other hand, Dr. Bronner, the magic soap guy, emigrated 1929 to the US, changed his name from Heilbronner to Bronner, and urged his parents to follow him (you can find that on his wikipedia page). So at least when it came to Antisemitism, it was possible to sense it. But on the other hand, there were even Jews who fell for Hitler at first, and were sorely disappointed when their home country turned against them.
So while Hitler never fooled some, he did fool many enough for long enough. And compared today, those times were utterly low tech. Even the propaganda was just brutish. Which is why I like to use them as an example, they were still clearly recognizable for what they were; it got so much murkier after that. You could say it metastasized and got debugged.
While I'm not sure the article is a useful addition to this debate, there are prominent people from the intelligence community who disagree with you about the utility and legality of the surveillance programs now in place:
> Of course, jihadists are also active on the surface Web, where they use social media and various applications, such as email, Internet telephony and chat programmes, to name a few. They use these means of communication to actively spread jihadist ideas, recruit new jihadists and proactively distribute and promote propaganda material. Jihadists that are active on the surface Web are afraid of being detected, which is why there is no (or very limited) dynamic interaction, as opposed to what is observed on core forums.
> "Your talk on YouTube can be monitored by the Kuffar. Many a brother were arrested based on intelligence from YouTube, they will not hesitate to handover your IP details to Kuffar. Therefore, it is NOT the place you should be social networking."
The brochure in general seems light on science, and I'm not sure it "drew a convincing picture", although I admit I didn't read the whole thing.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadSo, regardless of whether you think it's OK for the NSA to spy on everyone, this push did break down Al Quaida's organization.
Whether it affects cell oriented terrorism (or 'lone wolf' terrorism) is another matter. For example, for the Boston bombers one of them did mention something about terrorism and came on the radar, but the FBI misjudged the threat.
This is the point that this, bandwagon, article misses completely. They may be judging right, the smart criminals (or terrorists) understand tradecraft and how to avoid using obvious means of detection. However there are always many more low level folks that wil slip up due to lack of competence and lack of experience. When this happens we (non-terrorists) are able to establish a foothold at some, any, level of the organization and start to pick it apart.
OK, so why are we continuing it? We broke Al Qaeda, we killed their leaders. We got revenge for the September 11th attacks.
To put it another way, who is our enemy now?
Radical Islam is still around, as you can see by their infiltration of various populist movements in the Arab countries.
Monitoring of social media (as someone mentioned elsewhere here) is probably a very cost effective way of keeping tabs of the flow of money and influence of radical groups.
Further, this program is not focused on Islamic groups. It is broad, wholesale surveillance. Everyone is being monitored.
Sorry, but the "we are doing this to keep you safe" line is getting pretty old.
Re: Why have espionage agencies, and what should be their scope. Yes, this is a good debate but along the lines of "How big should our military be?" I believe the answer is very complex. As a citizen of a country I would hope my country has a military and an intelligence agency. I would hope both are independent of political influence, yet are under the leash of civilian government.
What should the scope of a spy agency be? By the very nature of the business it needs to be secret from the general public (i.e. other nations). Countries have spied on each other through out history because you really want to know what the other fellow is up to, especially if you can do something about it.
Snowden's statements re: spying on China/Russia whatever are not surprising. If you are a US citizen I would hope that you hope your intelligence agencies are keeping an eye on China/Russia, just as a Chinese citizen you would hope the Chinese government is trying to get information about the US.
It's a delicate game that all countries play to varying degrees of success.
Where Snowden has crossed the line is that he was working for the government and then decided to embarrass it re: other countries.
If Snowden had said, look China spies on the US, Russia spies on China, and the US spies on both. I think this is illegal, he would have been an interesting person to follow though a little naive.
From what he has done, I would think, there is a pretty high chance he is on some payroll, probably Chinese. Again, as others have mentioned, his timing and his statements are not that of a person trying to correct a wrong. It really sounds like some one who's a pawn in a diplomatic game.
In the emperor's with no clothes story would you suggest the boy should be hanged?
A naive version would generate plenty of false positives, but following up on random entries in the list generated would quickly reveal classes of other reasons that people's comms go dark (having children, new job, moving to a new town, major injury or illness, depression, etc.), and one could start filtering using that. Also one might get some use out of looking for clusters of people going dark in various social-connection graphs, and commonalities of what people fitting the comms-going-dark pattern read and say online.
It doesn't mesh.
