"If there is going to be another big terrorist attack on American soil, it's going to be one that would have hit us with or without Snowden,"
If we are to talk fantasy, then I'd say you're there with that statement. SIGINT has already stopped attacks, after all. Just one tiny bit of non-SIGINT intelligence thwarted the 2006 attack. That's why you don't want to throw away any advantage when peoples' lives are at stake. In a free society, this is always tough. It's hard to catch spies, for example. And, it's hard to justify intelligence methods when the population sees differently, even though they know little about the issues.
"if Snowden hadn't discovered the flaws and abuse in the system, then someone else or even multiple someone else's would have because of all the holes in it, so focus your disdain on the people who actually got us into this mess in the first place."
Somebody more responsible, hopefully. It didn't have to be a guy who stole a zillion documents, leaked a whole bunch about foreign intelligence operations, and fled to the territory of the two most significant enemies we have in the world. When I had security clearances, I took them seriously.
As to the world hating the US... first, it's not true. Travel much? Second, a lot of those who hate us do so because we are successful and we are not Muslim. Envy is a great way to gin up hate, as is religious fanaticism.
The intelligence capabilities got hammered in the past because well intentioned people were not aware of the damage their actions actually would do. They were sometimes abetted by ill-intentioned folks. Snowden, who may have been well intentioned (I doubt that but cannot prove it) followed in their footsteps.
As to historic wars, it's hard to find modern villains worse than Stalin, Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. We lost 100,000 soldiers fighting against Stalin and his successors in Vietnam (where I served) and Korea. The only significant difference between those two wars was the way they played out in US politics, and the resulting policy differences. Both were wars against Soviet-arranged aggression. Both ended up the same militarily, except in Vietnam, we just left after we won, where in Korea, we stayed behind.
Perhaps it wasn't wise to get rid of Saddam, but those who decry those wars rarely examine the likely consequences of staying out. After all, Saddam launched a war that killed 1,000,000 or so people, and then a few years later invaded one of our allies, threatened a critical (if evil) one, and rocketed a third. At the time, he was armed with huge stocks of WMDs and was working on nuclear weapons. The guy didn't change 12 years later (unlike Qhadaffi, another nasty guy who gave up his external nastiness and his WMD programs in return for our protection, something Obama failed to honor).
The Iraq war showed another repeating (rhyming?) theme in modern history: in both Vietnam and Iraq, the US failed in the first 3 years of the war, which destroyed domestic support. It then succeeded, but it was too late - the support was gone. In both cases, demagogues in the new media grossly misrepresented the issue as the wars dragged on.
"But I don't think another major terrorist attack is likely to happen either. One of the reasons we haven't been invaded since 1812 is because the United States has become HUGE, like Russia. There's just too much land mass to invade, so all our enemies can really hope to do is take pot shots at us from outside."
Actually, you just gave one of the reasons that we *will* suffer another major terrorist attack: we are big, so only asymmetric warfare can harm us. Terror attacks can be from stateless entities, like Al Qaeda, or state directed actors like Hezbollah (or the Iranian Quds force who fought us in Iraq).
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As to my claims, it is always hard to defend intelligence agencies, because of necessary secrecy. And, for me, it tends to be pretty hard to defend the government. But, I would appreciate it if you told me which evidence at TOG's links refutes what I am saying.
"That means nothing really. Do you really think that Al Qaeda is unaware that the USG uses every means possible to gain intel on them and wouldn't have increased their communication security anyways? That's pretty naive."
Your comment is naive. In warfare, and that's what this is, adversaries rarely have perfect information, but they strive to get the best they can. The very fact that AQ came out with new encryption shortly after Snowden's releases is telling.
You ask what releases are telling. The deep penetration of the internet was news to me, and I'd bet it was news to AQ. Remember, these guys *have* to trade off security with operational capability. They can't just use the most absolutely secure techniques - partly because they can't know what those techniques are! Did they know that NSA was able to read their mail even though it was SSL encrypted? No? Did that affect their actions - of course!
"Thus far, quite a few are. But I really wouldn't know. Do you?" Not directly. But the NSA wouldn't be as upset about this if they didn't think it was seriously compromising their mission. Contrary to what the paranoid think, their mission is primarily SIGINT on foreign threats, and that what has been compromised.
Now one can believe that the members of both parties on the intelligence committees in both houses are just lying about the damage. But if you believe that, you might as well find another place to live, because all hope is already gone!
But this statement suggests just that: "I'm sure you think that a lapdog, press pass chasing mainstream media reporter would have handled it better, right? Not me. I'd rather have truth over propaganda."
Apparently you are not talking about the US media, since they *love* scandals and have *loved* this one. Yeah, they are propagandistic - they tend to strongly favor the Democrats and the left - but there is no way they would bury this one.
"Dude, at least get your facts straight. He went to Hong Kong (ie: somewhere marginally neutral) to pass on the documents to the press. That didn't work out so well because of intense pressure from the USG. He was on his way to Ecuador to seek asylum and the USG stranded him en route at the Moscow airport by yanking his passport."
So he claims. He didn't go to, say, Bolivia. No, he went to a place controlled by our enemy: China. Then he went to a place controlled by another enemy: Russia. How remarkable that only these places were available to him. Now he is in a place where our enemy (Russia, you know, the nice guys who just ate Crimea) can get anything they want out of him. Their methods make the CIA look tame.
So you're reduced to psychoanalyzing me, eh? That's not constructive.
But I can respond in kind... obviously you are so enamored of Snowden's carefully constructed hero image that you cannot see anything else. Here we have this low grade sysadmin, whose parents were in grade school when I first hacked into an operating system, thrilling the world with his brilliance. Worship at his feet. I'm not impressed.
While we're at it, I see you are projecting "hate one's guts."
Enough of that.
Actually, by internet standards, this has been pretty civil, which I do appreciate.
Snowden was most certainly not alerting us that the US "pants were down." I have seen that nowhere in his leaks. The only security vulnerability he alerted us to was that NSA was lax in one specific way: failure to adequately supervise highly cleared, sworn individuals with sys-admin access. He could easily have revealed that with *one* document dump of non-injurious data - and fled to Russia or whatever after he did it (or even put it out anonymously). That he chose to dump reams and reams (to use an old technology term) of data shows otherwise.
As to the statistics - I'm not arguing whether they are correct. I am arguing that they not very relevant. The threat isn't great for any one individual - so what (although people I knew were killed by Islamist terrorists, not all by Al Qaeda). One could use the same reasoning to suggest that we shouldn't have been afraid of Soviet nukes during the cold war, because they never used them.
Seriously, do you believe 13 years of disrupted plots and low casualty counts means there is no more danger? Does this mean that if they only kill another 3000 in the US in one attack a few days from now, it doesn't matter? Are you familiar with the plot just barely stopped, in 2006, where 10 airliners were going to be blown up as they descended from Europe over US cities? At the time, we had no measures in place to stop the liquid bombs that were going to be used. Can you imagine what that attack would have done? It would have had a higher death toll than 9-11. It would have devastated air transportation (and the economies of the world that depend on it). We got lucky on that, because MI6 and MI5 weren't asleep at the switch and weren't hobbled by civil libertarians (unlike the FBI pre-9-11). Although the initial tip-off to that plot didn't come from signals intelligence, it could have. It is a lot less likely to be caught now, because Al Qaeda knows our capabilities, which before they could only guess at.
