If It Took Seven Years And An Employee Confession To Reveal Intentional NSA Abuse, How Can NSA Say It Knows All Abuses?
from the how-can-anyone-take-them-seriously dept
We partly made this point last week, but I'm kind of in shock that so few people have paid attention to it, it seems worth highlighting again: the NSA revelations last week about the supposed "only" cases of intentional abuse show that there's likely a ton of abuse that went undiscovered. After all, remember that NSA boss Keith Alexander has insisted that its auditing is near perfect:"The assumption is our people are just out there wheeling and dealing. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have tremendous oversight over these programmes. We can audit the actions of our people 100%, and we do that," he said.Given that, you'd assume those twelve cases of intentional (and at times flagrant) abuse of the system, often to spy on "love interests" would have been caught by those audits. But no. By our count, only three out of the twelve were caught by audits. And four of the revelations appear to have been self-reported. And one of the abuses (one of the self-reported ones) happened seven years before the confession.
Addressing the Black Hat convention in Las Vegas, an annual gathering for the information security industry, he gave a personal example: "I have four daughters. Can I go and intercept their emails? No. The technical limitations are in there." Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is 100% audibility."
Given all of this, how can anyone (especially those in charge of the NSA and its oversight) argue that those are the only intentional abuses -- or that their audits can catch everyone? That's clearly untrue because they didn't.
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Filed Under: audit, intentional abuses, keith alexander, loveint, nsa, nsa surveillance
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Two Words
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Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is 100% audibility.
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Re: Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is 100% audibility.
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Re: Re: Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is 100% audibility.
Just that they were audit-able...if they feel like it...and Snowden has already posted the documents online.
And if no one is in the room. Of course, that 'no one' includes the auditor.
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Re: Re: Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is 100% audibility.
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Re: Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is 100% audibility.
If viewed through the lens of how lawyers talk (lying without uttering a single untruth), this may be entirely correct.
He claimed 100% autidability. That means that it is technically possible to audit everything. I can easily see this being true.
He didn't claim that this technical ability was actually used in 100% of the cases.
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Re: Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is 100% audibility.
This guys weasel words have so many holes in them you could use them as a sieve. The guy is transparently a liar.
And all of it is just fine with Clapper the crapper and Obama the hopeless. I cannot understand why there is so much fire and all Americans can think to do is hold their hands against it for warmth.
This is potentially the biggest scandal since Watergate but there seems to be remarkably little actually happening.
Annie
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his technical limitations
i.e., "I don't know how to run an SQL query. I have other people do that."
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Re: his technical limitations
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So this billion-dollar program is being outwitted by his daughters.
Money well spent.
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C'mon Mike!
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"Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent that, in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable"
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Rotten to the core!
Another snowden predecessor, who went to jail.
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This guy was replying to "Thank you for spying on me and my family" and saw nothing wrong in what he is doing.
If that was the response from an employee, is it the exception or the rule?
Because that's how they're justifying it.
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Re:
Even if that guy's rather distorted view of the politics of this were accurate, it's still a strange argument to make. Is he really asserting that one cannot be a "Liberal Socialist" and a patriotic American at the same time? That's an incredibly unpatriotic stance to take.
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