I only meant that portrayals of the government, particularly on HN lately, sometimes seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them, or a useless bureaucratic morass. I wasn't intending to make a value judgement on anything. I probably shouldn't have used the word 'truth.'
>seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them
I haven't seen anyone call them a junta, otherwise, it's not without precedent, you know. Hell, the FBI's headquarters still proudly bears the name of its most disgraceful former director (37 years!), who directed every kind of activity we find antithetical to liberty and justice.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
and especially, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Post-COINTELPRO_ope...
Actually, probably yes. Almost always.
But again, Kylekramer was suggesting it seemed odd for these two contradictory portrayals of the NSA to exist. I was just suggesting that there was no real contradiction, because people can tend to resort to extremes to advance their point.
There seems to be no reason in itself to believe that the truth is between two (arguably) suspicious portrayals, and merely splitting the difference won't lead us closer to any truth.
"The fact that one is confronted with an individual who strongly argues that slavery is wrong and another who argues equally strongly that slavery is perfectly legitimate in no way suggests that the truth must be somewhere in the middle."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
The NSA can do sigint, and data mining. Every problem requires lots of data, and if they have enough raw data they should be able to predict anything and everything. So the politicians give them more data, and the resources to process it.
Somehow the organizations that align with one's ideologies are painted as efficient do-gooders in a horribly inefficient and bumbling system, while the ones that align with opposing ideologies are capable only of a incompetence at a level usually reserved for high comedy.
I think ultimately it comes from this notion of "the" government. It is easier/lazier to assume that government is a monolithic entity rather than a large organization of people, therefore complex and not at all monolithic. Since people are used to this sort of treatment, it becomes a nice dramatic vehicle for people to tell stories and push agendas, and it is so ingrained, people rarely say "hey wait a minute..."
Just for fun, pay attention and call people out on it sometime. The anti-jackbooted thugs rants and law enforcement needs more money (from the same person) crowd is pretty common in tech - note the switches in perceived competence, and position, and call people out. The mental gymnastics of retaining the position are awesome. Seriously, if there was an olympics of cognitive dissonance, people who like US politics would win the gold every damn time.
To be fair, the thing you described sounds like they're doing they're jobs, but that they're also idiots, so it actually makes sense to me.
The jack-booted thugs are "the government", the ones being ordered around by Godless Communist Obama; they are taking away our guns while intentionally giving guns to Mexican gangsters and black panthers, using the IRS, preparing the Peace Corps as a Marxist militia and sending drones to kill Americans just for opposing him. No incompetence, just pure and concentrated tyranny and malice intentionally resulting in the apocalypse, because Obama and his supporters literally hate America and are literally violating the rights of Real Americans and literally preparing to exterminate them.
The ones who should get funded are types who will support us, particularly right-wing groups like Oath Keepers and militias, who won't comply with the Obama agenda and will help us defend ourselves from Obama's tyranny and restore the glory of America as a Christian state, as the founders intended. This isn't "the government," but rather "the people."
Obama and his supporters are winning right now by treachery (a brainy kind of competence) and support from archvillain "elites" like George Soros and almost every college professor, but in the long term they are corrupt and weak; the strength and purity and common sense of Real Americans will win and the cancer will be purged.
It's a complete picture.
IME, that's the norm in large organizations.
>The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success and merit will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability.
The organization acts like a completely incompetent being, despite all interations with it being competently handled.
In the UK we've had some weird private courts (where NOT EVEN THE ACCUSED KNEW WHAT THEY WERE ACCUSED OF (caps because really come on even I think that's bad)) and in the US I guess the intelligence is passed onto to other agencies who then claim the arrests and other evidence is used for convictions.
I know that NSA and GCHQ have very smart, capable, people working for them. I have no doubt that if GCHQ wanted to get access to my hard drive they'd find it trivially easy to do so. Whether those people are allowed to operate at that kind of level (because of oversight or internal politics or they're just doing different work) is another matter.
Organizations are basically groups of people; it's entirely possible that some people in an organization are more competent than others. There could be extreme differences in the level of competency. Or maybe some people are competent in some areas (e.g. the technical details of surveillance) but lack competence in other areas (e.g. common sense). This could be even the case amongst the key decision-makers of an organization.
That's probably what we have here. A very sophisticated surveillance program that siphons data from all the major networks, that also misses 99% of the communications it was designed to catch because that last 20% of implementation isn't worth the expenditure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy
With this level of spying infrastructure and the poor oversight of agents and admins within the NSA, corrupt usage of this technology is effectively inevitable.
I am sure both organizations would admit that the scaling up just pre ww2 wasn't handled very well.
