[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.