[jobu]

Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad... That's just wonderful.

After 10 years of pervasive surveillance and not being able to catch a single terrorist I can't believe the NSA is trying to rationalize it as being a good thing. It's too bad the bill to defund the NSA didn't pass: http://defundthensa.com/

[Zak]

Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad

The NSA does an awful lot of hiding things. It might therefore be reasonable to conclude that it is bad and should, at the very least have its funding cut.

[tking8924]

Got to stop people from doing things that they themselves are doing...

Anecdotally reminds of this guy that was key in setting up the British porn filter being arrested for child pornography: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/10675...

[deciplex]

A person is not a government agency ostensibly accountable to a democratic government and, therefore, public oversight. The NSA is. To the extent a democracy keeps secrets from voters, it is not a democracy. The US government keeps a lot of secrets.

[josu]

>Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad...

No, that's not the reasoning. People that do bad things try to hide them. Therefore, a good first filter to catch bad people is to target those who hide things. They can narrow the search field afterwards.

[pyre]

This is true, but saying "treat all people trying to hide things as potential terrorists" is a very wide net to cast (to the point of useless).

[cbsmith]

Is that really what happens though? They aren't treating them as potential terrorists. They are treating it as one of many signals that would almost certainly be associated with a threat.

[SeanDav]

It is a vastly smaller space than "all people that use the internet". Also I think it makes sense to assume that the "privacy seekers" set would contain a higher proportion of "bad actors". I am not in any way supporting them, but I understand why they do it - even if I hate the idea.

[euank]

The fraction of terrorists in "all people that use the internet" is approximately equal to the fraction of terrorists in "privacy seekers" -- both are roughly zero.

The NSA only was given such pervasive power to catch terrorists. The fact that privacy seekers are more likely to be "bad actors" is moot unless that means terrorists because regular "bad actors" are supposed to be innocent until guilty, handled by police/fbi, etc. NSA only is allowed to work essentially with no due process because it's for cathing "terrorists". Interestingly, now that terrorists know about the NSA, they no doubt will simply not use the internet (or phones) at all, thus making it so the NSA can't catch a terrorist by any of its methods.

I definitely expect all terrorists are extremely careful about internet activity now that they know the NSA is so invasive, thus making the NSA's actions even less defensible (not that I thought they ever were).

[GHFigs]

Nobody said that.

[SeanDav]

Not sure why you were marked down for that comment. Logically it is an obvious low hanging fruit to target the people looking for privacy. It is cynical but certainly logical, like it or not.

[mihok]

Literally everyone hides something, its all relative. Not to mention the people that do bad things in plain sight.

[PavlovsCat]

> the people that do bad things in plain sight.

..aaand the ones who get "caught" and are away with a slap on the wrist before you can say "this is a joke, I just cannot believe the hipocrisy of this, double standards much?" (because let's be realistic, it's not instant)

[duaneb]

> I can't believe the NSA is trying to rationalize it as being a good thing

Is it really a surprise people in power wish to remain in power?

[Zelphyr]

I wonder if the sentiment here is that the NSA used to be known for being a highly intelligent group of people trying to solve hard problems but now they seem like a bunch of D-level bureaucrats snooping through everything hoping they'll get lucky.

[jobu]

That's it exactly. There are some brilliant people working at the NSA and our country would be better off if they were working improve the security of utilities, local governments, and critical businesses.

[watwut]

And maybe they are a highly intelligent group of bureaucrats trying to solve hard problems so they can snoop through everything and get lucky. Highly intelligent person solving hard problems is not necessary "good guy" nor "ethical guy" nor "law abiding guy".

[sliverstorm]

Maybe there's just both kinds of people working at the NSA...

[bsder]

I would amend that to: "Is it any surprise the bureaucracy wishes to protect the bureaucracy?"

[frostmatthew]

"The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty." - Eugene McCarthy

[sitkack]

"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for." - Will Rogers

[ForrestN]

http://people.bethel.edu/~steken/death%20and%20despair/holze...