Ironically Moscow center thought at one point that the famous 5 where some super devious plan by the security services.
What about Facebook? I think we could all name things they do which are brilliant, and things that are... not so much. How much worse would it be without the market to discipline them, with official secrecy to cover their every mistake, and limited to the pool of engineers who can pass a security screening?
The picture I get of the NSA is that the poles are just more extreme. Large scale architecture is done by someone like Binney, and then there are thousands who are like Snowden, with marginal academic credentials.
Basically, if you can glean information on the clever ones by the exposure offered by the bumbling ones, then this is an obvious indirect way to track the competent ones. Not only that, but it assumes the competent ones are always 100% competent and never make a mistake.
As they say in the SE world, it's a signal. One of many.
They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles, while being from questionable to insanely violent with some unpleasant agenda behind those smiles. Initially deal with a mafia, and it all smiles and pasta. Behind the scenes, its a different story.
So yeah, the NSA and he government are trying to present a Church of England tea and cakes at the afternoon garden party type of image. Of course they are. Meanwhile the people questioning this setup are trying to present an image people need to be worried about. The media then just present these extremes, and the citizens are expected to pick a side. As both sides become increasingly extreme, the issues loses credibility and gets swept aside by the next big news splash. while the relatively few people who actually care eventually disperse wonder what the hell just happened. This is the exact same pattern we see on almost every issue. Where is Occupy now?
This issue's only real relevance is as another example of the broken bond between those who govern and the people. And Im not sure there ever was any such bond. Lets face is, the government is basically the formalization of the rule and maintenance of the powerful over the population. There was a balance, they did used to realism they had to keep us broadly happy, in order to keep their power in place. But I think now, they are so arrogantly confident in their manipulations that they no longer care.
Heh, its like the old saying: No matter who you vote for, the government always get in.
But they haven't... They've made it clear that they are a potent force that fights the evil terrorists. No part of the NSA response has been smiles and cakes. They're calling for Snowden's blood and telling America that this is serious stuff.
Of course they are. He called the cops on their illegal party.
This implies two options: the NSA really are idiots and don't know this (unlikely), or they are well aware of this but are using terrorism as an excuse to do the surveillance anyway.
The NSA can competently access your citizen-grade e-mail, that's it. When it comes to real terrorist communication, they are bumbling idiots. They are wasting their time and our money.
The whole reason I'm so upset about what the NSA is doing is because it works, and over time it will work much better than it does today.
I don't believe this. Does anyone else?
We all better hope that Bloomberg/Vice is more authoritative on this subject than the intelligence community or else the NON-ZERO number of terrorism cases involving these types of comms just went dark.
Btw, wasn't it UBLs courier who was caught through his cell phone?
I don't believe I said that terrorist organizations were building their own "totally separate, stand-alone communications networks, end-to-end encrypted, one-time pads". I said they are most likely not using an unsecured third party service. I fail to understand why people cannot comprehend the idea that a small group of people need not use fancy technology to communicate to each other. They can simply meet.
I don't agree that it's a ludicrous assertion simply because I was arguing against the point of the top comment; that all the world's terrorists have suddenly dropped off easily compromised communications specifically because of Snowden. My assertion is that the top of the chain in the organizations have not used such communications for years and I fail to see how that is ludicrous.
But that's my point. it is these lower level people, maybe even up to mid level which are the weak links. Analysis and targeting, it's what led folks to UBL in the end.
There is nothing more damaging, in my opinion, than confirming your abilities, or lack thereof, to an adversary. That's why things are classified, there is strength in secrecy.
I agree, the weak links are almost always at bottom of the chain. Sometimes you can get a middle guy that's working his way up but that's luck. In the end, these things are done by getting someone to give someone else up in terms of turning or gathering info. So far from what I've read, I see no indication that the programs in discussion would actually have helped in the matters they cover. I'm sure it helps identify some of the lower links of the chain but all that does is point the way to people to use the traditional methods on.
The way I look at it is that the police could put a tap on every phone in the city but I seriously doubt that would help them arrest the local crime boss. It would point the way to find people to lean on to get the information you need to pursue him, but I doubt you'd get real evidence that way. You'd probably have to end up planting bugs to overhear conversations in private homes and businesses. In that case tapping everybody's phone is probably not needed as you could simply ask the cop that's been on the beat for twenty years who they should be looking at as the low-level flunkies and he could probably name ten of them of the top of his head.
