[tokenadult]

There is some good reporting here by the Washington Post about the circumstances of Clapper's testimony to Congress. Readers here who know my comments know that I'm not fully happy with how Snowden chose to disclose information from inside NSA, and particularly not about his travel to China (Hong Kong) and Russia, but I think Snowden raises a fair point here. There is some genuine difference of opinion among Americans about how Clapper's statement to Congress should be characterized (whether "lie" or "erroneous statement") and plenty of us who agree with another comment here posted before mine that two wrongs don't make a right. Every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy.

I think Congress is unsure about how to proceed on this issue because not all members of Congress are of one mind about what is best for the country in administration of NSA. I categorically reject the assertion that Congress is still moving forward slowly to change NSA oversight because "NSA has Congress by the balls." Nope. One of the most common kinds of comments here on Hacker News about issues like this is a comment that ASSUMES that if government leaders are under pervasive surveillance they are all afraid of blackmail. But I don't believe that, because some government leaders and some political candidates are essentially shameless. Even after they are caught (by old-fashioned journalism, or by a jilted lover or some unrelated criminal investigation) doing something unsavory, they are still willing to run for office, and SOME ARE REELECTED. United States Senator David Vitter was reelected in 2010 even after a scandal involving behavior that I would consider shameful,[1] and the antics of former DC mayor Marion Barry[2] are probably still notorious enough that they don't need further discussion here. In short, I call baloney on the idea that NSA can keep politicians on its leash simply by knowing their secrets. Some politicians have PUBLIC lives full of dirt, and still get elected and influence policy anyway.

The other reason I don't believe this HN hivemind theory of politics is that I by no means assume that everyone in politics lacks personal integrity. Some politicians, I am quite sure, could have all their secrets revealed only to have voters think "Why is that person such a straight-arrow? Why not have some fun once in a while?" The simple fact is that there is value system diversity in the United States electorate, and there is personal conduct probity variance among United States politicians, and there isn't any universal way to unduly influence politicians merely through even the most diligent efforts to discover personal secrets. If politicians think that NSA is going too far (as evidently several politicians from more than one party do think), then they will receive plenty of support from the general public to rein in the surveillance. (Obligatory disclaimer: Yes, I am a lawyer, who as a judicial clerk for my state's Supreme Court used to review case files on attorney misconduct, and, yes, some of my law school classmates are elected officials, including one member of Congress. I am absolutely certain that there are enough politicians ready to mobilize to roll back NSA surveillance programs if they really think the programs are excessive in their scope.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Vitter#D.C._Madam_scanda...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry#1990_arrest_.26_d...

[MisterWebz]

“I salute Sen. Feinstein,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference of the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I’ll tell you, you take on the intelligence community, you’re a person of courage, and she does not do that lightly. Not without evidence, and when I say evidence, documentation of what it is that she is putting forth.”

Pelosi added that she has always fought for checks and balances on CIA activity and its interactions with Congress: “You don’t fight it without a price because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth."

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140317/07441526589/nancy-...

[rayiner]

> Every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy.

> I think Congress is unsure about how to proceed on this issue because not all members of Congress are of one mind about what is best for the country in administration of NSA.

> The other reason I don't believe this HN hivemind theory of politics is that I by no means assume that everyone in politics lacks personal integrity.

None of these points should be controversial, but oh well.

[belorn]

Let me add a few others:

1) Every nation should protect their citizens against intelligence gathering from outsiders. 2) Intelligence-gathering must be subject of the rule of law. 3) Military forces must be under democratic control.

Surely, neither of those are controversial either?

[mpyne]

No, not even in the U.S. where all 3 conditions are in effect (unless you mean to quibble about oligarchy vs. democracy, in which case that's a whole 'nother level of argument).

[belorn]

I guess you could argue the definition of "protect", but sabotaging security standards and hording security vulnerabilities is not it.

And if the rule of law require says every citizen is protected against warrant-less searches, you can not "steal" personal information about those citizens when it rest in care of a service provider.

But I take it that what is controversial is not that every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy. The controversy how an intelligence-gathering agency may behave.

[jjoonathan]

They aren't. They wouldn't even be controversial at the EFF.

The controversy stems from cost/benefit judgements on individual spy programs AND from the fact that Clapper perjured himself in front of congress and the american people. The latter is a far more clearcut issue than the former, and it's what we were talking about before the lawyer came in and changed the subject.

[bediger4000]

Has there been any cost/benefit analysis on any of the spy programs that Snowden's leaks have revealed? It doesn't look like it to me. For instance, it should also be uncontroversial that universal surveillance only ends up with an intimidated, fearful citizenry, and a total lack of innovation, but oh well. For those reasons alone, we should probably start out against universal or dragnet surveillance.

[tptacek]

Wait, I don't understand how you can simultaneously believe that the NSA has actually built an apparatus of universal surveillance and that universal surveillance leads to an intimidated citizenry and total lack of innovation.

Which is it? Is the NSA restrained in their surveillance, or does surveillance not actually ruin innovation?

