Senator Leahy Calls Bulls**t On Claim That Metadata Collection Stopped Terrorist Attacks
from the good-for-him dept
One of the key claims that defenders of the NSA bulk data collection keep making is that the program was necessary to stop various terrorist "events" (note the careful choice of the word "events" rather than "attacks"). In fact, last week in arguing against the Amash Amendment, Rep. Mike Rogers directly claimed that "54 times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks." Of course, as we pointed out, he carefully added the "and the other program" to make it seem like the bulk data collection program being debated was necessary. Amazingly, that claim of 54 terrorist "events" is significantly more than what intelligence officials have claimed. They say it's more like 13. Yet, yesterday, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall both said that there was no evidence to support this, and at this morning's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings about the surveillance program, Senator Patrick Leahy was fairly direct in making it clear that what Rogers claimed last week was completely bogus:"If this program is not effective, it has to end," Leahy said, noting that a classified list of uses of the phone record program "does not reflect dozens or even several terrorist plots that Section 215 helped thwart or prevent, let alone 54 as some have suggested."Perhaps Rep. Mike Rogers' staffers -- rather than threatening me with bogus defamation claims -- should focus on having their own boss not mislead Congress and the American public. Wouldn't that be nice?
Much of the rest of the hearing suggested, yet again, that Congress simply doesn't believe intelligence officials and the administration (and the dwindling number of defenders of this surveillance) any more, as multiple Senators discussed introducing bills to limit the surveillance, and noted various problems with the programs.
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., raised the prospect of creating an independent counsel to consider surveillance requests presented to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to guard against potential privacy violations.Intelligence officials tried to defend the program, but it didn't seem to win many people over. There was lots of talk of "connecting the dots" and "finding needles in haystacks," but considering the lack of evidence that the program actually helps with either of those things, they didn't make a very convincing case. Of course, the best response to all of this came, sarcastically, from Julian Sanchez's commentary on the hearings:
"Don't you think we have left the state relevance?'' Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked, suggesting that the mass records collection was too large to be an effective counter-terrorism tool.
"How can one get one's mind around the concept (of) that amount of data?'' Lee said.
Said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.: "It appears this system is failing in maintaining the trust and credibility of the American people.''
[....]
"When you look at the reach of this (phone record collection) program, it envelopes a substantial number of Americans,'' said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "It seems to me that what is being described as a very narrow program is a very broad program.''
"There are going to be some proposals for changes to the law,'' Leahy said.
The only people who spend THIS much time "looking for needles" are addicts...So true. Time to get intelligence officials into rehab.
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Filed Under: metadata, mike rogers, nsa, nsa surveillance, patrick leahy, section 215, senate judiciary committee, surveillance, terrorism
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One thing just occurred to me...
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Re: One thing just occurred to me...
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Oy! "Apparently Claim" by alleged "reporter" becomes "threatening"!
That's YOUR title for the item.
So even if I agree with you HERE, your overnight inflation and myth-making right in front of my eyes totally undermines the little credibility gained by the piece.
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Re: Oy! "Apparently Claim" by alleged "reporter" becomes "threatening"!
Let's not be hypocritical, here. There are plenty of examples of TD commenters and writers tearing others apart for twisting what was actually said into something else for their own gain, or to make their own point.
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Well, as long as the NSA pinky swears to delete the metadata, then I guess that makes the unconstitutional seizure of that metadata constitutional.
Dianne Spystein logic at it's finest.
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What really annoys me ...
I email relatives overseas.
I email a ton of people outside the US without even knowing it. "@gmail.com" does not tell me what nation they are in.
About +25% of the people following me (46,000) on Google + are not US citizens and many comment on my posts.
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Re: What really annoys me ...
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Re: Re: What really annoys me ...
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Re: Re: Re: What really annoys me ...
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Billions. What, do we just tear down these buildings and sell the petabyte storage units at a loss of pennies on the dollar?
Not going to happen, and this data collection won't stop.
All the law will do is simply give power to corporations to say "No" on blanket requests.
Doesn't mean the rest of our communications can't be tapped between servers or cell towers.
PS: my two cents: when a government has a computer technology business who makes the world's strongest mainframes, asking for "decryption keys" seems rather moot.
Ars Technica did a recent write up where a home grown system was used to parse 1000s of passwords and a good number of them were broken due to identifiable pattern recognition.
Don't believe for a second the NSA didn't read that article.
Hell, they probably downloaded it before Ars posted it.
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Re:
It will change almost nothing except make unsatisfied agency workers even more unsatisfied and it will give the companies full responsibility when the data gets abused as opposed to today where agencies, government and higher politicians will hide it behind a "classified" sticker and dispense justice as they see fit...
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Haaaaayyyyyyyy!
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Re: Haaaaayyyyyyyy!
So by increasing the number of haystacks available to them, the NSA gets a clearer picture of the subject's activities, and (theoretically) decreases the probability that they might label an innocent person as a "terrorist suspect" by mistake. Which is actually a pretty good idea, except for the part where you have to violate everybody's privacy in order to do it.
Of course this is just speculation I'm basing on the information that we've learned so far. Perhaps the NSA is just a paranoid, Benevolent Big Brother (BBB for short) trying to protect Americans the only way it knows how. However, the way it's going about things now is doing more harm than good to America in the long run.
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Re: Re: Haaaaayyyyyyyy!
To use another bad analogy, if you know you lost your needle at the Mohammed farm, it doesn't do you any good to collect the hay from the Smith, Johnson, Rodney, Andersen,...etc. Farms. Too much hay just makes it that much harder to find the needle.
It is admittedly a good thing to have an over abundance of data after the fact to figure out what happened, but one, our laws don't allow for that and two the whole justification for these is the prevention of criminal acts.
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Re: Re: Haaaaayyyyyyyy!
Yes, he may beat me up all the time, but he's really a good guy at heart.
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Re: Re: Re: Haaaaayyyyyyyy!
The phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" is rather applicable to the NSA right now.
Of course, this assumes that the organization is a "BBB and isn't actually a completely malevolent group of assholes/control freaks out to try and secure more power for the organization, rights of the American populace be damned.
It's probably a combination of both mentalities scattered throughout the entire NSA staff, now I think about it (pure speculation on my part though).
However, it still doesn't justify the blatant invasions of people's privacy by any stretch of the imagination.
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Re: Re: Haaaaayyyyyyyy!
There, I fixed it for you.
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Re: Haaaaayyyyyyyy!
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Top federal security chiefs from the NSA, FBI, Office of National Intelligence and the Justice Department go before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss the FISA surveillance program. A legal panel also testifies on constitutional protections.
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dystopia
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NSA
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Haystacks?
"What may have escaped you, NSA, is that neither needles nor haystacks are people. However, your dehumanizing analogy may be revealing more about your underlying values than you intended."
"More important, when your net searches and surveils U.S. citizens without due process, you are violating the U.S. Constitution, not playing with needles and haystacks. You may think this is a game, but last I checked, the Constitution is still the highest law in the land and you are sworn to uphold it, not dance around it with lies, word games, and obfuscation via classification."
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You've got to be kidding me...
Oh, please just tell me if you're joking..because if you're not, we're truly fucked as a country, with people thinking this way about an out-of-control government.
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Hay and Needles
Just as hard as the traditional version and having to deal with a lot of pricks.
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Corrupt Foreign Intelligence Committee
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Nop, to the psychiatrist. This is not some addiction, it's a full scale psychiatric disorder. We've discussed before on an article on an interview with one person responsible for filtering what the Chinese (was it?) can see, it takes a sick megalomaniac to believe they have the right to dictate what people read or do.
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