I also agree that the leak of such programs most likely harmed national security in some way. As you say, there's a reason to keep things secret. The thing is, for programs like this there is supposed to be oversight and so far it appears that oversight has failed. To me, the biggest issue isn't that the existence of such programs were confirmed, it was that they existed to the extent that they do without apparently any real oversight. If we've lost a bit of security then I'm fine with that if it means our liberties are intact, or in some cases we're now finding about, if it means our liberties are restored.
I don't understand why people always trot this argument out. The dumb terrorists are capable of killing and injuring innocents also.
And to reverse what the IRA said the NSA/GCHQ "only have to be lucky once you have to be lucky always" - BP would not have broken tunny if a bored/lazy wireless operator had not broken the rules and screwed up a message.
But none of this has anything to do with my disagreement with the top comment in that all of the world's terrorists suddenly stopped using Verizon to discuss their dastardly plans just because of Snowden.
(which then is a bit ironic to claim that these leaks are not dangerous because terrorists already knew this, but that these leaks are important for civil liberties because apparently Americans did not know this)
Yes, I find that defense somewhat questionable in some terms because I do believe the leaks do in fact harm national security. The problem is that it seems that these programs are dangerously close to crossing the line of leading into a surveillance state and that the reason it may have crossed that line is because the people who have the responsibility to reign such things in have apparently failed to do so.
Therefore, yes, national security was harmed but I'm willing to sacrifice that somewhat to make sure our liberties are still intact. I don't feel the need to trade liberties for security if that security is essentially making the populace prisoners to the state for "their own safety".
I also enjoy seeing the contradictions such as you describe. The reports are full of "but" moments that no one seems to be addressing. The media is a big fail on all this.
I think the OP's point that it may have sent them off the grid with paranoia is valid. The weird thing is many of these folks have semi-normal lives. They might be using secure communications to talk about blowing something up but they also have their day to day lives of sending totally irrelevant e-mails to friends and family that perhaps were not secured. We already knew the CIA has used intercepted e-mail recipient lists to build social graphs of the fringes of these organizations. Identifying who is 2-3 steps removed from these organizations actually does have value especially to identify funding and support networks.
I don't think this article comes to the clever conclusion that it thinks it does.
If effectiveness were the only consideration, he would have a weak argument. Even if most terrorists are smart enough to avoid Gmail, Skype and cellular networks, it might still make sense to eavesdrop in these places.
After all, smart criminals sometimes get caught because they make dumb mistakes. For example, my understanding is that Sabu (a member of Anonymous) was caught because he forgot to use Tor in one instance when he logged into a social network.
But we can argue all day about whether or not PRISM is effective. I think the author would have a stronger argument if he focused on the fact that the program is unconstitutional, regardless of how well it works.
Why dance around your opponent when you know where to place a powerful right-hook?
If the actual goal is to produce a massive database of citizen activities for later (ab)use, then there is a huge benefit for the government.
Since all of the evidence seems to point to scenario #2 (since there is no good reason that tracking those eeeevul turrists) requires all this information from innocent people, I think we can safely assume their excuse is a shitty facade.
Also, I seriously doubt the assertion in the headline that terrorists simply don't use common online services, and even if this were true, the ripples that can be correlated from their associates who do use these services would still be of interest to law enforcement.
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/06/24/bfp-report-whistl...
The method is a little bit different than normally email. They used Gmail as a electronic dropbox by saving messages in the draft folder, but now that NSA have direct access that are probably picking up that also. So be careful not to make a draft with text like "the drunk monkey sings at midnight", or the NSA may come knocking :)
0: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/11/12...
As for terrorists, if someone were a skilled terrorist their entire life, they probably wouldn't live digital traces within the US. But this isn't the case; people become terrorists, and some of those become skilled terrorists. There is immense value in having intelligence on people before they become a terrorist and needless to say, before they hone their tradecraft and drop from the grid.
Yes, of course. And 99% of them are in stupidest, lowest-ranking part. As for the smartest and highest-ranking ones, there is undercover agents and informators.
I just find the whole situation quite disappointing.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
"A recent Bloomberg piece points to a 2012 report on terrorism which found that most serious terrorists steer clear of the most obvious platforms—major cell networks, Google, Skype, Facebook, etc."
The 2012 report cited wasn't some senate oversight committee, a DIRNSA (director NSA) report, or a truly credible intelligence source. It was from the Dutch Intelligence agency, an agency focused on leftist activity vs. right-wing Islamic terrorism.