[mikeash]

I agree on the first two, but I have a hard time believing that anyone in national office possesses any personal integrity. Perhaps maybe one or two, but that's it.

[Zigurd]

Politics in the security state selects for the kind of politician at the national level who is bought-in to the rightness and necessity of the security state, early in their careers, long before the people choose among them. It doesn't have to be powered by blackmail, assassination, or other exotic methods 99.99% of the time to be effective. It's the water they swim in. They hardly notice.

All the possible "radicalism" ends up at one end of the scale: PRISM, NDAA, and "least untruthful" causing barely a ripple.

The statement "Every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy." is true, but it's true at every scale. Suppose someone spilled ALL the beans, and the US had to start over in deciding what's secret and what isn't, going forward. How long would it take to accumulate our current trove of secrets, and what does that say about the necessity of most of them?

[crunchcaptain]

Two things to point out here...

1. Rumors and innuendo are not the same as hard evidence. While some politicians may survive a controversy, in most cases reputation-damaging information has a negative effect on a political career (especially if it's indisputable evidence). "Nobody wants a scandal". Furthermore, what an old enemy might leak to the press is a far cry from what might be uncovered through comprehensive digital surveillance. Having access to raw, captured Internet traffic is a game-changer.

2. If the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence don't feel that they are getting completely accurate and inclusive information from the NSA, why wouldn't they feel vulnerable? Who could know the truth if the NSA doesn't give straight information to the very people who are supposed to be overseeing their work?

[resu_nimda]

Every national government in the civilized world needs an intelligence-gathering agency that can operate with some degree of operational secrecy.

What is the basis for this assertion? What would happen to a nation that didn't have that?

[tormeh]

It would lose wars, basically. Now, this matters less than it used to in this age of the nuclear bomb, but knowing what other nations are doing and planning is still useful in trade and technology. Knowing more about the market than others means you get better deals and China isn't the only nation doing industrial espionage.

Terrorism? It's a pretty pedestrian intelligence agency whose primary aim is to prevent terrorism. The NSA is stuffed full of paranoid people with information addiction. They don't care about terrorism; they just want all the world's secrets. An intelligence guy is just as likely to respect other's privacy as a security researcher is to accept other people reading his files. It's in their nature not to.

[resu_nimda]

China isn't the only nation doing industrial espionage.

Yeah, this is a common argument, the intelligence arms race. It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament...only to start the cycle over again with digital information gathering, which is a lot easier to hide than a nuclear weapons program (and weaves itself into the fabric of citizens' private lives, in that sense it's much more sinister).

Who has the fortitude to step up and lead us (by example) towards a healthier geopolitical climate? Collaboration, not paranoid xenophobic competition. It saddens me (but doesn't surprise me) that my country is driving full speed in the opposite direction.

[mpyne]

> It's just...we had the nuclear arms race, which we eventually realized was folly and really could only result in negative impact to humanity, so we started moving towards disarmament

We have not started moving toward disarmament. Just ask Iran and North Korea.

If anything, what happened to Libya and Ukraine after they gave up existing nuclear weapons will hurt nuclear non-proliferation even further. And that's not even to get into the possibility of a Russia generally hostile to the West, which is the best possible thing that could have happened to U.S. nuclear weapons labs.

[tormeh]

Russia isn't hostile to the west. It's easy to think that everything a foreign country does is about "us". Putin needs an external enemy and a national narrative to support him. It's all domestic policy. We're just annoying background noise. What Putin wants is to stay in charge of his kleptocracy for as long as possible. He doesn't give a shit about the US.

It's the Russian equivalent of American currency disputes with China. While there is truth to the claims of an undervalued yuan it's really overblown. It's about identity politics and feelings. China just happened to be a convenient target.

To the downvoter: Do you think Putin just now found out he is homophobic? That his claims that NGOs with foreign ties are foreign agents aiming to destabilize the country are real? No, it's all theater, scaremongering and scapegoating.

[mpyne]

> He doesn't give a shit about the US.

I didn't say hostile to the U.S. I said hostile to the West. That doesn't mean cutting off contact or anything so silly, but let's not act like Russia has not long been at odds with the general foreign policy of the West.

Even post-Cold War, it dates back to stuff like Bosnia and Kosovo. Remember reading the "TIL" about that singer who used to be in the British armed forces and claimed to have avoided WWIII by not attacking Russian troops at an airport in the Balkans during Bosnia?

The way Russia views it, the West has certainly been antagonistic towards them, between the NATO expansion, possible construction of missile shields in east Europe, intervention against their Serbian brothers in Bosnia and then Kosovo, open talk of friendship between the U.S. and Georgia, the difference in perception over what was authorized in the Libyan intervention, and later the EU trying to influence Ukraine away from Russia.

You are certainly right that there are domestical political reasons for Putin to play up an external enemy, but his behavior is certainly consistent with, at best, an antipathy towards the West. Sure, they'll play along in international politics as it becomes convenient to them, but the USSR did that too.

[bediger4000]

It would lose wars, basically

How do we know this? This strikes me as an assertion without evidence. Are there examples?

