Today’s NSA hearing
So far what I’ve heard at the NSA hearing today is pretty straightforward and pretty interesting. The testimony makes the programs sound reasonable. Nor is this information new, although some of the detail is. But we’ve known the general outlines for years, whether people have paid attention or not.
Libertarians, of course, usually have objections to a program like this on general principles even if there are no abuses. The rest of us are more inclined to a cost-benefit analysis: we’ll give up a little to get something we consider worth it. Is this worth it? Well, it depends on whether you believe the testimony or not and how much you trust the methods described to be safe from abuse, and it depends whether you think there are alternative ways to combat terrorism that would be better.
It is somewhat ironic that it may have been the very success of the NSA program that has lulled Americans into a false sense of security that it’s not needed. Do you believe that (as has been testified to today) over 50 terrorist attacks have been thwarted as a result of this program? I do, actually, and although they probably all were not serious some probably were. For the most part, the terrorist attacks we hear about are the ones the government has failed to intercept and prevent, so it’s easy to forget that there may be serious plots that are thwarted by these programs. We have noticed that most of these successful plots seem to be more homegrown or “rogue”; it’s possible that’s no accident, because the NSA program is focused on communications with foreign nationals. So if no foreign national is involved, it is a plot that’s less likely to be discovered this way.
The larger problem with this program and so many others is, of course, trust. People who hated and distrusted Bush and Cheney assumed they were doing nefarious things with the data. But we have learned that under the Obama administration IRS data actually has been grossly misused against Obama’s political enemies, and members of the press have been investigated under the auspices of national security considerations (by the Obama Justice Department in that case, rather than the NSA) with very weak justification. So the distrust is justified, and it infects all programs and all government bureaucracies.
And then there’s Snowden, speaking of trust. We’ve seen only a fraction of the information he dumped on the Guardian, but so far the actual files (or slides, or whatever they are called) that have been published don’t really reveal all that much that was not already known. His most inflammatory and alarming remarks, that make assertions that are new, have been undocumented by anything else, and include explosive statements that he had the authority to wiretap anyone’s phone. Snowden was implying that he could do that if he merely judged it necessary, but the testimony today emphatically contradicts any such assertion, as well as several others he made about his own authority at NSA.
Ever since the Snowden story broke, one of the things I’ve been worried about is one that, for want of a better term, I’ll call the hacker issue. I have doubted whether Snowden really had the authority to do what he said he could do, and wondered whether it is possible for a determined and adept computer geek (Snowden, for example?) to hack the system and get information he/she is not cleared to get. The fact that Snowden was somehow able to get this information off his computer and to take it out of the building on a thumb drive is very, very disconcerting. By that evidence alone, we can conclude that security at the National Security Agency is not all it should be.
“It is somewhat ironic that it may have been the very success of the NSA program that has lulled Americans into a false sense of security that it’s not needed.”
Regarding Snowden, it appears to me that conservatives generally have been taking a wait and see approach as to whether or not he is a whistle blower or a traitor. (Note-he could be both.) People with pretty good information about the NSA program, though, are sure that Snowden is no whistle blower.
I intended to follow up my quote from neo-neocon’s excellent argument with the comment that that is exactly true.
“The larger problem with this program and so many others is, of course, trust.”
Trust the Justice Dept? The IRS? The EPA? The NLRB? DHS? The White House? Congress? The MSM? OFA?
What about the NSA warrants trust?
I am almost certain they are inflating the number of “prevented terrorist attacks” numbers. It’s probably akin to jobs “saved or created” to justify the stimulus. A few of the examples they put out early on were debunked as being prevented by the NSA program. It seems to me that if there were 50 to choose from, the two examples they would use should have a fairly direct connection. http://reason.com/blog/2013/06/10/did-nsas-prism-program-help-foil-2009-ny
And there will be nothing to disprove any of their claims, really. The NSA chief previously perjured himself on the program I would guess mainly because he thought no one would ever have the classified material or the permission to reveal the lie.
There were supposed to be safeguards in the Patriot Act that prevented much of this activity and activity the FBI has engaged in, but the intelligence powers continue to expand without the consent of the governed or their representatives, to say nothing of the objective 4th amendment issues presented.