"In 2010, Google estimated that it had indexed just 0.004% of the internet—meaning the vast majority of the web is open for surreptitious message-sending business. Terrorists simply aren't dumb enough to discuss their secret plans over Skype or to email each other confidential information on Gmail."
Do you think that it's feasible for terrorists to use couriers/tradecraft to transmit all messages to their group members around the world? If I told you right now to get a message to your cousin in Connecticut within an hour without using Skype/email/phone or anything of the other means listed, could you do it? Let's say you answer that you'll just use steganography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography) to hide the message. How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down?
Armchair intelligence analysis is the same as armchair anything -- you have no basis for what you're talking about except a bunch of redacted reports, news articles, and spy movies. Intelligence analysis is a very straightforward thing, though, which a lot of folks working in tech would be really good at, but articles like this are the equivalent of commenting on the merits of using PHP having never written a line of code in your life.
I understand peoples' frustration with what (if true) would be an egregious slight on the public trust. But, is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little. Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community.
Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community.
It looked to me more like something some Air Force captain who was looking for a promotion put together. There are all sorts of junk slides floating around like that, which don't necessarily reflect active programs...just proposals to show that the people writing them can think outside the box and whatnot.
For obvious reasons, I can't comment on classified things, but I was very knowledgable about things and I had never even heard of PRISM when all this stuff came out. Take that with a grain of salt, though, since there are plenty of compartmented programs.
I can't speak for everyone, and I've certainly been doing a lot of Devil's Advocating on behalf of the NSA and the government, but I think people would feel better if there were much more transparency into things like:
* Why a given collection technique is useful.
* Why that technique can't be replaced by other existing techniques.
* Why good policy-based protections cannot be reasonably lifted into the law.
* And especially whether there are good technical protections in place to protect these masses of data being collected to ensure they are used only for valid investigations. I.e. there is undoubtedly a policy saying not to mis-use the data; is there any superior technical controls also in place?
Because while I'm sure that the vast majority of the 4+ million of you all are upstanding people just trying to do the right thing, we've seen in the past month the damage that just 1 "disgruntled worker" can do...
-Is it okay to collect intelligence on foreign governments? -Is it okay to collect on allies? -What are the boundary markers for the government abusing its power? -Can we amend the constitution to reflect privacy concerns of the 21st century? -How many civilian casualties are the threshold for being a tolerable amount in America?
Just questions to get you thinking about things. I feel like the majority of people's indignant outrage, if not translated into action in fixing a perceived problem, is passively accepting the status quo.
The author seems to ignore two things: real anonymity is hard and people (even terrorists) are lazy. So, if the criminal elements slip up once, it might be saved within Prism, Tempora or one of the other programs we need yet to discover. If it is saved there, algorithms or analysts can detect it and work backwards - or just overlook it because of the sheer amount of data.
I do not condone Prism or any other secret surveillance program in any way, please let me make that clear. But to say "haha, the NSA are idiots, terrorists surely are smarter" is an equally moronic (and dangerous) assumption. I think one of the problems is, that those projects have to be secret to work. Nobody outside a small circle knows if and when they helped to disrupt a plan that would have cost lives. On the other hand, the lack of a democratic oversight makes it easy for people involved to misuse their powers.
I think, Snowden and all the other whistleblowers are like the symptoms of a disease. If you see the symptoms, the self-healing of the body doesn't work anymore. and with self -healing i don't mean the cover up of stuff, but the clean up of something that went clearly wrong or too far. I think, every democracy as a whole should embrace whistleblowers and use the information to act on, not fight them.
I always assumed that when these groups communicated, the information was not time-sensitive. Plans can take months or years to discuss or finalize.
Also: Wouldn't it be feasible for communication to be done on a private/custom platform connected to the internet, yet located in a country where the US has no control?
It could be feasible, but now your custom platform is a lighting rod drawing all of the attention of intelligence resources into cracking it.
Osama bin laden ran the largest terrorism network in the world that way for years so... Yes.
Also mail can get just about anywhere in the world in a few days so speed is hardly a problem.
You have to admit that legal grey areas have been allowed to emerge in recent years that are dangerous? If you want to be given the benefit of the doubt, the legal basis should be open and clear.
In the first example, how often is it that you must communicate with someone far away in an hour without any prior coordination? Assuming that is the case, then wouldn't the NSA also have to intercept, decode, translate and mobilise within less than an hour? In that case using those systems may be fine. Or perhaps use those systems to point your cousin to cryptocat or redphone. Anyway I think there is a difference between what might be used for long term planning vs. the immediate communication scenario you outline.
