New NSA Boss' Understatement Of The Year: NSA 'Has Lost A Measure Of Trust' From The Public
from the depends-on-what-'measure' dept
New NSA boss Admiral Mike Rogers (once again, a different guy than NSA "overseer" and "chief #1 fan" Rep. Mike Rogers) has kicked off his new job by significantly understating the current predicament of the NSA with regards to its relationship with the public. In fact, count the multiple understatements in his comments:“I tell the [NSA] workforce out there as the new guy, let’s be honest with each other, the nation has lost a measure of trust in us,” Admiral Michael Rogers told a conference of the Women in Aerospace conference in Crystal City, Va."A measure of trust." I guess that depends on exactly what "measure" you're talking about, but I'd start with a fairly large one, and then go up from there. And then up some more.
In the future, he said, “If we make a mistake, you will hear about it. That’s my job as director and I have no problem with it. ... We are not going to hide our mistakes.”Yes, the director of the agency which once denied its own existence and was referred to as No Such Agency is claiming the agency won't hide its mistakes? Pretty much the only thing that the NSA does is hide its own activities. That's its core competence. Hiding everything that it does, which all too frequently includes its mistakes.
“The whole media leaks issue as we call it, has caused quite a stir,” said Rogers, who was sworn in as director of NSA and assumed command of U.S. Cyber Command at the beginning of April."Lost a measure of trust," "media leaks issue," "quite a stir." Yes, Admiral Rogers is the master of the understatement.
And, for all the talk about how the NSA won't hide from its mistakes, rather than taking responsibility for its mistakes, Admiral Rogers takes the easy way out: blame the media!
Rogers didn’t lay complete responsibility at the doorstep of the NSA: He blamed public mistrust on the way the newsmedia had framed the issues raised in the Snowden revelations.That's a joke?
“From my perspective the debate and the dialogue to date have been very uneven,” he said.
“Your neighbors are saying to you: ‘Man, I’ve been listening about you on the TV and reading about you in the papers and I had no idea what a bad person you are,’” he joked.
He said the NSA and its staff had to work to “earn and sustain” Americans’ trust, but could not be too open about the work of the ultra-secret agency, which specializes in electronic eavesdropping and other surveillance using the latest high technology.Wait. I thought he was just saying that the NSA wouldn't hide from its mistakes any more (note that he has still yet to admit to a mistake, but instead, blamed the media for everything).
“I believe in transparency and I will be as transparent as possible, but I also have to be mindful that in doing so I cannot undermine the specifics of what we’re doing” to protect the country, he said.So, he doesn't know how to be transparent, but he believes in transparency.
“To do that [be transparent] I have to get out of my comfort zone,” he acknowledged. “I have to walk that tightrope.”
To sum up, Admiral Rogers appears to be saying that the NSA lost some trust because of a "media leak" which caused "a bit of a stir," and because of that he's going to embrace transparency and not hide from his mistakes. But... at the same time, he won't admit to a single mistake, and it's really all the press's fault for misreporting on things that need to be kept secret. And, also, he believes in transparency so much that he admits he isn't comfortable with transparency, and if he's actually transparent, we might all die.
That's not exactly going to win back any of the "measure" of trust the NSA lost there...
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Filed Under: admiral mike rogers, nsa, surveillance, transparency, trust
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Considering the amount of haystacks they have been collecting I'm guessing this measure may be lost forever.
Also, I'd say that China is a measure into censorship. Just a measure.
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They are also trying to shift their economy from an export economy to a market economy, which will be good news for Europe and USA in the long run.
That China has a very long way to go on openness and media freedom is very evident, but they are moving in the right direction on other issues as opposed to other countries.
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Not just the NSA but government as a whole has lost not just a measure but pretty much stomped it in the ground.
Any time you get public officials to address the nation through the media then it is not the media that is at issue because these officials purposely used the media to spread the word.
To add insult to injury, within days, those messages were proven lies which then the tactic was repeated over and over again.
There is a reason the public has lost faith in the government, not just NSA. They've had their noses rubbed in just how bad it really is.
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something is very, very wrong.
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Where is...
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FTFY
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Hmmm. I'm still waiting for the NSA to admit it thinks it has made a mistake. My guess is they stand behind everything they do, so this statement might very well be the most meaningless thing in his statement.
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There, added in the second half of the statement, makes much more sense now wouldn't you say?
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As far as this little tidbit:
“From my perspective the debate and the dialogue to date have been very uneven,” he said.
When a large proporation of everything you utter is outright lies, and most of the rest of your content are words you've redifined to mean things the rest of us define differently, then yes, you're going to have a debate and dialigue that is very uneven.
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It is after all an agency created to be secret, to do things in secret and to keep those secrets.
In other words, it's not really a bug if they keep secrets, it's a feature.
The real problem here is government and the problem with government isn't the backward, ignorant, thoughtless short sighted politicians, but the people who choose them as their representatives.
Some people simply cannot grasp that secret spy agencies are directly antithetical to democratic government. Believing that 1) you need them and 2) you can control them is as broken a way of thinking as believing that torture is 1) sometimes necessary or 2) actually useful.