Congress voted upon powers that they either were not permitted to know the extent of their implementation or explicitly thought they were prohibiting. It’s disturbing from a Republic governance standpoint to say the least, let alone the civil liberties questions.
A couple of awkward sentences there as is typical of my commenting on the run style. Sorry 🙂
Another problem too- if this material were ever used to blackmail someone, the public would likely not hear about it.
Want to know if your political opponent sees a therapist? It’s just a few triangulation figures away…And from there, they could investigate through “other sources” to basically clean the data up. “We interviewed a neighbor who says that Candidate Blutarsky meets with a mental health therapist at least twice a month…”
“We have noticed that most of these successful plots seem to be more homegrown”
We should have prevented the Tsarnaev brothers, but at the same time, we need to respect that American civil liberties protected them, too.
Our enemies parasitically using our Constitutional protections and laws to compete against us is the essence of lawfare.
Less dogmatic libertarians will counter that Muslims should fall under a double standard, like the West Coast Japanese (as opposed to Hawaiian and other-US Japanese) in WW2. That’s a logical position, but it’s not how we’re doing America at this point in our history.
We know how to profile Muslims. Dedicated government engagement against Islamic terrorism stretches back to the first WTC bombing in 1993. Demonstrably, we’ve killed Anwar al-Awlaki and similar like-minded Americans overseas. But we have not reached the point of applying the foreign standard as a double standard in the homeland.
It’s more than a passive absence of a double standard, but a deliberately active policy block against matching knowledge with practice.
So, it’s not that NSA surveillance is ineffective for its stated purpose, but rather it doesn’t work optimally when alone. It seems to work best when coupled with other tools that – at present – we can apply in the foreign sphere but cannot apply for civil liberty reasons in the domestic sphere.
For example, the NSA surveillance program serves to tag possible threats for follow-up investigation. And indeed, the Tsarnaev brothers were tagged, but the failure to prevent their attack occurred in the follow-up investigation due to the higher bar set by the American civil liberties protecting their rights, and our rights.
Note that limiting the ability of martial law to suspend civil liberties in the domestic sphere is actually a recent phenomenon in American history. Extending civil liberties to our enemies in the prosecution of a war is even more recent.
“People who hated and distrusted Bush and Cheney assumed they were doing nefarious things with the data.”
The Democrats line of defense – see Hoyer and Obama – against charges of Obama’s hypocrisy is that the “Bush program” was wholly different in kind than the current program because it was unchecked by FISA courts and Congress.
Note the Democrat emphasis on checks and balances rather than the effect of the surveillance. (I’ll get to that a little later.)
One, if I recall correctly, it was briefed to Congress during the Bush administration.
Two, IIRC, the “Bush program” that was assailed in 2006 was more limited in scope insofar it covered communications with a foreign point. Thus, the Bush admin argued the practice was covered by the President’s wartime legal purview. Other than more-limited reach and the FISA courts, in every other respect, the “Bush program” was not different in kind than the current program.
In any case, the ‘rubber stamp’ of FISA courts has been in place since the 2006 controversy. Any change in the “Bush program” before and after the controversy was bureaucratic, not substantive.
Why does that matter politically? Because Snowden is correct about Obama’s hypocrisy. Although Democrats now defend the NSA surveillance program on the basis of checks and balances, the Democrats protested the “Bush program” *after* the checks and balances were put in place. Their protest through the 2008 presidential election was based on the program’s *effect*, not checks and balances. Yet the Snowden leaks show that the effective reach of the program has expanded under Obama.
Rather than owning their hypocrisy, the Democrats, as usual, are spinning it away using BDS. Why wouldn’t they? It works and the GOP doesn’t call them on it.
“The fact that Snowden was somehow able to get this information off his computer and to take it out of the building on a thumb drive is very, very disconcerting. By that evidence alone, we can conclude that security at the National Security Agency is not all it should be.”
Snowden’s access is normal. He was granted the security clearance as a job requirement. From there, access is controlled by security clearance and need to know, right? Although Snowden may have been low level, that’s not the point. The point is Snowden worked for someone with a high-level need to know. Snowden’s access was his boss’s access.