This was not the first and won't be the last large scale attack. Al Qaeda first tested this in 1994, killing one passenger and blowing a hole in the side of an en-route airliner. They were planning a ten or more plane attack to follow, which was only disrupted because of an accidental fire in their bomb facility (Google bojinka plot for details).
Americans tend to think short-term about this stuff. Using 13 years of statistics is an example of that. Islamists are thinking in 100 year time spans. They may have a nutty ideology, but that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous (invoking Godwin's rule here: the Nazi ideology was just as whacky). Our short-sightedness on these issues is largely because we have been isolated from many dangers by the oceans, and haven't been invaded since the war of 1812.
That short-sightedness has been visible in the past. Before WW-II, there was a large and very influential anti-war movement in the US. They didn't want to fight the Nazi's, and never imagined that the Japanese would attack us.
After Vietnam, we retreated into our isolationist heads-down shell again. We gutted the CIA and the military, imagining that we could just sweet talk our adversaries into goodness (sound familiar?). That didn't work, as the Iranian revolution, and rapid spread of Soviet influence around the world shows.
After the cold war, we did it again. As mentioned before, we crippled our counter-intelligence capabilities by locking them out of any information gleaned by criminal investigations, and vice versa. The result was 9-11. (As an aside, I think the US should move CI out of the FBI into it's own MI-5 equivalent agency - to reduce conflict of interest and goals).
I have been following Islamist terrorism since the early 1980s. As I said up-thread, an attack of the scale of 9-11 did not surprise me, and I knew as soon as the second plane it that it was most likely Al Qaeda. When the USS Cole was bombed, I knew Al Qaeda was still after us. When Massoud was killed in Afghanistan on 9-9-2001, I was afraid that something was up.
Those guys don't give up. They can't. It's a holy mission.
Perhaps you are not used to thinking about strategic threats, viewing Al Qaeda instead as a pin-prick organization that just got lucky. And indeed, Al Qaeda may not get that lucky again. But they are not alone, and they are surely trying, and lately we have been strengthening their hand by giving them more and more sanctuaries in which to operate: Syria, parts of Libya, western Iraq, and soon, all of Afghanistan, to name a few. The last time they had Afghanistan, they plotted 9-11, and succeeded. They also, in their sanctuary, experimented with chemical weapons - with their PhD neuroscientist (and their physician current leader, al-Zawahiri MD).
Hezbollah, which has also killed a bunch of Americans, operates in Mexico. If the dictators in Iran feel a need to hit at us, they'll use Hezbollah in an asymmetric strike (or a bunch), because they can't do anything with conventional warfare. How will you feel when, statistics still tiny, a few dozen school kids are blown up in school busses across states near Mexico? Not a big threat? The same measures which work against Al Qaeda work against Hezbollah (or worked until Snowden blew them).
My point is: the threats are real. Sure, any individual American is unlikely to be killed in them. But, terrorism isn't about killing lots of people - it is about causing societal or economic damage through the fear generated by such attacks (hence the word "terror"). It is an ancient and tried and true technique.
Your statistics are misleading. It's like saying in 2000 that the risk that terrorists would fly an airplane into a US building were zero, because they hadn't done it.
As I've said before in this thread, the threat is not little acts of terrorism, like the Boston Marathon bombing or the fizzled Times Square bombing. The risk is of major attacks. Al Qaeda know this too. That's why they had a PhD scientist on their Afghanistan staff in 2001. The risk is a major biological attack, or an attack on a nuclear plant (say, to set off explosives in a quickly drained cooling pond), or a chemical attack in a highly crowded area like NYC. And, the risk is just not how many are killed, but the economic *and civil liberties* consequences of the attack.
9-11 cost over $1 trillion in direct economic damages, and a lot more in the resulting wars.
The US government, incompetent as they and all governments must necessarily be, at least recognizes this. They have spent over $70 billion dollars on combating bio-terrorism. Sadly, because of the nature of the threat, a lot of that is on how to respond after the attack happens and thousands of people are dying. But they take it seriously.
We should too, even if our media and our visually focused, short term thinking public doesn't.
And... that's just an example of one serious threat. There are others.
As to what Snowden should have done... It is my opinion that he should suffer for the Americans who will die as a result of his action. I'm tired of talking about it, and nothing will change the minds of those more afraid of having their phone records stored than of those countries and organizations how to destroy our way of life and to kill some of us.
"clearly gravely damaging to US national security" - release of details about means, methods and practices of signals intelligence is damaging, because the primary target of these activities is foreigners whose actions may harm the interests of the US.
Al Qaeda is one obvious example - they introduced three new encryption programs shortly after the NSA internet programs were made public.
Another example: the tapping of Merkel's phone. Germany is an ally, but Germany can and does act against US national interests. Revealing that we had the means to intercept her phone is quite dangerous.
Intelligence is largely the process of collecting lots of bits of data and building a picture from it. Our adversaries do this. In the case of the Snowden releases, instead of bits of data, it's mountains of data.
Do you really think that those many documents Snowden took are just about spying on Americans?
"A journalist who is exposing Constitutional violations is un-American? What kind of crazy dictionary are you using?"
A journalist writing for a foreign left-wing anti-American paper (The Guardian).
"The US stranded Snowden in Russia by revoking his passport, he didn't choose to stay there."
Yeah... except before that happened, Snowden had already fled to China, that human rights haven which is constantly spying on Americans, stealing our secrets, and rapidly building a military whose stated purpose is to sink our ships.
Then he went to Russia, another paragon of virtue.
I think you have a misperception of the risks the civil rights activists took. Some were killed, after all. Many were beaten.
I'm not sure why you think things are different now in this regard. Espionage was treated more harshly in the past than now. It's true that Daniel Ellsberg got off, but he couldn't know that ahead of time.
But... my primary problem with Snowden is not that he embarrassed the NSA (they beclowned themselves by allowing him that broad, unsupervised access) or that he is a coward. It is that he released information that is clearly gravely damaging to US national security, and that he chose to do so based purely on his own arrogance, the arrogance that he knew better than Congress, the FISA courts, and the Administration. It is that he released this information to a journalist who is strongly anti-American. It is that he didn't even try releasing it to a congressman - when it is clear that many congressmen (many of my own party) who are happy to pummel the NSA for political gain. It is that he fled to enemy countries.
He certainly isn't the first to have caused grave harm this way, although I don't think any previous releases were as damaging, except the "A-bomb" spies (the Soviet run officers and agents in the US nuclear weapons project).
"That would not have worked at all. Snowden was dealing with confidential information, so revealing it to anyone, even a sympathetic congressman, would have gotten him labeled as a traitor and dumped into the same situation he's in now."
It's been done plenty of times without the outcome Snowden faces.
"If you just take whatever punishment the courts had you without protest though, then you're no longer being civilly disobedient, are you?"
Nonsense. You just made up your own definition of civil disobedience that is contrary to history.
"You haven't had your privacy violated until you become aware of it'(otherwise known as the peeping-tom excuse). "
That isn't what I wrote or meant. I meant that your civil liberties haven't been harmed unless the government acts illegally on that information. That they have a big pile of your metadata is not, per se, harmful. It is what they do with it.
As to the rental analogy... It has long been adjudicated that renters have privacy. The fourth amendment doesn't distinguish rental houses from owned houses (or, per courts, apartments). So, very different situation. A better analogy is if you put tiny labels on all your documents, stuck stamps in the corners, and dropped them in the mailbox. That's more akin to what's happening here.