It also strikes me that the secrecy more often gets used to conceal career-ending mistakes and cost overruns, at least in the USA.

Has anybody done an honest assessment of secrecy?

[tormeh]

Nazi Germany and Japan partly lost WW2 because the Americans and the British broke their codes. Particularly the Japanese. Had the axis known their codes were broken they would have made new ones. Intelligence gathering would have been worthless without secrecy in this case.

To be honest I don't really know too much about this. I've read Cryptonomicon, and that's basically it. But it would be hard to dispute that signals intelligence is useful in war and that secrecy is necessary for SIGINT to work.

[Nelson69]

We won pretty handedly in Afghanistan and Iraq and we had bad intelligence. We were flat out wrong about a number of things, yet we prevailed..

I think equating it to war fighting is a little naive and an over simplification. There is strategic and tactical war intelligence and there are real historical examples of them making the difference, no disputing that. But today, especially for the United States and most other g7 type nations, it's a communication channel for things that it's unpopular to communicate, don't under estimate this. Could any military in the world practice without the modern intelligence gathering that all these nations have? Also regarding any negotiation for anything, knowing when the other side is bluffing or telling the truth is huge, it's everything. Those powerful nations routinely ask/demand other nations to do things, stop doing things, etc.. Information is incredibly powerful in those discussions and these aren't commonly war related things.

Whether or not we need it, I don't know, I seriously doubt it would change the results of most wars though. Another world war? It could be decisive but with the global economy I think just about every body capable for world warring has too much invested and to risk to let that happen.

[mikeash]

It's tough to dispute that this stuff is useful while in a major war, but I think the relevant question here is whether you need to have it all in place ahead of time, or whether you can spin it up on demand, as it were.

In any case, SIGINT certainly helped a great deal, but what really won the war for the allies was the roughly order of magnitude difference between the size of the economy of the United States and those of the countries it was fighting.

[tormeh]

The US didn't have that much of an effect. By D-day, Germany was already running out of people to feed the meat grinder. The Soviet Union, Britain and France basically won the war in Europe. I'm grateful for not being born in the Soviet Union and all, but won the war, the US didn't. Also, the US is about 2.5 times as big as Japan and 4 times as big as Germany today. I don't know what the historical data is, but "order of magnitude" sounds way unrealistic.

I think it would be very hard to spin up on demand. There's not a catalogue of talented SIGINTs lying around. These people need to be found and hired. A whole organization as big as Google would have to be built overnight. It would be a nightmare. Not to mention that this organization would be starting from scratch while its counterparts might have taps into American society already.

[dragontamer]

Is Russia planning to invade the Ukraine? What are their plans? Are the "protests" in the Ukraine Russian-backed or not? Do they have greater plans to push out west, or are Russia's plans legitimate in the region?

These questions can be answered with good-old fashioned spying, and nothing else. Russia is not going to give us their gameplan on a silver platter.

And when we do learn Russia's gameplan, it would be best if we kept that fact secret. We can't have Russia knowing that we know their gameplan during the negotiation process.

[gcb0]

It would be ...gasp... Following its own and iteration law.

[dllthomas]

Narrowly regarding "But I don't believe that, because some government leaders and some political candidates are essentially shameless.":

First, there is a tremendous difference between (having already been exposed) choosing to run in the face of that difficulty (possibly not showing sufficient shame, to be sure, but dealing with what is effectively a sunk cost) and choosing to take (or postpone taking) that blow in the first place.

Second, even if there are congresspersons who wouldn't comply in the face of blackmail, are there enough or are they insufficiently identifiable that they can't simply be avoided?

Note that I'm not saying that I think blackmail of many in congress by the NSA is hugely likely, I'm just not sure your reasoning is sound.

[makmanalp]

I am not so sure. Taking a scandal you're in and spinning it or making the most of it is not a guaranteed success. I don't think politicians willingly put themselves into such situations, they just survive them sometimes.

As for your examples, the fact that politicians use drugs or have sex is no surprise to anyone, for example, but what if it was exposed that Berry secretly supported something that his constituency disagreed with? That's real political damage that's harder to survive.

I do think it's kinda far fetched that everyone is sufficiently intimidated that no one says anything.

[bediger4000]

I doubt that the public lives full of dirt are the problem. If the dirt is out there, it's not a problem. It's the Larry Craigs of the Senate and House that are the problem. Dirt swept into the closet is the problem.

Also, how do you explain Jane Harman? Google "jane harman alberto gonzalez" for details.

[higherpurpose]

So are you saying the agencies should be "rogue" and completely independent from Congress?

[tokenadult]

No. A diligent search of my previous comments on HN will remind readers that I participated in the Restore the Fourth public protests in Minneapolis last summer,[1] and in general I support effective civilian oversight by elected officials of all intelligence and covert action operations of the United States government.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991375#up_5992149

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7071480#up_7072301

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985285#up_5985720

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6258037

[gcb0]

Yes, his comment is just a winded way of saying ends justifies means.