It’s the same dynamic as the Bradley Manning case. Manning also held a low rank but he worked in a section for a boss with high-level access to classified information. The work load of NSA and Army intelligence sections simply cannot be done if the boss is required to micromanage the access and classified information handling of his every subordinate. If the boss could do the job alone, then he would, but he can’t. Employees – whether soldier or civilian – are hired because one person cannot practically do the job alone.
When I was a soldier, I held the same job as Manning. Despite being young, lower enlisted and only possessing a HS degree, I too had access to a high level of classified information that extended echelons above my pay grade.
Why? Because my boss and his boss and their bosses needed access to that classified information to do their jobs. And my boss needed me to do his job, so I had access, too.
A security clearance, and the laws attached to it, only works as a practical deterrent as far as respect for its punishment for violating infosec or opsec. Snowden bypassed the deterrent by running.
If Snowden wants to be a dogmatic libertarian folk hero, fine. He can be a dogmatic libertarian folk hero who earns martyr status by being prosecuted.
holmes: “There were supposed to be safeguards in the Patriot Act that prevented much of this activity and activity the FBI has engaged in, but the intelligence powers continue to expand without the consent of the governed or their representatives, to say nothing of the objective 4th amendment issues presented.”
A slide down a slippery slope can be arrested. Setting an arbitrary limit can be done by policy. But there’s also relevant precedent – specifically in this case, the precedent set during the Bush administration.
If Obama has been worse than Bush about expanding the effective reach of the program, then that also means Bush was better than Obama about limiting the effective reach of the program.
The quantified usage under the Bush administration is set in stone as a matter of historic record that can’t be changed. Even if Bush wanted to expand the surveillance program, he can’t change his record because he can never be president again.
So if Bush’s record shows he struck a better balance than Obama with the same program, then draw a line based on Bush’s precedent, and expressly hold Obama to the limiting extent of Bush’s usage.
Eric:
You completely misunderstand my point about the thumb drive.
Whatever Snowden’s access (and we do not know whether he exceeded it or not), that is not the point I’m making when I mention the thumb drive. Whatever his access, there were supposed to be safeguards against his (a) putting the info on a thumb drive; and (b) leaving the facility with it.
That he was able to do that is a clear security violation of a very basic kind. Manning was able to do the same thing (take the information out with him) and supposedly, more safeguards were placed around that process as a result of Manning’s illegal activities. Obviously, they are inadequate.
That is my point.
It’s not just about trust it’s about control. Control of our personal data that can be used to determine our movements, our associates, our possessions, our interests & beliefs, our future action. How can we still be considered free citizens when so much of our personal lives are available for scrutiny (and may be used against us) by an unknown number of unknown government persons for unknown reasons?
“If Snowden wants to be a dogmatic libertarian folk hero, fine. He can be a dogmatic libertarian folk hero who earns martyr status by being prosecuted.”
Fair enough, but I’m still glad that I now know what I’ve learned as a result of his actions. I still see him as (at worst) a Gollum-like character: he might be loathsome and despicable but he will have played an important role if something good – – or at least better- – comes out of all this. Whether Snowden gets prosecuted, goes to prison, or worse is not really relevant to the fact that we’re better off knowing than not, especially since we now know that we may have a government that hasn’t been worthy of our trust
I personally don’t oppose the theory of the program; it’s kind of like the govt looking through my mail and seeing from whom I’m getting mail without actuallyopening it. I trusted Bush/Cheney administration to do this, and until now I trusted the Obama Administration to do so, too. I no longer do.
Now, I have no doubt that Obama did not directly order this to be done, but this is a referent power issue (“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”). See Salena Zito’s insightful essay on Obama’s referent power:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/05/19/obamas_incredible_referent_power_118468.html
Obama can only demonize the opposition for so long with out it having a referent effect. Now caught abusing the privilege, I would discipline this administration just the way I would discipline a teenager abusing a driving privilege; no more car—no more surveillance.
One further comment on this entire scandalgate. I am amazed that none in the media have picked up on what I consider to be a very revealing and important point.