The problem arises when people think that secret spy agencies are a necessity for any country and a lot of Americans do believe just that.
It all really comes under the same problem faced with policing, there are a sizable number of people (who are not police; police will always think this) who believe that anything that makes the job of the police easier to do should be available to them, other people realise that while police should have the legislation and tools available to them to make their job possible, making it easy is not and should not be the aim.
US experience of using secret spy agencies has led the US to be responsible for overthrowing democratically elected governments, supporting dictators and both torturing people and instructing others in torture techniques.
If those are parts of US history and present that US people are proud of, then by all means carry on, bearing in mind that anything that governments find they can get away with outside the borders of their country, they inevitably eventually decide to do inside their own borders.
Effectively, the US love affair with spy agencies is a hell of a lot of rope, now are you going to keep it and if so, what use are you going to make of it?
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Well, he's right
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Really? A measure of trust?
If this quote...
"the nation has lost a measure of trust in us" means "Most of the Americans that are concious now know about the existance of the NSA and hate us."
Would be like a doctor saying "The patient is suffering from a mild headache." means "OH crap!, the NYPD blew this fuckers head off!!!"
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Masnick, how would you have phrased things were you the one delivering the speech?
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"Guys, we've fucked up big time - we're pretty much just government whores at this point. Expect this to get worse before it gets better, and the public to hold us accountable for crimes against humanity."
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Technically they are supposed to be, but you've seen what happens when government actually tries to oversee them.
If any body is whore to one group, it's government and by extension the people that the government represents who are getting f*&%ed by the NSA and god knows how many other acronymous organisations.
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Don't be silly.
The government writes out their paychecks.
The government gives them their marching orders.
The government hired them and the government can fire them - if they do not do as they are told.
These agencies are doing PRECISELY what the Government has ordered them to do.
This is why there has been not a single wrist slapping from the Fed on any NSA activities. Because the NSA is doing exactly what it was told to do. In fact, bonuses are in order for a job well done.
Your "government" - a criminal organization by any other name - is lying to you daily, about far more than just what the NSA, FBI, CIA and HLS are about.
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It's not simply about "word choice".
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That the rules we operate under are secret, governed by a secret court, in secret, using secret rules, and that process is secret, so when we share our 'intelligence' with LEA's but don't let them tell where they got their 'intelligence' there is no way to point back at us, cause imperative?
In fact, you are not allowed to know that you are not allowed to know!
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Understatements
What do you expect? These people lie for a living. (Yes, even more so than marketing / sales / bankers / lawyers / congress.)
Understatements are probably the closest thing to genuine truth that we will ever hear cross their lips.
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Don't worry - this will be fixed once you have settled in.
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Understatement?
" Rogers didn’t lay complete responsibility at the doorstep of the NSA: He blamed public mistrust on the way the newsmedia had framed the issues raised in the Snowden revelations. "
I mean, he's not interested in whether or not they were justified in doing so-only that the NSA doesn't get caught doing it again and being exposed.
No, he's not being facetious.
He's perfectly serious and he doesn't think we have any right to know anything that the government doesn't want us to know.
I don't expect things will change much with this new boss, either.
Same old shit, different day and name.
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He's right
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Ten pounds of bullshit and they didn't budget a bag.
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http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-google.html
Doing things like installing back doors in BIOS is not going to win you any more trust either.
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Rogers believes in transparency... as in, he knows it exists.
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Accurate enough
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Call the next witness
(When asked, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?", a Mike Rogers or James Clapper would automatically respond, "Strict oversight *ensures* that I have a sense of decency.")
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Not only has the NSA lost the trust of the US public...
Good. Bloody good. Every contracted export sector, they deserve. Every aborted weapons sale, and satellite deal, they deserve. They deserve every lost job, and every lost billion in profits.
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Demoted to a Captain for stupidity...
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He still doesn't get it. HIS neighbors may be saying that that to HIM because he's in a leadership role. I have seen no reports and know of no one who blames the workers at the NSA for any of this. 100% of the criticism falls squarely on the shoulders of those IN CHARGE of the NSA. They are the ones who did this, not the workers.
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Yes, this is one of the big distortions the NSA defenders trot out regularly -- pretending that criticism of the agency's actions is really criticism of the rank-and-file workers.
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"I have seen no reports and know of no one who blames the workers at the NSA for any of this."
Yes, this is one of the big distortions the NSA defenders trot out regularly -- pretending that criticism of the agency's actions is really criticism of the rank-and-file workers."
Um, did I just imagine the stories about how rank and file workers abused their positions at NSA to access data on people who were under no sort of gov't investigation whatever, like ex-girlfriends, friends, and neighbors, just for the hell of it and because they can?
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The NSA is my enemy
It used to be different in the late 90ies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux
But then, the NSA was about "making the USA more secure by making everyone more secure". Now it's the opposite ;).
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And that measure is in parsecs.
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...on the bright side...
When you put your faith/trust in people who mean you only harm, you simply make it easier for them to do you harm.
The very best thing the public could do is withdraw their trust from the Federal Government itself - no part of which is pro-public - before it drains the nation dry and brings it crumbling down into dust.
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