[jacinda]

>not being able to catch a single terrorist

Except, you know, this guy named Osama Bin Laden. http://www.ibtimes.com/nsa-snowden-leaks-satellites-drones-c...

[bitchypat]

I think he meant before they wreak havoc.

[gdewilde]

No, he had already died in 2001, people only get to die one time.

[stinos]

Because anyone trying to keep anything private or secure must be hiding something bad...

Well that idea isn't exactly new, unfortunately, remember Eric Scmidt.. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

[Zarel]

Well, in context, I believe that quote was intended to mean "as a US company, we can't stop the government from intruding upon your privacy", not "we don't value your privacy".

[dan_bk]

Like we shouldn't get our privacy.

Whereas he bought himself a specially isolated penthouse in order to live his open marriage in perfect privacy.

[anigbrowl]

On the other hand, anyone who is up to something bad is going to try to keep it as secret as possible, no?

After 10 years of pervasive surveillance and not being able to catch a single terrorist

Questionable. I wouldn't expect the NSA to put out a press release every time someone is nabbed on the back of their information-gathering, that wouldn't be very smart.

[josefresco]

If we are to accept that some who seek privacy and security are good and innocent, we also need to accept that some who seek those same things can also be bad.

[bilalq]

You can literally replace "seek privacy and security" with almost anything in that statement. I mean, out of all the people that prefer Coke over Pepsi, there are definitely some bad guys.

While your statement is true, it doesn't really give any justification on targeted spying. That is, unless of course, we consider the desire to hide things to be a signal of being a bad actor. Thinking along those lines is a very slippery slope though. The erosion of freedoms is just another side-effect of policies and actions shaped by such thinking.

[throwaway5752]

That's nonsense. If a credible actor poses a threat, they will attempt to do a competent job hiding their communications and data. Those that don't are by definition less competent and less likely to pose a threat.

Pardon the bluntless, but it seems like an a priori conclusion that only people taking pains to hide their data/communications should be targeted. That is not because the vast majority of those people are innocent (they are) but because that is the only group that contains a subset that poses a real & present threat.

So, that ignores your slippery slope argument about personal liberties, which are totally valid. How do you balance national security and personal liberty in this case? That's the million dollar question.

Please let me know if you question my reasoning. I'm purely looking at it as a 2x2 matrix of (highly encrypts personal data, does not ...) x (seeks to harm people/nation interests, does not ...)

So only the people hiding their tracks that seek to harm are the ones to worry about. Those that don't hide their tracks are a lot less likely to be operationally successful</euphemism>.

However, I assume that the 99.95% of people that highly encrypt personal do not seek to harm anyone, and are collateral damage here.

Constitutional tradeoffs happen all over. Fire in a crowded theater, felons rights to vote, personal rights to own certain weapons, etc. This is another one that needs to be decided very carefully. But I think both sides have very valid concerns.

[pessimizer]

>Fire in a crowded theater

This is a quote by a judge in a trial that put someone in prison for passing out antiwar fliers. It's good to know the source of our philosophies.

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

When we accept that "shouting fire in a crowded theater" isn't protected speech, we're backing up an argument that was used to put someone in prison for non-violent anti-state speech. Not token prison either; 6 months. That is not a good thing, and not an acceptable baseline to guide us in the examination of other issues.

[throwaway5752]

You are mischaracterizing the case and unfairly tarring the reputation of Oliver Wendell Holmes, a truly great Supreme Court justice. Perhaps you would like this better:

"we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death"

Back to the other quote: it is a classic and excellent demonstration of the one of the greatest tensions in US Constitution, the balance between individual rights and societal good. It doesn't require any context.