The lying and obfuscation coming from the administration to mask everything from the IRS scandal to the surveillance scandal is like the local news tape of an arrested perpetrator covering his/her face to hide from the camera. The message such action carries in both cases is that they knew that they were doing wrong and abusing privilege.
If the left truly believes that conservatives are evil and that Progressivism must win at any cost, then where’s the shame? One is doing what one must do to defeat the evil conservative “Reich.”
I suspect that they don’t really beleive this (except, perhaps for the far left fringe), but they need the cover to “morally” justify a win-at-all-costs strategy. They inherently know they are wrong and dishonorable in doing so.
Good post, Eric.
One additional point that few seem to realize is that our security people share info with security people of other countries. Tipping off a foreign country to potential threats in those countries can prevent cells from sending their ops to us.
Also the Bush was worse argument is disgusting. Bush’s administration had to start from scratch in trying to identify possible terrorists and their connections, and they had to build working partners abroad. The idea that the originators of the Patriot Act and other programs might never be tweaked or amended is simply stupid. No one can possibly know how many aspects of our policies had to take into account the sensitivities of other countries.
For Snowden not to know the propaganda advantage he was giving to the Chinese is a sign of me, me, me provincialism.
Neo, I agree completely that all our security agencies need to do a better job of limiting what can be stolen from our computers, and maybe they will even find a way to identify the Mannings and Snowdens. Our PC president certainly doesn’t help with the latter.
Expat,
“For Snowden not to know the propaganda advantage he was giving to the Chinese is a sign of me, me, me provincialism.”
But isn’t it most often true that those with the most narrow vision see themselves as the most perspicacious? They simply don’t know what they don’t know; just look at virtually any teenager (including ourselves when we were that age).
I must be having a senior moment when I read that the Bush program was not restrained by FISA courts, because I am certain that I remember that it was.
I listened to part of the hearing this morning with Inglis and that other guy who they referred to as “General”. I was not hearing the same program that Snowden described. I heard rhetoric that sounded a lot like the program we knew about under Bush, a program that was targeted to international calls; not a program that was mining data on millions of citizens. Which is accurate?
Some Wag commented in a wrap-up that when you send a letter through the USPS the addressee is available for anyone to see–so why get excited about the government keeping a list of who you call and email? Well, I don’t expect the government to keep a record of everyone I send snail mail to either.
I see that NYC Police Commissioner Kelly is objecting, strongly to this program. Kelly has a lot of credibility, and I find it significant that he finds it objectionable. I hope to learn more detail about his problems with it.
Neo,
True, I’m assuming Snowden’s access was derived from his section, like Manning’s access, rather than a hack, although I imagine hacking the NSA from the inside the system is easier than breaking through firewalls from outside.
The issue of access within the practical context of the job at least partially addresses the how. Deadlines are deadlines, the workload is the workload, and the workday is the workday. Internal infosec measures cannot be so onerous as to prevent efficiency. I don’t know the office practices where Snowden worked, of course, but I wouldn’t be surprised if thumb drives were a normal tool in the computer-based workplace, though likely they normally were kept in safes.
Especially if there was a special encryption on the thumb drives, Snowden may have simply stolen an office thumb drive rather than use a personal one. If that’s what happened, we can speculate on the daily inventory policy of NSA classified safes or the laxity of his supervisors in counting their thumb drives.
We can also speculate about the end of day employee departure procedures, but I guess they don’t do strip searches.
As far as the effect of the Bradley Manning incident on the NSA, why should we expect NSA bureaucrats to react to a failure in a different government agency – the Army, overseas – with a comprehensive overhaul of NSA practices? Manning was only a lowly enlisted soldier reacting to an unpopular war, after all, not ‘elite’ NSA protecting the homeland. The Army may be grunts who still think in terms of muskets and horses, but the *NSA* is modern and sophisticated. Moreover, why change what ain’t broke? Manning didn’t happen to the NSA … until Snowden did.
It’s the inertia of bureaucracy and the pattern of common practices. Did FEMA react better to Hurricane Sandy than it did to Hurricane Katrina? No. Closer related to the Manning/Snowden incidents, has the government been able to stop anonymous leaks to the press? No.