In the second example, another poster on a different thread worded it much better than I will here, but I don't think it has to be 4+ million people working towards a conspiracy. I think intelligence work is hard. I think people with the best of intentions will always look for a way to make their job easier. Each individual incremental step may seem small and inconsequential, but over time it leads to a massive overreach. One person then looked up to see the forest instead of the trees and felt it was wrong and spoke out. In that scenario it isn't 4+ million in on a conspiracy or one person wanting to see the world burn it's what I think is typical human nature in large organizations over time.
But, is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms, or that a disgruntled worker wanted to watch the world burn a little.
Those aren't the only two choices for what is happening here. There is also the idea of a government bureaucracy without a credible internal counter balance to its desire for more and more information. I have to wonder if an analyst there ever got promoted for saying something is wrong. That the something in question goes against the People's right to privacy.
When you work for the NSA, you can take a managerial route or a technical route for promotion. This means that you can achieve the highest rank (GS/GG-15) being either a manager or just being good at your job.
I once wrote a report which countered reports that other people had written, resulting in some angry phone calls demanding me to redact my correct report so as to not make them look bad. I responded with a no to all of them, and when circumstances proved the validity of my analysis, I was rewarded for standing my ground and not punished.
All in all, the people working there on the whole cared about doing what is right, is what I found. In that light, NSA stood in stark contrast to the FBI culture of major bureaucracy and lazy/inefficient practices.
As an example of the culture, I learned to program at NSA because when I said I was interested they said, "Here's a book and some servers.".
I think the core problem here is that the scope of what the NSA does was blown out dramatically, because the nature of the threat shifted from the Soviet bloc to various extremist groups that may or may not have state affiliation.
So we went from a world where we were spying on the Russians (which nobody has an issue with) to a world where we're spying on people with extremist beliefs, who could live next door.
We expanded the scope, depth and breadth of the mission, but there isn't a level of oversight present that is trustworthy. When we ask the question "Who watches the watchers?", the answer is both nebulous (in that you never get a straight answer to any question from anyone) and antithetical (secret courts, blurred and cozy executive/judicial lines) to the way that the American system works otherwise.
I used to think that was true, but witness the reaction here on HN to the very idea that the NSA might still by spying on China or Medvedev.
If the infrastructure is put in place to monitor everyone's communications and infer all their contacts, it may be used for good at the present time, but it will be the perfect tool to quash dissent in the future.
People die and the world changes with time. Misguided people have taken positions of extreme power in the USA within the memory of current generations. How can you be sure that won't happen again, that another Nixon won't misuse the tools of state authority, this time so vastly powerful that the misuse would be guaranteed to produce some sort of blackmail information on half the population?
In this case, I trust the disgruntled worker more than the people still getting a salary.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
Also, there are a bunch of other services that offer communications. Even something like Twilio/Tropo/Plivo can be leveraged using their WebRTC clients and calling inside their own networks (as opposed to hitting PSTN). A FreeSWITCH server will get you similar capabilities between extensions and you can spin one up in minutes on a VPS and then just as quickly throw it away.
You are right that armchair BS isn't going to get us anywhere here. To that end, your comment is ironic because do know that the real terrorists know they're being snooped on.
before he was found there where numerous articles showing that Bin Laden was losing control and getting hacked off about affiliates doing their own thing.
Why would you even bring this up when raw PGP et al. are so much simpler? Just share your public keys and you're good to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exch... etc.
What I do think is that the government is doing what it always tends to do in these situations: kill flies with bazookas. Why? Because they can. They don't answer to anyone, so they can exert a ridiculous amount of resources and infiltration that no other body could feasibly get away with.
No evil man thinks they're doing evil.
All I'm saying is that if there was a significantly flawed system, I didn't see it and I was pretty deep. Take that how you want.
That doesn't sound like a situation a reasonably intelligent terrorist cell would find itself in. They know they will have to communicate secretly. The need to exchange messages doesn't just pop up like that.
Why would they not just open a new free web hosting account once every few weeks with some obscure web hoster and upload any messages encrypted and disguised as image files?
To notify each other of new messages they could use "hey, what are you up to tonight?" style SMS messages. They could do all of that using anonymous prepaid phones and use a public VPN paid via bitcoin.
It seems more likely that the NSA isn't just hunting hardcore terrorist cells. Terrorists don't act in a vacuum. They are the extreme end of political/religious movements, so if they keep tabs on the radical movements from which terrorists eventually emerge, that could help narrow down the circle of those who are then tracked in a much more intensive and expensive way.