On to your links... they look like what I would expect when the system is working right: the NSA goes beyond in some areas, and the court reins them in. Duh. Do you imagine that they will always, magically, be exactly right?
So, show me one American who was harmed by the violations listed in your links. You can't.
So I will be generous: there were a few cases where NSA personnel used systems to spy for personal reasons. That's clearly abuse. And when they were caught, they were disciplined. And that' what you would expect when things work right, because government agencies are compose of actual human beings. And that's one reason we have minimization procedures and oversight in the first place. I just wish they had been as careful in overseeing their sysadmins!
If you demand that the NSA be perfect, then you are not being realistic. But if you recognize that they created rules, mostly abided by them, and were slapped down when they missed, then you understand the situation. That's how these systems evolve, too. When they go beyond, usually its because they think they are not beyond. So the courts detect it, and change their guidance, and that is pushed down into the agency.
That's the best you can do with this sort of thing. And it's certainly good enough for me.
No, the Russians are ruthless. The CIA is not. If the Russians believe that extreme measures are needed, they will have no qualms about it. I don't just mean repeatedly gagging someone (waterboarding) or stress positions. Heck, the US did that to *me* in SERE school. I mean whatever torture they feel will work - amputation, burning, electric shock, drugs... whatever. They are not constrained to a few lawyer-approved methods, unlike the CIA.
A to Russian "unpopularity" - the Russian government (i.e, Putin) is not unpopular with the people it cares about: Russians. Quite the opposite.
The Russians might not want to risk the bad foreign publicity of Snowden disappearing. But more likely, they are finding his continued value as an propaganda tool more useful at the moment than the remaining secrets (if there are any) that they might get. Also, since Putin is a sadist and a narcissist, I suspect he gets off on Snowden's antics - Putin gets to once again humiliate the US - over and over.
Snowden claims not to have any documents with him. Okay - do we believe that? Do we believe that a narcissist like him would not have provided some way for him to get them as he needed them? I sure don't.
I do agree with one thing: the NSA was tragically weak on security. You can't generalize that to generally weak internally, but certainly they failed to take adequate precautions in Snowden's case.
I'd bet that, today, sysadmins aren't able to operate as freely as Snowden was. The NSA may be a government bureaucracy, but it has a lot of extremely smart and determined people in it. If they have been able to get through the bureaucratic thicket, they have patched this hole, and are looking hard for others.
I left the words out on purpose, because I didn't want my main point to get confused with the rather obscure meaning of the 4th's warrant clause (which is not what most people think). But that's a digression from the main point here...
The answer to your specific question is: because the grabbing does not constitute a search. What will constitute some sort of search is *using* that data - depending on how it is used and what it is used for.
NSA has "minimization procedures" to limit that usage, which means that very few people are "searched" in any meaningful way. Those procedures are meant to provide a balance between gross civil liberties violations, and the loss of all useful intelligence. Obviously, many people disagree that they are sufficient, but the FISA court liked them (and in a few cases, adjusted them).
There is a new theory, which I think may eventually be accepted by the courts, that grabbing a lot of data may constitute a search even though each individual piece does not. This is the "mosaic theory." But... it would be *new*. It is not a matter of settled law or understanding, and obviously is not what the drafters were thinking about.
My position is simple: in the modern era, technology has created new threats, and new ways that adversaries can operate. We need a way to deal with this. The right balance of detection and civil liberties is not obvious to me. I think the anger at NSA is way out of line. But... we need to try to figure out how to defend ourselves against adversaries without turning our government into one of the adversaries. This has always been a difficult problem.
BTW... I deeply dislike the current administration. My support for the NSA is not partisan at all. I am a national security hawk, I pay a lot of attention to the threat environment, and I have my own opinions as to the proper balance of detection technologies vs. civil liberties. YMMV.
Who was briefed and who has oversight is not necessarily related to whether an action is Constitutional or not."
I was referring to the constitutionally created mechanisms for government actions. When an activity is managed across all three branches, that's working the way the constitution intends.
You seem to live in a dreamland where we can all do whatever we want, in complete secrecy, as long as nobody else is harmed. Unfortunately, that is in direct conflict with the enforcement of laws and the protection of the citizenry from foreign powers and agents.
There is plenty of room to agrue about where to draw the line, but from your vehemence, I doubt you are interested in anything other than shouting your absolutist bullshit.
That you disagree with the rulings of the courts is fine, but to call other opinions "bullshit" repeatedly is tendentious.
"This is a case of a clear violation of the fourth amendment as it's written."
No, it is not. Go back and read the fourth amendment:
The relevant part of the fourth is "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
Note the word "unreasonable." Note that information given to others is not covered. Note that jurisprudence has allowed authorities to gather metadata for centuries - early on, that metadata was whatever was written on the outside of the envelopes. Now it is the electronic equivalent: call records.
Snowden revealed a whole lot more than "the extent to which we are being spied on as ordinary citizens." If that was all he revealed, I wouldn't be so bothered about it.
What he revealed was a whole lot of details about domestic, but more importantly, foreign intelligence capabilities and methods.
For good reasons, that class of information has long been considered extremely sensitive, subject to the highest classification levels and protection.
The idea that releasing this information doesn't help our adversaries is untenable. In World War II, the Japanese encrypted their communications. The US broke their naval codes, which directly led to the victory at Midway (and a lot of other places, including the assassination of Yamamoto). If the Japanese know this, they would obviously have taken countermeasures.
Our adversaries know we are trying to "read their mail." But they didn't know that the NSA had penetrated systems in a way that they could get around SSL encryption without breaking it by cryptography. They do now.
And they know a whole lot more. We don't even know how much they have discovered, because we don't know what Snowden has given them.
The Russian security services are very good at getting information from people, and are utterly ruthless. They will get what Snowden has, if they haven't already.
No, I don't work in the intelligence field. I have worked with classified information (in other fields, and when I was in the military) and know people who were in intelligence.
Of course the vast majority in congress had no details. It's called "need to know." You can't spread sensitive secrets to 535 people and their staff! This isn't to hide things from the public - it's primarily to protect the secrets that we used to have until Snowden.
But, those in the legislature who did know were from both parties, and were put on those committees with the knowledge of all that they would be handling highly secret information and not letting it out.
You can call them cheerleaders if you want, but I think they are people who know enough about the real dangers (due to their access to classified information) that they keep their mouths shut even when the actions are by an administration they deeply dislike.
As for one court - yes, one court that has had quite a number of federal judges roll through it during the time of this activity, and all of those judges knew about the activity. The very fact that they occasionally "slapped down" the NSA (actually, they minimized a few requests) shows that they weren't toadies.
As far as I can tell, by your logic, we can not defend ourselves against certain kinds of threats. The *necessary* secrecy leads you and many to believe that there is no oversight, so we just can't do it.
That is the sort of logic that lead to 9-11. Civil libertarians believed that the FBI should not allow it's counter-intelligence folks to communicate with it's anti-crime folks - the Gorelick rule. Without that rule, 9-11 almost certainly would have been prevented.
My argument is that we need balance. We need procedures to minimize the impact of necessary intrustions.
A secondary argument is that, if we fail, and the inevitable mass casualty attack happens, we will then have to rush into a massive surveillance program - under public pressure. Better to have one in place where safeguards are worked out and experience gained.