Based on my experience as a nominal unit security officer, people quickly adopt a blasé and cavalier attitude about classified information handling. It becomes routine and, worse, blends into unclassified routines, like unauthorized taking of classified info home in order to catch up on work. I witnessed the undisciplined attitude towards classified info handling by senior officers and NCOs in my unit who knew better, but until they were caught, they preferred efficiency over security. They CO may have given them a perfunctory reprimand, but the CO wanted his unit to get its work done on time and probably was taking classified material home, too. I imagine the same human nature exists in the NSA. It’s not like what they were working on was unConstitutional or illegal or even particularly secret after the leaks during the Bush administration.
Like I said, the chief preventative of classified info mishandling, whether from laziness or malfeasance, is fear of legal punishment. Snowden overcame that fear by running.
Eric: I am pretty sure there are ways other than strip searches to detect thumb drives. And in another thread we discussed the fact that to be secure from thumb drives, the ports need to be blocked or obliterated on all the computers. This is done in many places. Was it not done where Snowden worked? If it was, was he some sort of exception? And why? Those are the sort of things I’m getting at. No one should be allowed to leave with a thumb drive.
“the National Security Agency is not all it [as secure as it] should be.”
vanderleun:
See this.
Oldflyer,
IIRC, skipping the FISA courts step was both the crux and the mystery of the controversy in 2006.
The crux is self-explanatory, but the mystery was why Bush officials would skip the step since doing so was clearly unnecessary. The program was within bounds of the post-9/11 mandate and it was commonly recognized that requests would have been ‘rubber stamped’ by the FISA courts.
From what I gather, the misstep was over the initial legal interpretation that the President’s war authority was sufficient to cover the surveillance without a FISA warrant as long as there was a foreign connection in the data collected. I don’t recall whether Bush officials cited precedents from Clinton administration counterterror practices, but it is a common misconception that Bush’s counterterror policy was novel.
It was an easy fix. Applying for the FISA warrant added a procedural step but didn’t otherwise change the scope or effect of the program.
The Democrats, of course, used the controversy to fear-monger about Bush and the GOP. And, as I pointed out, they continued to protest the surveillance *effect* after the FISA application step was added. The Democrats stopped protesting the program when Obama became president and expanded the scope of the program.
Today, the Democrats would like us to believe their protest was always about Bush initially skipping the FISA step. They want us to forget that they protested the effect of the program, not just the absence of a procedural step.
Does this have piece in the Atlantic any bearing on the subject?
3 Former NSA Employees Praise Edward Snowden, Corroborate Key Claims
Or are these just three more traitors?
Neo,
Clearly, Snowden wasn’t allowed to do what he did, but he did it anyway.
USB ports wouldn’t be blocked if they normally used thumb drives in his office.
For example, storing classified data on thumb drives rather than hard drives may be viewed as a common-sense practical alternative from a standpoint of daily classified info storage.
In my old job, we used desktop computers, from which we removed and stored ‘classified’ hard drives in our safe.
If the NSA uses a similar system, I imagine they’re more likely to use modern laptops and thumb drives rather than bulky desktop computers and space-eating, fragile hard drives.
Here’s something that may have also played a part in Snowden’s case, if they had a similar office practice: After we removed and stored the ‘classified’ hard drive and inserted the ‘unclassified’ hard drive, we used the same desktops for unclassified office work. It was a compromise for the sake of office efficiency that, if repeated in Snowden’s office, would make a sleight-of-hand harder to catch.
Back in the day, in the Army, we had a relatively primitive classified network, but it was still SOP to compartmentalize with hard copies, disks, and removable hard drives, all stored in our office safe, for our daily work. While the Manning case shows that the Army has come a long way with its classified network, I wouldn’t be surprised if compartmentalization continues to be SOP in intelligence work even as networks have grown.
It’s all speculation, of course, but my guess is the security lapse that Snowden exploited was prosaic and due more to complacency, everyday convenience, and human nature than anything else.
People with security clearances and InfoSec responsibilities want to work smarter, not harder, too. From what I understand, it’s even a cherished part of the techie ethos.