It's easy if you already have access to or can collect on and analyze metadata from as many sources as possible. Then it's easy(ish)
Without it.. where do you start?
Where does this arbitrary 1 hour deadline come from?
> "How are you going to communicate to your cousin where to look for the message and how to break it down?"
In person, long before it's needed. Even better, if cousin A isn't reachable for some reason, cousins B, C, D, E and F are perfectly fine substitutes.
> "is it more likely that the 4+ million security clearance holders are in on some large conspiracy to take away our freedoms"
No conspiracy needed, just everybody looking out for themselves within the framework of rationalizations they bought into. And when it comes to that, 4 million are nothing. Even 4 billion are nothing.
"The ordinary man with extraordinary power is the chief danger for mankind - not the fiend or the sadist." -- Erich Fromm
Were tens of millions of Germans really involved in a conspiracy to industrially murder millions? Of course. They just weren't aware of it. All their individual little steps and reactions were somewhat rational, the bigger picture decidedly wasn't. Do you really honestly believe worse things than this haven't happened to more and better people than 4 million NSA peeps? Such hybris in itself is a ticking bomb.
> "Having worked in every facet of the NSA as a linguist/intelligence analyst/programmer/many other things, and CIA contractor for a year, I tend to think the latter, and I'm very vocal about my thoughts on the intelligence community."
How can working with people who aren't Snowden tell you that he wants to see the world burn? Or do you think that follows from your proposed dichotomy between "it's either all a deliberate conspiracy by everyone involved in it, even as janitor or secretary - or Snowden is a disgruntled worker"?
> "Read my previous comments if you want to see my thoughts on how the media has been getting it wrong, and what the deal is from the perspective of someone who worked in this community."
I did, but I just saw you criticizing specific claims of Snowden, probably correctly so -- that doesn't mean "the media get it wrong" wholesale, it just refutes those claims. The only other thing that seemed relevant was this: Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. That can't be what you meant, so did I miss it, do I have to go further back, or was that bit about Snowden actually all?
Personally I think @PavlovsCat raised some interesting points. I also hate arguments by authority; if anything @bazillion's experience as an NSA employee and a CIA contractor raises red flags when thinking about his agenda or bias (although kudos for his transparency on the issue - isn't transparency great btw? ;))
What really bothers me about @bazillion's opinion is the logical fallacies he conjures:
1) establishing a protocol for communication is done by meeting with your peers well in advance, which does happen; trying to make this problem harder by restricting what you can do is setting up a straw-man
2) you can still use phone lines, you just need to buy a bunch of prepaid cards, tossing them away after usage, preferably with short messages without going into specifics, accompanied by small chat on weather and baseball games - you can make it so that conversations are indistinguishable from normal conversations or from noise, without using stenography and while still bearing important information. You can also receive incoming calls this way. You buy them in bulk, you communicate the numbers to your peers and you toss them away after each incoming call, with your peers being left to try out the next number in sequence.
3) on the Internet you can use strong encryption, in combination with whatever email accounts you want, including Gmail accounts, you just can't use the web interface. Route that access through easily changeable anonymous proxies placed in countries were the U.S. doesn't have much influence and voilà - you can be immune of NSA's spying and surveillance on the Internet, as they'll have nothing - no words, no name, no IP address. They can't even prevent the message going through, as you can ask for confirmation in your encrypted message and have that confirmation delivered encrypted as well.
Surveillance on the Internet only affects the uneducated, which happen to be normal people living normal lives.
4) the world is not divided between evil men that conspire and maniacs that want to watch the world burn - Snowden's intentions and motives are actually irrelevant. And what NSA apologists don't seem to get is that NSA's intentions or motives are also irrelevant. What really matters is the final result ... people are not safer due to NSA's actions, while these actions are a disaster for privacy and for human rights in general. In fact terrorism prevention only fixes a symptom of the larger problem and one has to wonder why the threat of international terrorism is much smaller in Europe.
This isn't true. There has been quite a bit of research and when Germans say they didn't know anything they were just making excuses after they lost the war.
I picked this out because it seemed to be quite central to your argument.
This isn't true. There has been quite a bit of research and when Germans say they didn't know anything they were just making excuses after they lost the war.
"not knowing anything" and "not being aware of mactual details of the industrialized killing they were part of" are worlds part.
I have recently listened to an interview with Hannah Arendt, who was against the Nazis from the get go, and frustrated with her friends of whom many just went along to get along. I don't remember the exact year right now, but between 1940 and 1942 she and her partner first heard of the death camps.