There are plenty of federal agencies I don't trust at all. The NSA is not one of them, because their mission is specific and targeted on certain kinds of security, and because they are a military organization (which leads to different ethics and behavior towards civilians). I do believe that the DEA should not be a legal customer of NSA in these sensitive areas, because I don't think their mission is a critical national defense issue, and their involvement threatens to tarnish an otherwise very important activity.
As to the "lying weasel words" - that is not helpful. If those are lies, one might believe you if you offered evidence rather than pejoratives.
Perhaps you can elucidate how we are to protect ourselves against modern threats. Try just one very plausible scenario, one that causes national security folks to lose sleep, and one they have spent almost $100 billion to prevent and prepare a reaction to. It is the one I was expecting when 9-11 happened. I have been following Islamist terror for a long time, and on 9-11, the 9-11 surprises to me were the date, the target and the method. I was not surprised at a mass casualty attack, and the moment I saw the second plane hit, I knew it was Al Qaeda.
The scenario: terrorists get hold of a contagious, deadly biological agents such as smallpox; they conspire to spread it at US airports in the security lines. The death toll from such an attack ranges from the low thousands to the tens of millions.
Backup for the scenario... Al Qaeda (and other Islamists) clearly intend to do us grievous harm. They believe that if they kill enough of our civilians, we will leave them alone to construct the new Caliphate. Iran, btw, has similar religious views, and also engages in terrorism, and might try such an attack if pressed too hard. There is clearly no reduction in Islamist terror, but we have successfully defended ourselves in the U S(except for the Boston Marathon).
In 2001, Al Qaeda was actively experimenting with chemical weapons, and was interested in biological weapons. The US captured a PhD neuro-scientist who was Al Qaeda's leader in this area.
Biological weapons terrorism has been made a lot easier by modern advances. Genetic engineering is widely taught in universities, and the cost of it has gone down. There is even a genetic engineering maker movement, and you can buy time on sequencers and PCR equipment, etc, and you can purchase made-to-order DNA sequences. You can get the needed lab equipment and reagents.
Al Qaeda may be fanatics, but not all of them are stupid. Core Al Qaeda has a high percentage of engineers and medical people. The current leader of Al Qaeda is an MD.
There are official channels. They are often abused by the government.
But there are also unofficial channels, the use of which is a lot more responsible than spreading critical national security secrets around the world. He could have gone to a congressman critical of the administration, for example.
Also, there is a tradition in this country of civil disobedience. One believes the government is acting unfairly, one violates the law to try to get it corrected, and then on takes whatever punishment is meted out by the courts. This is what the civil rights people did in the 50's and 60's. It's honorable.
Snowden shows the following by his actions:
1) He believes that he is entitled to release critical national security information even though all three branches of the federal government are aware of this information, approve of what is being done, and are keeping it quite. That is profoundly anti-Democratic.
2) He is a coward. Rather than taking the honorable route, he flees to our geopolitical enemies.
You need to look more closely at the Islamist movement. They most certainly intend to cause us grievous harm.
As to the history, they didn't just attack once. They tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. In later 1990's, the set off two huge car bombs at US embassies in Africa, killing hundreds. The attacked the USS Cole with a boat filled with high explosive, killing a number of sailors. They tried to set off a bomb in Times square and the only reason it wasn't a disaster was incompetence - it fizzled. They set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon. They fought a significant war with us in Iraq, killing thousands including many Americans.
As to abandoning our core principles... It isn't a core principle that the government can't gather and scrutinize telephone call data. They have been doing that for a very long time before the terrorism started, and it has been held constitutional by the Supreme Court.
And yes, you have no choice but to make rational tradeoffs between civil liberties and safety (and order). It's done all the time and has been since the start of the republic. People love to quote Ben Franklin, but Franklin understood this need. That's why we have a court system, and we have other government officials swearing to defend the constitution: so that a democratic system, bolstered by the Constitution, can find the boundaries of liberty without sliding all they way down the slippery slope into tyranny.
For example, you probably have heard that you are not free to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. That in itself is a compromise between security and civil liberty - in this case the right to free speech.
One cannot have a rational discussion of policy without understanding that no freedom is absolute - that there will always be compromises, and that there always have been.
If the people decide that our government indeed is conspiring against us to an intolerable level, then we'll have a nasty, vicious revolution which has some chance to make things better.
The Fourth does not exist for the sake of privacy - it exists for the sake of constrained security. The fifth only addresses privacy in the realm of criminal defense - which is not the primary issue with the NSA.
The Ninth, unfortunately, is currently inoperative.
But... let's see what sort of privacy folks imagine they are entitled to. The claim is that the government use of metadata, not actual conversations, violates privacy rights. That isn't implausible. But for a very long time, courts have held that you have not right to privacy for information you give up to others - and that's what metadata (and email, these days) is. You do have a right to encrypt your email, after all.
The term "guns" doesn't exist in the Second, but it certainly a completely obvious part of it, since firarms were very common arms that were borne in the era.
If he ever comes back, noble motivations should get him an hour a week of sunlight at supermax. Otherwise, no sunlight at all.
They guy did incalculable damage, including damage to democracy by putting his judgement above that of our duly elected and appointed members of government. No, I don't think those folks are saints, but they are what representative democracy provides. Snowden is totally anti-Democracy - it's Snowden uber alles. Screw him.
I think you are seeking perfection in a field, intelligence, where that doesn't happen. The NSA tries its best, and for a government operation, it has been historically remarkably good - compared to, say, the CIA or FBI. I have a lot of respect for NSA, and the few professional and other encounters I have had with NSA folks have been impressive.
As to the stories... I lived those years. I had a copy of the original public key paper while the NSA was still embargoing its publishing. I remember the Clipper chip. So I do have a bit of a background here.
NSA originally didn't want to prevent encryption - they wanted a back door into it. Public pressure prevented that (perhaps that was good, but it's arguable).
For many years, people thought the NSA had intentionally weakened DES encryption, when NSA insisted that the key be 56 bits (plus 8 bit parity) when the original developers at IBM wanted 112 bits. Much later, academic cryptology researchers discovered that DES, counter-intuitively, was *stronger* at 56 bits than 112! Apparently NSA was decades ahead in this regard, and used their knowledge to improve publicly available encryption.
The increasing potential of Islamist terrorism was apparent to those of us paying attention in the 1990's. But, civil libertarians were doing their best to defeat our CI capabilities. 9-11 would have been prevented if the Gorelick rule had not been promulgated in the '90s. This was a civil liberties rule keeping FBI CI and criminal investigations separate.
But, once the real threat was demonstrated - with 3000 civilian casualties - more than the death toll at Pearl Harbo - NSA used many techniques. Too many (maybe all) of which have now been revealed by Snowden, which increases the threat and empowers our adversaries.
They are not making up stories - the threats and attempts are real. Does anyone imagine that the Islamists no longer want to kill American civilians in large numbers?
Also, before 9/11, the US indeed has a history of terrorist attacks. My former residence, Lawrence, KS, had all of its male residents killed by terrorists during the civil war. Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the US several times, including an attack in the Capitol building. There have been plenty of other incidents. But, nothing as lethal as 9-11.
Modern times have made the potential damage from a terrorist attack much more serious, while at the same time making it easier for foreigners to attack. Air transport, the internet, and the modern telephone system all enable adversaries. American adversaries, whether foreign governments or ideological groups like Islamists, represent a far greater danger than they did in the past, so just looking at history is missing a bigger picture. These days, genetic engineering applied to pathogens can make them more lethal. And, you no longer need a big institution to do it. A member of my family learned, and used the techniques as an undergraduate at a good US university. We did a business plan for some GE products, and the cost was surprisingly low - well within the budget of terrorists. And... Al Qaeda employed an Islamist scientist for this purpose - who had a doctorate in neuroscience from MIT (or was it Harvard... whatever). We captured her.