Eric- the larger point is that if it’s this easy, if a fairly low level contractor can basically take all of this information and pass it along, that can be replicated. Part of the justification that advocates for this program are using is that the information is secure. It won’t be used for illicit or improper means. But clearly, that cannot be guaranteed.
Eric:
Unless you were working in national security AFTER the Bradley Manning incident, it’s probably not all that relevant what you say the precautions were at that time. Manning took his material out on a thumb drive, and supposedly they made that impossible to do afterwards.
Obviously not, though.
carl in Atlanta: “Fair enough, but I’m still glad that I now know what I’ve learned as a result of his actions.”
If I was an NSA unit security officer – or whatever they call the job – I’d be royally pissed right now. But I’m not, so … yeah, me, too.
My sentiment as a citizen is the same as it was for the 2010 Wikileaks controversy, albeit that was more about the War on Terror and this is more about homeland security inasmuch the two areas are distinct.
I wrote about it for a national security team blog I was part of at the time:
http://securenation.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/wikileaks-opportunity-for-frank-discussion/
Everyone realizes government security agencies can not be 100% effective in their assigned responsibilities; but the failure to prevent the Boston and Ft. Hood attacks is troubling to say the least if the NSA has been so successful otherwise. NSA and the administration need to first explain how and why these failures occurred before many of us will be able to trust this new declaration of so many successful operations. And they need to explain how mega-harvesting everyone’s information is not an abuse of power.
“I don’t expect the government to keep a record of everyone I send snail mail to either.”
Exactly.
Neo,
I imagine people are as capable as violating InfoSec procedures in ways big and small, to the letter and in principle, with motivations pragmatic and nefarious, and be as lax in enforcing the same procedures on the other side, now as when I was in the field.
Human nature has a way of breaking down the supposed-tos in the Intel field, just like everything else in life.
As I’ve said before, and Iowahawk and others have written, this domestic surveillance is necessary only because of the failure to secure the borders. Why let anyone from Chechnya, or Somalia, or Yemen in? It’s absurd. Sorry your country sucks, but we cannot tell you apart from the bad guys.
* … as capable of violating …
*failure to secure the borders and open immigration system.
parker: my guess is that the Boston bombers and the Ft. Hood shooter may not have been communicating by phone or email with suspicious foreign nationals who came under investigation. So the NSA phone program might not have come into play.
However (and it’s a big however), the Boston and Ft. Hood perps should have been suspected because of other hints they gave that there might be problems. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but still, these guys had a lot of red flags.
Red flags provided by several nations, as I understand it re: the boston bombers.
And by the way, why wouldn’t the terrorists who get here or who become radicalized, go IRS? The IRS didn’t need orders. They knew what to do independent of marching orders. My fear is that the terrorists finally stop going for the big explosion, pick up a gun with several magazines, and start walking into public places and shooting. They could buy the gun cash. They could pick the target themselves. And off they go.
It’s the fact that they are here that is the danger. Intercepting communications may postpone or prevent a few attacks, but we’re playing defense.
We ought to be going after these Mosques- finding out how and where they spend their money, seeing what ties they have to front groups. You know, stopping the hornets by going after the hornets nests. But that’s so bigoted of course.
holmes: “this domestic surveillance is necessary only because of the failure to secure the borders.”
Good point.
Part of this discussion should be, if we accept that the surveillance program is both necessary for national security *and* onerous from a privacy perspective, then what other national security practices could either be newly implemented or strengthened in order to draw down the NSA surveillance program’s impact on privacy?
Such as: beefing up immigration policy and border security (air, land, sea); restoring human intelligence with increased capture and interrogation (change the sheets and air out the empty guest rooms at Gitmo!); profiling Muslims by lowering the bar from indicators of terrorist attack to indicators of radicalism; and/or Bush’s ambitious Freedom Agenda of changing the conditions over there to shrink the problem here.
It’s about trade-offs. If we don’t accept the liberty vs security trade-off with the surveillance program, but still demand the security of preemptively tagging potential terrorist threats, then we have to look for trade-offs elsewhere to achieve the same end.
