[TheCondor]

Is there any evidence that they actually target terrorists?

Collectively, we all need to keep beating this drum. Fundamentally, there are very very few terrorists. Very very few, if any, are in America. What's the bulk collection failure rate? 99.999999% ? And at what cost? It's astronomically expensive and out of all the leaks, what evidence is there that we've stopped a terrorist in America or any of her close allies' teritory where they are effectively spying on innocent tax paying civilians?

It's just making some contractors wealthy

[xorcist]

The most important thing in all of politics is to get to decide which words are used. The moment you use terrorism in the same sentence as data collection, you help spread the propaganda.

Bulk data collection has been done since the advance of fiber optics. They started doing it because they could, and because they had the economic means to. That's it.

The plots that have been thwarted by it are those orchestrated by US agencies to get mentally unstable people to join in, to quickly whisk them away to Siberia^WGuantanamo.

[xnull2guest]

Reprising a comment.

It's not about terrorism. Never was. That's just how the deep state sells it to voters.

If you look at the Snowden documents (and leaks by others) you'll see essentially nothing other than the international nature of the programs. For example, you'll remember from the Snowden leaks that the NSA hacked the Brazilian oil company PETROBRAS to help American oil companies win offshore oil drilling locations. The hacking of Merkle's cell phone was a big deal because it revealed that the US had information from Germany _during the Eurozone crisis_! Stuxnet was used to destroy Iran's nuclear program. The US also faces the same sort of pressure from other countries. This year alone the DoD was hacked, Wall Street, NASDAQ and JP Morgan were hacked and hundreds of defense contractors were hacked - all with foreign attribution. Israel's Iron Dome designs were hacked by China.

Take a look at the NSA program HACIENTA, which "is used to port scan entire countries" and which uses other compromised (civilian) computers to disguise attribution.

Look at The Intercept reporting (where Glenn Greenwald is right now). He speaks at length about how the US uses NSA operations to benefit the global bargaining posture and competitiveness of US companies. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/05/us-governments...

And take the Inspector General's report from the Boston Bombings - a great example of how and when the NSA domestic programs would be used if they were about terrorism. The NSA is hardly mentioned. The Inspector General investigates the failings of the FBI. (http://info.publicintelligence.net/IC-IG-BostonBombingReport...)

"We focused our review on the entities that were the most likely to have had information about Tamerlan Tsarnaev prior to the bombings – the FBI, the CIA, DHS, and NCTC, which maintains the U.S. government’s database of classified identifying and substantive derogatory information on known or suspected terrorists. We also requested other federal agencies to identify relevant information they may have had prior to the bombings. These agencies included the Department of Defense (including the National Security Agency (NSA)), Department of State, Department of the Treasury, Department of Energy, and the Drug Enforcement Administration."

The report on the failures to anticipate/stop the Boston Bombers barely mention the NSA. This is because the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Counterterrorism Center are in charge of counterterrorism, not the National Security Agency.

Or go to the NSA's own mission statement. (https://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml)

"The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (NSA/CSS) leads the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Information Assurance (IA) products and services, and enables Computer Network Operations (CNO) in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances."

(Nothing to do with terrorism.)

Lots of news recently has called out Executive Order 12333's role in defining the goal and the means of intelligence capabilities. EO 12333 was passed in 1981. The Five Eyes, the key partnership of the NSA, has its origins in the 40's and ECHELON and other leaked programs (eg CARNIVORE/PREDATOR) predate 9/11 by decades.

The Snowden leaks disclose a list with over thirty countries with competing digital intelligence programs.

The NSA is not about terrorism. Never was. Never will be. The NSA and CSS are the intelligence arm of the United States. New Zealand's programs are similarly not about terrorism (what terrorists are attacking New Zealand?). Digital communications play a huge role in global communications and corporate and international power.

Reprised comment from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8370973

[xnull2guest]

Given the highly sourced nature of this comment, I would expect a well reasoned argument accompanying a downvote. In case this person missed what they should be replying to:

* Programs for internet surveillance existed before 9/11

* Partnerships with other intelligence services existed before 9/11

* The programs are used for international espionage and sabotage often

* Most of the capabilities of the NSA are not counter-terrorist capabilities

* EO 12333 and the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court" were established in the early 80s

* The inspector general's report on the Boston Bombings excluded the NSA almost wholey from its report

* The NSA's own mission statement and website content focuses almost exclusively on foreign intelligence

There is a domestic nature to NSA programs. But the 'reason for the NSA and it's programs' is not CT.