America has a long history of retreating into isolationism. Our geographical isolation has allowed us to get away with not worrying about foreign threats, with a few exceptions like Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center. We can no longer afford that luxury.
We need to make *rational* tradeoffs between civil liberties and protection. I believe NSA did a darned good job of it, based on what has been revealed so far. They had procedures to limit the scope of actual use of the vast data they gathered. They had approval of both houses of congress, who were regularly briefed, and approval of the FISA courts.
Obviously once can disagree. But too many people are just assuming that NSA is evil, that the programs are gigantic conspiracies to deprive us of our rights, and that the threats are minimal. Our deadly serious, evil and dedicated adversaries are quite happy about this.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Risk of terrorism
If we are to talk fantasy, then I'd say you're there with that statement. SIGINT has already stopped attacks, after all. Just one tiny bit of non-SIGINT intelligence thwarted the 2006 attack. That's why you don't want to throw away any advantage when peoples' lives are at stake. In a free society, this is always tough. It's hard to catch spies, for example. And, it's hard to justify intelligence methods when the population sees differently, even though they know little about the issues.
"if Snowden hadn't discovered the flaws and abuse in the system, then someone else or even multiple someone else's would have because of all the holes in it, so focus your disdain on the people who actually got us into this mess in the first place."
Somebody more responsible, hopefully. It didn't have to be a guy who stole a zillion documents, leaked a whole bunch about foreign intelligence operations, and fled to the territory of the two most significant enemies we have in the world. When I had security clearances, I took them seriously.
As to the world hating the US... first, it's not true. Travel much? Second, a lot of those who hate us do so because we are successful and we are not Muslim. Envy is a great way to gin up hate, as is religious fanaticism.
The intelligence capabilities got hammered in the past because well intentioned people were not aware of the damage their actions actually would do. They were sometimes abetted by ill-intentioned folks. Snowden, who may have been well intentioned (I doubt that but cannot prove it) followed in their footsteps.
As to historic wars, it's hard to find modern villains worse than Stalin, Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. We lost 100,000 soldiers fighting against Stalin and his successors in Vietnam (where I served) and Korea. The only significant difference between those two wars was the way they played out in US politics, and the resulting policy differences. Both were wars against Soviet-arranged aggression. Both ended up the same militarily, except in Vietnam, we just left after we won, where in Korea, we stayed behind.
Perhaps it wasn't wise to get rid of Saddam, but those who decry those wars rarely examine the likely consequences of staying out. After all, Saddam launched a war that killed 1,000,000 or so people, and then a few years later invaded one of our allies, threatened a critical (if evil) one, and rocketed a third. At the time, he was armed with huge stocks of WMDs and was working on nuclear weapons. The guy didn't change 12 years later (unlike Qhadaffi, another nasty guy who gave up his external nastiness and his WMD programs in return for our protection, something Obama failed to honor).
The Iraq war showed another repeating (rhyming?) theme in modern history: in both Vietnam and Iraq, the US failed in the first 3 years of the war, which destroyed domestic support. It then succeeded, but it was too late - the support was gone. In both cases, demagogues in the new media grossly misrepresented the issue as the wars dragged on.
"But I don't think another major terrorist attack is likely to happen either. One of the reasons we haven't been invaded since 1812 is because the United States has become HUGE, like Russia. There's just too much land mass to invade, so all our enemies can really hope to do is take pot shots at us from outside."
Actually, you just gave one of the reasons that we *will* suffer another major terrorist attack: we are big, so only asymmetric warfare can harm us. Terror attacks can be from stateless entities, like Al Qaeda, or state directed actors like Hezbollah (or the Iranian Quds force who fought us in Iraq).
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As to my claims, it is always hard to defend intelligence agencies, because of necessary secrecy. And, for me, it tends to be pretty hard to defend the government. But, I would appreciate it if you told me which evidence at TOG's links refutes what I am saying.
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Your comment is naive. In warfare, and that's what this is, adversaries rarely have perfect information, but they strive to get the best they can. The very fact that AQ came out with new encryption shortly after Snowden's releases is telling.
You ask what releases are telling. The deep penetration of the internet was news to me, and I'd bet it was news to AQ. Remember, these guys *have* to trade off security with operational capability. They can't just use the most absolutely secure techniques - partly because they can't know what those techniques are! Did they know that NSA was able to read their mail even though it was SSL encrypted? No? Did that affect their actions - of course!
"Thus far, quite a few are. But I really wouldn't know. Do you?" Not directly. But the NSA wouldn't be as upset about this if they didn't think it was seriously compromising their mission. Contrary to what the paranoid think, their mission is primarily SIGINT on foreign threats, and that what has been compromised.
Now one can believe that the members of both parties on the intelligence committees in both houses are just lying about the damage. But if you believe that, you might as well find another place to live, because all hope is already gone!
But this statement suggests just that: "I'm sure you think that a lapdog, press pass chasing mainstream media reporter would have handled it better, right? Not me. I'd rather have truth over propaganda."
Apparently you are not talking about the US media, since they *love* scandals and have *loved* this one. Yeah, they are propagandistic - they tend to strongly favor the Democrats and the left - but there is no way they would bury this one.
"Dude, at least get your facts straight. He went to Hong Kong (ie: somewhere marginally neutral) to pass on the documents to the press. That didn't work out so well because of intense pressure from the USG. He was on his way to Ecuador to seek asylum and the USG stranded him en route at the Moscow airport by yanking his passport."
So he claims. He didn't go to, say, Bolivia. No, he went to a place controlled by our enemy: China. Then he went to a place controlled by another enemy: Russia. How remarkable that only these places were available to him. Now he is in a place where our enemy (Russia, you know, the nice guys who just ate Crimea) can get anything they want out of him. Their methods make the CIA look tame.
Re: Re: Risk of terrorism
But I can respond in kind... obviously you are so enamored of Snowden's carefully constructed hero image that you cannot see anything else. Here we have this low grade sysadmin, whose parents were in grade school when I first hacked into an operating system, thrilling the world with his brilliance. Worship at his feet. I'm not impressed.
While we're at it, I see you are projecting "hate one's guts."
Enough of that.
Actually, by internet standards, this has been pretty civil, which I do appreciate.
Snowden was most certainly not alerting us that the US "pants were down." I have seen that nowhere in his leaks. The only security vulnerability he alerted us to was that NSA was lax in one specific way: failure to adequately supervise highly cleared, sworn individuals with sys-admin access. He could easily have revealed that with *one* document dump of non-injurious data - and fled to Russia or whatever after he did it (or even put it out anonymously). That he chose to dump reams and reams (to use an old technology term) of data shows otherwise.
As to the statistics - I'm not arguing whether they are correct. I am arguing that they not very relevant. The threat isn't great for any one individual - so what (although people I knew were killed by Islamist terrorists, not all by Al Qaeda). One could use the same reasoning to suggest that we shouldn't have been afraid of Soviet nukes during the cold war, because they never used them.