Yes, the concentration camps were known, the persecution of Jews was obviously known, and when it wasn't, it was willfully ignored because the antisemitism got lapped right up. The industrialized killing and the scale of it, that was not known, and certainly not to everybody. At least not to Hannah Arendt, and she did pay attention.
[see caveat at end of paragraph] Then there is the fact that the murdering of mentally disabled children 1942 was an internal secret even to the Nazis, not to mention the public. They only dared to do it under the cover of war. [I'll try to find a source for this -- but I remember it from school ages ago, so if I don't find one, you can ignore this paragraph, it's not like my post rests on it. Edit: maybe I misremembered it: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005200 though maybe not completely -- "Conservative estimates suggest that at least 5,000 physically and mentally disabled German children perished as a result of the child "euthanasia" program during the war years." (note "during the war years", it's not like they wouldn't have loved to kill them on day one)]
But hey, I'm all ears. If you can point me to research refuting that I would be very keen to hear it, being German and not into Nazis and all that.
I coincidentally just finished a WWII history the other day, Max Hastings's "Inferno - The World at War - 1939-1945" and though he only briefed discussed the Holocaust in general, it was fairly clear that there was at least some level of awareness that something very sinister was going on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Holocaus... also has a bit to say, and a link to some books about the very topic.
What you can say is that Germany was not alone in its treatment of the Jews. The Nazis provided the impetus for the Final Solution but found many willing co-conspirators, not just the Germans.
In fact, many Jews unknowingly got into trains having an Auschwitz concentration camp as destination, thinking that they'll be deported to other countries or that they'll get sent to work camps. A significant proportion of them came forth by themselves, wilful to leave Germany. Many of them also assumed that the destination is some kind of horrible, but survivable re-education/work camp. The propaganda at that time included commercials picturing these camps to the German public as being camps were Jews are used for the betterment of German society, while living in humane conditions, unworthy of the rodents they were considered to be.
This whole thing started and evolved in small steps. Auschwitz happened after they realised that deporting them is not feasible, due to the process taking too long due to other countries being reluctant to open their borders to such a big minority and killing them in bulk by gas was cheaper than using bullets.
If anything the German public probably viewed murders and awkward things happening in plain sight as being acts taken for security reasons against disobeying Jews or against Jews that refuse to leave their society.
Eventually the German public must have been aware of the genocide, but you also have to consider that (1) they could have been too frightened of the monster they created, with problematic individuals being in jeopardy of being classified as Jews or Jew-lovers and (2) as a species, we tend to not recognize our mistakes after enough sacrifices have been made, so it's easier to think that you are part of a revolution for the good of human kind, then it is to think of yourself as a freaking murderer that believed the words of maniacs.
But that wasn't really the question either. Of course the people should have known what was going on, especially by 1943. Even the example of "working the Jews to death" is horrific enough, and what did they really think was happening over on the Eastern Front?
Which was roughly 10 years too late. By 1934, Hitler had all the laws he needed to do whatever. Also consider that the Nazis are a example of hybris and self-destruction, I wouldn't expect anything to follow that pattern again, other than in the third world. Steady does it.
On the other hand, Dr. Bronner, the magic soap guy, emigrated 1929 to the US, changed his name from Heilbronner to Bronner, and urged his parents to follow him (you can find that on his wikipedia page). So at least when it came to Antisemitism, it was possible to sense it. But on the other hand, there were even Jews who fell for Hitler at first, and were sorely disappointed when their home country turned against them.
So while Hitler never fooled some, he did fool many enough for long enough. And compared today, those times were utterly low tech. Even the propaganda was just brutish. Which is why I like to use them as an example, they were still clearly recognizable for what they were; it got so much murkier after that. You could say it metastasized and got debugged.
http://freespeechdebate.com/en/media/a-whistleblowers-argume...
> Of course, jihadists are also active on the surface Web, where they use social media and various applications, such as email, Internet telephony and chat programmes, to name a few. They use these means of communication to actively spread jihadist ideas, recruit new jihadists and proactively distribute and promote propaganda material. Jihadists that are active on the surface Web are afraid of being detected, which is why there is no (or very limited) dynamic interaction, as opposed to what is observed on core forums.
> "Your talk on YouTube can be monitored by the Kuffar. Many a brother were arrested based on intelligence from YouTube, they will not hesitate to handover your IP details to Kuffar. Therefore, it is NOT the place you should be social networking."
The brochure in general seems light on science, and I'm not sure it "drew a convincing picture", although I admit I didn't read the whole thing.