Or we can trade off security and accept that a constant threat of terrorist attack is the permanent lottery cost of preserving our liberty.
holmes: “the larger point is that if it’s this easy, if a fairly low level contractor can basically take all of this information and pass it along, that can be replicated. Part of the justification that advocates for this program are using is that the information is secure. It won’t be used for illicit or improper means. But clearly, that cannot be guaranteed.”
Agreed. That’s a problem.
An overbearing sovereign is one thing. An overbearing incompetent sovereign is worse.
This article — “NSA leaks put focus on intelligence apparatus’s reliance on outside contractors” — may provide at least a partial answer as to how it was possible for that thumb drive to be used:
For what it’s worth, I’ve worked on three contracts with two different agencies of the federal government and close supervision by actual government employees was very necessary to keep us to the letter of our contract in each case.
Ann,
Interesting. Not a surprise.
We have an image of a slick NSA from movies like the Bond films, Enemy of the State, and Bourne Identity. (I know they weren’t all NSA, but Hollywood super secret spy agencies are interchangeable.) The reality is more prosaic and bureaucratic, just like other agencies. And quite disillusioning.
Like holmes pointed out, we’re asked to give extraordinary trust to entities that are revealing themselves to be vulnerably ordinary.
This is what former House Judiciary chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, a key author of the 2001 Patriot Act, has been worrying about for a long time. He told Laura Ingraham on her radio show last Wednesday that the explanations the White House and the senior members of Congress’s Intelligence Committees are offering for the NSA surveillance activities are “a bunch of bunk.” In his view, the administration and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court have gone far beyond what the Patriot Act intended. Section 215, the so-called business-records part of the amended act, “was originally drafted to prevent data mining” of the type the NSA has been engaged in for years. The FISA court’s willingness to accede to administration requests is “really truly scary,” he said. They were “signing off on an unlimited dragnet.”
Sensenbrenner believes that changes to the Patriot Act must be “very specific” so that “the intelligence community knows that this goes too far.” Good luck. Back in 2010, he told FBI officials at a congressional hearing that he felt “betrayed” by the FBI’s attempts to evade the Patriot Act’s restrictions.
“Every time we tried to patch up a hole in what the FBI was doing, you figured out how to put another hole in the dike, and this little Dutch boy has only got ten fingers to put in the dike,” he told the officials.
from a John Fund article on NRO http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351200/watching-nsa-watchers-john-fund?fb_action_ids=10201360247869613&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=timeline_og
carl in atlanta asked, “Or are these just three more traitors?”
I’ve seen Drake, Binney, and Wiebe interviewed on Fox. Here’s an excerpt from a USA Today article about them:
“For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media.
To the intelligence community, the trio are villains who compromised what the government classifies as some of its most secret, crucial and successful initiatives. They have been investigated as criminals and forced to give up careers, reputations and friendships built over a lifetime.”
They all seem quite mature, lucid, and ethical. None of them ran to the press without first going through the chain of command, albeit unsuccessfully. They all believe that the program is dangerous to our freedom because it is subject to the policies of the administration in power.
Here’s a link to the article and a video:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/story/r/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/
Eric said in relation to to the Hollywood version of our spy agencies, “The reality is more prosaic and bureaucratic, just like other agencies. And quite disillusioning.”
So true. I spent 21 years in the Navy, and though we were the most capable Navy in the world, the element of bureaucratic drift, a tendency to become lax over time, and the inability of humans to be highly disciplined at all times lead to some less than admiral performances. And it happens in every government department/agency that we depend on for our defense. Fortunately, in spite of these all too human tendencies, we have been far better at the art of war than our adversaries over the last 72 years. We can’t count on that continuing when we have a governing class that is more interested in egalitarianism and fairness than in defending ourselves from a determined foe.
Ann,
Close supervision by actual gov’t employees was VERY necessary . . . Isn’t that what all good management does?
If you manage, you know what workers do when the bosses are gone.
But on the other hand, we can trust Obama to protect us because of his girls? (Kidding.) Obama is the ultimate servant/employee and is rightly subject to severe scrutiny.
(on the trust issue) We maybe could have trusted Obama because he knew a major terrorist activity would spell doom for his administration. It would almost have been worth it especially if it took out LA, San Francisco, New York, or Washington D.C.