Seriously, do you believe 13 years of disrupted plots and low casualty counts means there is no more danger? Does this mean that if they only kill another 3000 in the US in one attack a few days from now, it doesn't matter? Are you familiar with the plot just barely stopped, in 2006, where 10 airliners were going to be blown up as they descended from Europe over US cities? At the time, we had no measures in place to stop the liquid bombs that were going to be used. Can you imagine what that attack would have done? It would have had a higher death toll than 9-11. It would have devastated air transportation (and the economies of the world that depend on it). We got lucky on that, because MI6 and MI5 weren't asleep at the switch and weren't hobbled by civil libertarians (unlike the FBI pre-9-11). Although the initial tip-off to that plot didn't come from signals intelligence, it could have. It is a lot less likely to be caught now, because Al Qaeda knows our capabilities, which before they could only guess at.
This was not the first and won't be the last large scale attack. Al Qaeda first tested this in 1994, killing one passenger and blowing a hole in the side of an en-route airliner. They were planning a ten or more plane attack to follow, which was only disrupted because of an accidental fire in their bomb facility (Google bojinka plot for details).
Americans tend to think short-term about this stuff. Using 13 years of statistics is an example of that. Islamists are thinking in 100 year time spans. They may have a nutty ideology, but that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous (invoking Godwin's rule here: the Nazi ideology was just as whacky). Our short-sightedness on these issues is largely because we have been isolated from many dangers by the oceans, and haven't been invaded since the war of 1812.
That short-sightedness has been visible in the past. Before WW-II, there was a large and very influential anti-war movement in the US. They didn't want to fight the Nazi's, and never imagined that the Japanese would attack us.
After Vietnam, we retreated into our isolationist heads-down shell again. We gutted the CIA and the military, imagining that we could just sweet talk our adversaries into goodness (sound familiar?). That didn't work, as the Iranian revolution, and rapid spread of Soviet influence around the world shows.
After the cold war, we did it again. As mentioned before, we crippled our counter-intelligence capabilities by locking them out of any information gleaned by criminal investigations, and vice versa. The result was 9-11. (As an aside, I think the US should move CI out of the FBI into it's own MI-5 equivalent agency - to reduce conflict of interest and goals).
I have been following Islamist terrorism since the early 1980s. As I said up-thread, an attack of the scale of 9-11 did not surprise me, and I knew as soon as the second plane it that it was most likely Al Qaeda. When the USS Cole was bombed, I knew Al Qaeda was still after us. When Massoud was killed in Afghanistan on 9-9-2001, I was afraid that something was up.
Those guys don't give up. They can't. It's a holy mission.
Perhaps you are not used to thinking about strategic threats, viewing Al Qaeda instead as a pin-prick organization that just got lucky. And indeed, Al Qaeda may not get that lucky again. But they are not alone, and they are surely trying, and lately we have been strengthening their hand by giving them more and more sanctuaries in which to operate: Syria, parts of Libya, western Iraq, and soon, all of Afghanistan, to name a few. The last time they had Afghanistan, they plotted 9-11, and succeeded. They also, in their sanctuary, experimented with chemical weapons - with their PhD neuroscientist (and their physician current leader, al-Zawahiri MD).
Hezbollah, which has also killed a bunch of Americans, operates in Mexico. If the dictators in Iran feel a need to hit at us, they'll use Hezbollah in an asymmetric strike (or a bunch), because they can't do anything with conventional warfare. How will you feel when, statistics still tiny, a few dozen school kids are blown up in school busses across states near Mexico? Not a big threat? The same measures which work against Al Qaeda work against Hezbollah (or worked until Snowden blew them).
My point is: the threats are real. Sure, any individual American is unlikely to be killed in them. But, terrorism isn't about killing lots of people - it is about causing societal or economic damage through the fear generated by such attacks (hence the word "terror"). It is an ancient and tried and true technique.
We discount it at our peril.
Risk of terrorism
As I've said before in this thread, the threat is not little acts of terrorism, like the Boston Marathon bombing or the fizzled Times Square bombing. The risk is of major attacks. Al Qaeda know this too. That's why they had a PhD scientist on their Afghanistan staff in 2001. The risk is a major biological attack, or an attack on a nuclear plant (say, to set off explosives in a quickly drained cooling pond), or a chemical attack in a highly crowded area like NYC. And, the risk is just not how many are killed, but the economic *and civil liberties* consequences of the attack.
9-11 cost over $1 trillion in direct economic damages, and a lot more in the resulting wars.
The US government, incompetent as they and all governments must necessarily be, at least recognizes this. They have spent over $70 billion dollars on combating bio-terrorism. Sadly, because of the nature of the threat, a lot of that is on how to respond after the attack happens and thousands of people are dying. But they take it seriously.
We should too, even if our media and our visually focused, short term thinking public doesn't.
And... that's just an example of one serious threat. There are others.
As to what Snowden should have done... It is my opinion that he should suffer for the Americans who will die as a result of his action. I'm tired of talking about it, and nothing will change the minds of those more afraid of having their phone records stored than of those countries and organizations how to destroy our way of life and to kill some of us.
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Al Qaeda is one obvious example - they introduced three new encryption programs shortly after the NSA internet programs were made public.
Another example: the tapping of Merkel's phone. Germany is an ally, but Germany can and does act against US national interests. Revealing that we had the means to intercept her phone is quite dangerous.
Intelligence is largely the process of collecting lots of bits of data and building a picture from it. Our adversaries do this. In the case of the Snowden releases, instead of bits of data, it's mountains of data.
Do you really think that those many documents Snowden took are just about spying on Americans?
"A journalist who is exposing Constitutional violations is un-American? What kind of crazy dictionary are you using?"
A journalist writing for a foreign left-wing anti-American paper (The Guardian).
"The US stranded Snowden in Russia by revoking his passport, he didn't choose to stay there."
Yeah... except before that happened, Snowden had already fled to China, that human rights haven which is constantly spying on Americans, stealing our secrets, and rapidly building a military whose stated purpose is to sink our ships.
Then he went to Russia, another paragon of virtue.
That shows real taste, eh?
(untitled comment)
I'm not sure why you think things are different now in this regard. Espionage was treated more harshly in the past than now. It's true that Daniel Ellsberg got off, but he couldn't know that ahead of time.
But... my primary problem with Snowden is not that he embarrassed the NSA (they beclowned themselves by allowing him that broad, unsupervised access) or that he is a coward. It is that he released information that is clearly gravely damaging to US national security, and that he chose to do so based purely on his own arrogance, the arrogance that he knew better than Congress, the FISA courts, and the Administration. It is that he released this information to a journalist who is strongly anti-American. It is that he didn't even try releasing it to a congressman - when it is clear that many congressmen (many of my own party) who are happy to pummel the NSA for political gain. It is that he fled to enemy countries.
He certainly isn't the first to have caused grave harm this way, although I don't think any previous releases were as damaging, except the "A-bomb" spies (the Soviet run officers and agents in the US nuclear weapons project).
(untitled comment)
It's been done plenty of times without the outcome Snowden faces.
"If you just take whatever punishment the courts had you without protest though, then you're no longer being civilly disobedient, are you?"
Nonsense. You just made up your own definition of civil disobedience that is contrary to history.
Re: Re: 4th amendment
"You haven't had your privacy violated until you become aware of it'(otherwise known as the peeping-tom excuse). "
That isn't what I wrote or meant. I meant that your civil liberties haven't been harmed unless the government acts illegally on that information. That they have a big pile of your metadata is not, per se, harmful. It is what they do with it.