Perhaps I should have used the blunter formulation, also from Justice Holmes:

"The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins"

[dobbsbob]

Oliver Holmes already has one of the worst reputations, nothing any of us write can compare with the man's own words regarding his reputation. Here's part of his decision in upholding the the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. [...] Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Of course this has nothing to do with the NSA/GCHQ/CSEC collecting IP numbers of users of privacy software. Only a police state casts a wide net and then spies on it's own citizens to determine their innocence presuming they are already guilty by seeking out this software in the first place. It's the exact guilty by association kind of nonsense every police state throughout history has done.

[mikecb]

You're citing to a case that was overturned more than 40 years ago.[1] So I wouldn't really describe it as our 'philosophy' whatever that means.

[1] http://www.oyez.org/cases/1960-1969/1968/1968_492

[Crito]

> "So, that ignores your slippery slope argument about personal liberties, which are totally valid. How do you balance national security and personal liberty in this case? That's the million dollar question."

"National Security" is a fucking joke; there is nothing that needs to be balanced. Anyone interested in terrorizing others could (after driving across state lines if necessary) walk into a Walmart and walk out with a semi-automatic rifle, walk into the nearest mall, yell their grievances with the country and start shooting people.

We know that this sort of attack is possible in the US because plenty of lone-nutters have more or less done it already in the US. We know that terrorist organizations are receptive to this style of attack because they have carried out this style of attack in other countries (Mumbai in 2008 and Kenya in 2013 are obvious examples). Yet the two have yet to be combined in the US.

The only reason why this hasn't happened in the US is that, contrary to popular belief, there just simply are not many people interested in doing this sort of thing in the US. The notion that terrorists yearning to attack America are around every corner is a myth. Those people are a rounding error.

[opendais]

> How do you balance national security and personal liberty in this case? That's the million dollar question.

That would be valid if they could point to any noteworthy success. The fact they can't ["because national security"] pretty much guarantees the program contributes very little real value.

If they had anything to do with something important, say Osama's death, you think they wouldn't trumpet it out as "proof" it works?

I'd say their lack of evidence that it functions is more damning than anything. They can't exactly hide they are doing it post-Snowden. Their one chance to justify funding for new programs that aren't compromised is to say "LOOK HOW SUCCESSFUL WE ARE!!!!" in broad terms.

The fact they cannot do this, and thereby justify larger budgets to Congress, convinces me they know the benefits are negligible.

[throwaway5752]

Do you feel there might be information that they can't publicize? I skeptical and sympathetic to that at the same time.

I really would say that it's a question of risk aversion & utitility. Even targetting a whole class of people the odds are probably astronomical of finding someone planning harm (1M:1? more than that?). To me it comes down to the negative utility of privacy invasion * the number of people targeted ??? the probability of detecting & thwarting the one malactor, where ??? is an inequality.

Maybe it's good we have risk averse and non risk averse groups, that the balance of power between those groups can change over time as necessary.

[opendais]

> Do you feel there might be information that they can't publicize? I skeptical and sympathetic to that at the same time.

XKeyscore is a (at a minimum) 6 years old.

You are telling me in 6 years they can't provide the broad strokes of a reasonable number of success stories?

The fact they can't stand up and say "Terrorist plot X was stopped by XKeyscore" from 4-5 years ago pretty much proves its a failure as far as I am concerned.

> I really would say that it's a question of risk aversion & utitility. Even targetting a whole class of people the odds are probably astronomical of finding someone planning harm (1M:1? more than that?). To me it comes down to the negative utility of privacy invasion * the number of people targeted ??? the probability of detecting & thwarting the one malactor, where ??? is an inequality.

Given that with sufficient information a person is able to force another person to do quite a few things via blackmail, its simply too dangerous to trust human beings with this tool. Especially an organization like the NSA where their only knowledge of Snowden's actions came after he released all of the information publicly.

[cbsmith]

No, because anyone trying to hide something is highly likely to be trying to keep things private and secure. Ignoring the moral, ethical, and legal concerns, it is a perfectly reasonable course of action. The moral, ethical & legal concerns are of course terrible.