Obama got a freebie thanks to multiculturalism. He used MC to justify blind surveillance relying on massive collection and crushing of data which (oops) happens to have all the information his Americorps and pseudo-brownshirt administration lust after.
The irony is that the NSA data mining looks fairly reasonable to many non-progressives but seems to be the one thing that has really cost Obama support in the uber progressive young and black crowd.
Today’s NSA hearing everything it can… 🙂
as far as whether its legal or not? if the police need a warrant for the same information, guess what? (and they do, though i cant remember the term for the collecting of the telephone numbers).
as to
Ever since the Snowden story broke…
Given that is my bailiwick, you would be horrified to know what actually goes on in companies and such as to data and accessibility.
do i think he could hack things? no.
how did he do it? i can guess many ways, but it would just be guesses. however, i will give a guess as an example.
most systems are pretty well protected software wise. not necessarily to pro hackers, but to the person who that isn’t their expertise, they are solid enough.
so most people do not tend to work the system, they tend to work the “wetware”. the term has changed a bit, but in the days of early hacking the idea was you could work hardware (chips, wires, drives), you could work software (Trojans, virus, cracks), or you could work the people.
want to guess which is your weakest link and the one you cant upgrade? fix? patch? 🙂
depending on the office, and how people behave, the person may have gained access by simply being given the password so they could access something to finish a task the boss wanted them to do for them so they didnt have to.
or, if he worked closely with people, over time, he may have had the opportunity to see the passwords being put in.
it can be as simple as rearanging stuff on a shelf so that one could see the reflection…
we tend to want to crop up movie scripts, but the truth tends to be more mundane and benign…
like pulling out the note panel in a desk in an office and seeing all the passwords written down!!!
the problem with such systems is that you cant tell they are failing till they fail. ie. you can leave your door unlocked starting tomorrow, and may not ever get robbed, and may get robbed by the end of the week. this is hard for people to practice as the causational object is not a certainty, nor even very likely (depending on which it is).
combine this with some crunch…
AND
Over 70 million Americans say they’re friggin’ miserable at work
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-employee-engagement-gallup-poll-20130617,0,5878658.story
there are a lot of places covering it, but its some of the comments (not a lot) that can put it in perspective as people explain this new command economy where everything is top down, an the bosses do the thinking, and others are not authorized to think (quite collectivist, no?)
so, they basically come and do what they are told, some just come and sit there (but their bosses make more as there are more in the department). productivity sucks, if you try to move ahead, your slammed cause your manager wants you to stay under him… and so on
magnify this in a job in which money comes from the state, not profits…
“The beatings will continue until morale improves”
sharpie: “The irony is that the NSA data mining looks fairly reasonable to many non-progressives but seems to be the one thing that has really cost Obama support in the uber progressive young and black crowd.”
For the principled leftists like Greenwald and Nader, maybe. For the zombie/tribal Democrats, they need only hear an anti-GOP or even more effectively, anti-Bush/Cheney spin, and they’re happy again.
Too true, Eric. But the numbers seem to show there is a bit of discontent out there with his normally very trusting base. College students may say “thank you IRS” but they probably think they don’t want that same scrutiny on themselves. Maybe it’s their now many years of economic starvation, the sense that they don’t see how they’re going to pay off those “free” student loans. Wait for that freebie to loom large in 2014. And Artfldgr points to the general dissatisfaction inherent with the progressive “I didn’t build that” lifestyle.
Making a diagnosis is like running up a down escalator. If you’re not doing it for the exercise, well, then there’s easier ways of getting to your destination.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DZ6Z0lE_YtA
It’s a theme today. I’ve heard from three separate sources of the basic dullness, incompetence and ineptitude of our youth. One was from a non-profit corporation wondering about termination issues regarding a young employee. (I know the President. I call her sweetie. She loves it.) Another was walking home and noticing that every (every!) young person was on a cell phone. Ugh. And the final one was this youtube. (Dishonorable mention was a youtube of William Ayers. I can’t stand to watch that bastard longer than it takes to build up an urge to explosively shit on some hippie symbol. A VW van will do.J)
The exceptions to the general young: Our kids. Yeahhhhh! (What the hell did ya think beatings were for?)