As to the rental analogy... It has long been adjudicated that renters have privacy. The fourth amendment doesn't distinguish rental houses from owned houses (or, per courts, apartments). So, very different situation. A better analogy is if you put tiny labels on all your documents, stuck stamps in the corners, and dropped them in the mailbox. That's more akin to what's happening here.
On to your links... they look like what I would expect when the system is working right: the NSA goes beyond in some areas, and the court reins them in. Duh. Do you imagine that they will always, magically, be exactly right?
So, show me one American who was harmed by the violations listed in your links. You can't.
So I will be generous: there were a few cases where NSA personnel used systems to spy for personal reasons. That's clearly abuse. And when they were caught, they were disciplined. And that' what you would expect when things work right, because government agencies are compose of actual human beings. And that's one reason we have minimization procedures and oversight in the first place. I just wish they had been as careful in overseeing their sysadmins!
If you demand that the NSA be perfect, then you are not being realistic. But if you recognize that they created rules, mostly abided by them, and were slapped down when they missed, then you understand the situation. That's how these systems evolve, too. When they go beyond, usually its because they think they are not beyond. So the courts detect it, and change their guidance, and that is pushed down into the agency.
That's the best you can do with this sort of thing. And it's certainly good enough for me.
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A to Russian "unpopularity" - the Russian government (i.e, Putin) is not unpopular with the people it cares about: Russians. Quite the opposite.
The Russians might not want to risk the bad foreign publicity of Snowden disappearing. But more likely, they are finding his continued value as an propaganda tool more useful at the moment than the remaining secrets (if there are any) that they might get. Also, since Putin is a sadist and a narcissist, I suspect he gets off on Snowden's antics - Putin gets to once again humiliate the US - over and over.
Snowden claims not to have any documents with him. Okay - do we believe that? Do we believe that a narcissist like him would not have provided some way for him to get them as he needed them? I sure don't.
I do agree with one thing: the NSA was tragically weak on security. You can't generalize that to generally weak internally, but certainly they failed to take adequate precautions in Snowden's case.
I'd bet that, today, sysadmins aren't able to operate as freely as Snowden was. The NSA may be a government bureaucracy, but it has a lot of extremely smart and determined people in it. If they have been able to get through the bureaucratic thicket, they have patched this hole, and are looking hard for others.
4th amendment
The answer to your specific question is: because the grabbing does not constitute a search. What will constitute some sort of search is *using* that data - depending on how it is used and what it is used for.
NSA has "minimization procedures" to limit that usage, which means that very few people are "searched" in any meaningful way. Those procedures are meant to provide a balance between gross civil liberties violations, and the loss of all useful intelligence. Obviously, many people disagree that they are sufficient, but the FISA court liked them (and in a few cases, adjusted them).
There is a new theory, which I think may eventually be accepted by the courts, that grabbing a lot of data may constitute a search even though each individual piece does not. This is the "mosaic theory." But... it would be *new*. It is not a matter of settled law or understanding, and obviously is not what the drafters were thinking about.
My position is simple: in the modern era, technology has created new threats, and new ways that adversaries can operate. We need a way to deal with this. The right balance of detection and civil liberties is not obvious to me. I think the anger at NSA is way out of line. But... we need to try to figure out how to defend ourselves against adversaries without turning our government into one of the adversaries. This has always been a difficult problem.
BTW... I deeply dislike the current administration. My support for the NSA is not partisan at all. I am a national security hawk, I pay a lot of attention to the threat environment, and I have my own opinions as to the proper balance of detection technologies vs. civil liberties. YMMV.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
Who was briefed and who has oversight is not necessarily related to whether an action is Constitutional or not."
I was referring to the constitutionally created mechanisms for government actions. When an activity is managed across all three branches, that's working the way the constitution intends.
You seem to live in a dreamland where we can all do whatever we want, in complete secrecy, as long as nobody else is harmed. Unfortunately, that is in direct conflict with the enforcement of laws and the protection of the citizenry from foreign powers and agents.
There is plenty of room to agrue about where to draw the line, but from your vehemence, I doubt you are interested in anything other than shouting your absolutist bullshit.
That you disagree with the rulings of the courts is fine, but to call other opinions "bullshit" repeatedly is tendentious.
"This is a case of a clear violation of the fourth amendment as it's written."
No, it is not. Go back and read the fourth amendment:
The relevant part of the fourth is "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
Note the word "unreasonable." Note that information given to others is not covered. Note that jurisprudence has allowed authorities to gather metadata for centuries - early on, that metadata was whatever was written on the outside of the envelopes. Now it is the electronic equivalent: call records.
Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
What he revealed was a whole lot of details about domestic, but more importantly, foreign intelligence capabilities and methods.
For good reasons, that class of information has long been considered extremely sensitive, subject to the highest classification levels and protection.
The idea that releasing this information doesn't help our adversaries is untenable. In World War II, the Japanese encrypted their communications. The US broke their naval codes, which directly led to the victory at Midway (and a lot of other places, including the assassination of Yamamoto). If the Japanese know this, they would obviously have taken countermeasures.
Our adversaries know we are trying to "read their mail." But they didn't know that the NSA had penetrated systems in a way that they could get around SSL encryption without breaking it by cryptography. They do now.
And they know a whole lot more. We don't even know how much they have discovered, because we don't know what Snowden has given them.
The Russian security services are very good at getting information from people, and are utterly ruthless. They will get what Snowden has, if they haven't already.
Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
Of course the vast majority in congress had no details. It's called "need to know." You can't spread sensitive secrets to 535 people and their staff! This isn't to hide things from the public - it's primarily to protect the secrets that we used to have until Snowden.
But, those in the legislature who did know were from both parties, and were put on those committees with the knowledge of all that they would be handling highly secret information and not letting it out.
You can call them cheerleaders if you want, but I think they are people who know enough about the real dangers (due to their access to classified information) that they keep their mouths shut even when the actions are by an administration they deeply dislike.
As for one court - yes, one court that has had quite a number of federal judges roll through it during the time of this activity, and all of those judges knew about the activity. The very fact that they occasionally "slapped down" the NSA (actually, they minimized a few requests) shows that they weren't toadies.
As far as I can tell, by your logic, we can not defend ourselves against certain kinds of threats. The *necessary* secrecy leads you and many to believe that there is no oversight, so we just can't do it.
That is the sort of logic that lead to 9-11. Civil libertarians believed that the FBI should not allow it's counter-intelligence folks to communicate with it's anti-crime folks - the Gorelick rule. Without that rule, 9-11 almost certainly would have been prevented.
My argument is that we need balance. We need procedures to minimize the impact of necessary intrustions.
A secondary argument is that, if we fail, and the inevitable mass casualty attack happens, we will then have to rush into a massive surveillance program - under public pressure. Better to have one in place where safeguards are worked out and experience gained.
There are plenty of federal agencies I don't trust at all. The NSA is not one of them, because their mission is specific and targeted on certain kinds of security, and because they are a military organization (which leads to different ethics and behavior towards civilians). I do believe that the DEA should not be a legal customer of NSA in these sensitive areas, because I don't think their mission is a critical national defense issue, and their involvement threatens to tarnish an otherwise very important activity.
As to the "lying weasel words" - that is not helpful. If those are lies, one might believe you if you offered evidence rather than pejoratives.
Perhaps you can elucidate how we are to protect ourselves against modern threats. Try just one very plausible scenario, one that causes national security folks to lose sleep, and one they have spent almost $100 billion to prevent and prepare a reaction to. It is the one I was expecting when 9-11 happened. I have been following Islamist terror for a long time, and on 9-11, the 9-11 surprises to me were the date, the target and the method. I was not surprised at a mass casualty attack, and the moment I saw the second plane hit, I knew it was Al Qaeda.
The scenario: terrorists get hold of a contagious, deadly biological agents such as smallpox; they conspire to spread it at US airports in the security lines. The death toll from such an attack ranges from the low thousands to the tens of millions.
Backup for the scenario... Al Qaeda (and other Islamists) clearly intend to do us grievous harm. They believe that if they kill enough of our civilians, we will leave them alone to construct the new Caliphate. Iran, btw, has similar religious views, and also engages in terrorism, and might try such an attack if pressed too hard. There is clearly no reduction in Islamist terror, but we have successfully defended ourselves in the U S(except for the Boston Marathon).
In 2001, Al Qaeda was actively experimenting with chemical weapons, and was interested in biological weapons. The US captured a PhD neuro-scientist who was Al Qaeda's leader in this area.
Biological weapons terrorism has been made a lot easier by modern advances. Genetic engineering is widely taught in universities, and the cost of it has gone down. There is even a genetic engineering maker movement, and you can buy time on sequencers and PCR equipment, etc, and you can purchase made-to-order DNA sequences. You can get the needed lab equipment and reagents.
Al Qaeda may be fanatics, but not all of them are stupid. Core Al Qaeda has a high percentage of engineers and medical people. The current leader of Al Qaeda is an MD.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
But there are also unofficial channels, the use of which is a lot more responsible than spreading critical national security secrets around the world. He could have gone to a congressman critical of the administration, for example.
Also, there is a tradition in this country of civil disobedience. One believes the government is acting unfairly, one violates the law to try to get it corrected, and then on takes whatever punishment is meted out by the courts. This is what the civil rights people did in the 50's and 60's. It's honorable.
Snowden shows the following by his actions:
1) He believes that he is entitled to release critical national security information even though all three branches of the federal government are aware of this information, approve of what is being done, and are keeping it quite. That is profoundly anti-Democratic.
2) He is a coward. Rather than taking the honorable route, he flees to our geopolitical enemies.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
As to the history, they didn't just attack once. They tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. In later 1990's, the set off two huge car bombs at US embassies in Africa, killing hundreds. The attacked the USS Cole with a boat filled with high explosive, killing a number of sailors. They tried to set off a bomb in Times square and the only reason it wasn't a disaster was incompetence - it fizzled. They set off a bomb at the Boston Marathon. They fought a significant war with us in Iraq, killing thousands including many Americans.
As to abandoning our core principles... It isn't a core principle that the government can't gather and scrutinize telephone call data. They have been doing that for a very long time before the terrorism started, and it has been held constitutional by the Supreme Court.
And yes, you have no choice but to make rational tradeoffs between civil liberties and safety (and order). It's done all the time and has been since the start of the republic. People love to quote Ben Franklin, but Franklin understood this need. That's why we have a court system, and we have other government officials swearing to defend the constitution: so that a democratic system, bolstered by the Constitution, can find the boundaries of liberty without sliding all they way down the slippery slope into tyranny.
For example, you probably have heard that you are not free to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. That in itself is a compromise between security and civil liberty - in this case the right to free speech.
One cannot have a rational discussion of policy without understanding that no freedom is absolute - that there will always be compromises, and that there always have been.
As to the NSA - which lies?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
The Fourth does not exist for the sake of privacy - it exists for the sake of constrained security. The fifth only addresses privacy in the realm of criminal defense - which is not the primary issue with the NSA.
The Ninth, unfortunately, is currently inoperative.
But... let's see what sort of privacy folks imagine they are entitled to. The claim is that the government use of metadata, not actual conversations, violates privacy rights. That isn't implausible. But for a very long time, courts have held that you have not right to privacy for information you give up to others - and that's what metadata (and email, these days) is. You do have a right to encrypt your email, after all.
The term "guns" doesn't exist in the Second, but it certainly a completely obvious part of it, since firarms were very common arms that were borne in the era.
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If he ever comes back, noble motivations should get him an hour a week of sunlight at supermax. Otherwise, no sunlight at all.
They guy did incalculable damage, including damage to democracy by putting his judgement above that of our duly elected and appointed members of government. No, I don't think those folks are saints, but they are what representative democracy provides. Snowden is totally anti-Democracy - it's Snowden uber alles. Screw him.
Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
As to the stories... I lived those years. I had a copy of the original public key paper while the NSA was still embargoing its publishing. I remember the Clipper chip. So I do have a bit of a background here.
NSA originally didn't want to prevent encryption - they wanted a back door into it. Public pressure prevented that (perhaps that was good, but it's arguable).
For many years, people thought the NSA had intentionally weakened DES encryption, when NSA insisted that the key be 56 bits (plus 8 bit parity) when the original developers at IBM wanted 112 bits. Much later, academic cryptology researchers discovered that DES, counter-intuitively, was *stronger* at 56 bits than 112! Apparently NSA was decades ahead in this regard, and used their knowledge to improve publicly available encryption.
The increasing potential of Islamist terrorism was apparent to those of us paying attention in the 1990's. But, civil libertarians were doing their best to defeat our CI capabilities. 9-11 would have been prevented if the Gorelick rule had not been promulgated in the '90s. This was a civil liberties rule keeping FBI CI and criminal investigations separate.
But, once the real threat was demonstrated - with 3000 civilian casualties - more than the death toll at Pearl Harbo - NSA used many techniques. Too many (maybe all) of which have now been revealed by Snowden, which increases the threat and empowers our adversaries.
They are not making up stories - the threats and attempts are real. Does anyone imagine that the Islamists no longer want to kill American civilians in large numbers?
Also, before 9/11, the US indeed has a history of terrorist attacks. My former residence, Lawrence, KS, had all of its male residents killed by terrorists during the civil war. Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the US several times, including an attack in the Capitol building. There have been plenty of other incidents. But, nothing as lethal as 9-11.
Modern times have made the potential damage from a terrorist attack much more serious, while at the same time making it easier for foreigners to attack. Air transport, the internet, and the modern telephone system all enable adversaries. American adversaries, whether foreign governments or ideological groups like Islamists, represent a far greater danger than they did in the past, so just looking at history is missing a bigger picture. These days, genetic engineering applied to pathogens can make them more lethal. And, you no longer need a big institution to do it. A member of my family learned, and used the techniques as an undergraduate at a good US university. We did a business plan for some GE products, and the cost was surprisingly low - well within the budget of terrorists. And... Al Qaeda employed an Islamist scientist for this purpose - who had a doctorate in neuroscience from MIT (or was it Harvard... whatever). We captured her.
America has a long history of retreating into isolationism. Our geographical isolation has allowed us to get away with not worrying about foreign threats, with a few exceptions like Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center. We can no longer afford that luxury.
We need to make *rational* tradeoffs between civil liberties and protection. I believe NSA did a darned good job of it, based on what has been revealed so far. They had procedures to limit the scope of actual use of the vast data they gathered. They had approval of both houses of congress, who were regularly briefed, and approval of the FISA courts.
Obviously once can disagree. But too many people are just assuming that NSA is evil, that the programs are gigantic conspiracies to deprive us of our rights, and that the threats are minimal. Our deadly serious, evil and dedicated adversaries are quite happy about this.
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