Edward Snowden reveals the 21th Centurys' Global Big Brother

I can imagine how advanced smartphone you have. In 1984 I have transferred my first file over DEC's VAX 11 computer. It was a postscript printer ready copy of a scientific article. That was much before the introduction of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I hope you understand that my post on the previous page about using teleprinter was just sarcasm. I also have a smartphone and I know how to connect to Internet too.

I dissagree with that: all of them had a first class training in executing covert actions:

Otherwise they wouldn't have been able to coordinate and execute such a sizable and complicated mission.

I am sorry for having to say this but you've been watching to many action movies.

 

Let's be clear; Blanket espionage upon US citizens at home is trying and failing miserably to detect new, isolated cells of home grown terrorists, it's not used to find foreign borne Al-Qaeda operatives at home or overseas. Al-Qaeda operatives are not getting into the US, today. They just aren't. Because of stricter visa controls, not some electronic espionage on American citizens in the USA.

I don't think anyone here is advocating the unilateral ban by Western democracies on espionage networks. But shadowy quasi-military organisations should not be spying on their own citizens, at home. Why? Because that erodes the very heart of the justice system which the West so proudly has established. There is already in place non-military, or civilian, organisations that provide security at home. That can spy on individuals, but require warrants and due process must be followed. When the West spies on its own citizens in this manner, then it weakens its credibility abroad when it talks about democratic freedoms and civil liberties.

What is occurring, is some people, that are disaffected with the society they live in, are turning upon it. Many seek an alternative lifestyle, an alternative moral compass. Let's face it, "Cash is King" is not a very humane moral code. 80 years ago, there were chasms in society, but they were smaller than the gulfs that exist today. Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, The Boston Bombings, Nidal Hasan, all did terrible crimes, that were an outburst against the society they lived in. I'm not advocating their acts, but somewhere along the line, you have to ask where it all went wrong; why they turned against the USA. Blanket Espionage did not catch these killers.

Currently, society is moving towards absolving citizens from any responsibilities, and taking away all the freedoms as well. "Don't worry; we'll see that nothing happens." Let's face it, nothing usually does happen. Terrorists commit some act of random violence, and society responds by spending large sums of dollars trying to make sure nothing happens, again, by removing more freedoms, and causing more injustice. Imagine what could have been done to improve the world with all that money. Given the miniscule risk in the first place, I'm finding the expenditure hard to justify. Each day, 89 people die (average, 2011) in the US in car accidents. In 34 days, more people die in car accidents, than 9/11. We can also safely say, the terrorists will never, ever achieve anything so spectacular ever again. Very few people think twice about stepping into their car. If we include all the American fatalities in the War in Iraq (4488) and Afghanistan (2258) we see that amounts to around 109 days of traffic accidents. These fearsome Al-Qaeda fighter terrorists. In 10 years of war + their most successful operation ever.

The best tool for prevention is engaged citizenry, a strong Justice system, and a fair society. You have to realise, you can never prevent all possibilities, if you want to live in a humane, civil society. Some level of trust between citizenry and between the ruled and the rulers must exist. Trust is increased by transparency, not by obfuscation. How long would you trust a friend that lied and told you untruths, or avoided answering you?

So, you can choose what to spend the money on; expanding espionage on your own citizens, increased military spending, or strengthening civil society (and perhaps increasing road safety along the way).

 

My impression based on the above is that (at least as far as I understand) you don't realize how the tools are being used. If a connection of interest shows up, whether a true or a false positive, no reputation is ruined. The connection is simply flagged for additional study. Before any action is taken they would want a rock solid case preferably based on non classified data or data that if revealed wouldn't negativly impact any other lines of investigation.

Frankly I can't see any knowledgeable individual haveing the illusion that email is private. At least without encrytion and that raises it's own flags.

 

Personally I'd just as soon people that haven't educated themselves on the choices and issues don't vote. That tends to water down the votes of people that have. The parties and the unions used to be able to rally higher percentages of voters but how many really understood the issues? I've heard of voters in the US who couldn't even name the two main presedential candiates in a presidential election. People who make party line votes because some one else has told them too are more of a threat than those who don't vote IMO.

 

I'm shocked. On my next trip to Germany I was planning on searching for the guy walking around with the teleprinter and the archaic encryption systems, wearing a 1950s-vintage trench coat.

Some of them certainly have. Most have not. Frankly - if you know what you're doing and you're good at it - it isn't that difficult. And, if they really have been getting first class training, most of these people are incredibly incompetent - which would in the end be an indicator of poor training anyway. We tend to focus only on the 'successes' instead of the much more numerous failures. Take the underwear bomber, the Times Square bomber, the Christmas tree bomber and all the utter morons who have tried to buy explosives and weapons from undercover agents after advertising their plans on the internet.

And I'm sorry to say this, but you clearly have no idea how these systems work. None of us obviously know exactly how it works, but I feel that mine and lwd's descriptions (which are essentially the same) are pretty accurate.

If the NSA actually keeps a file for every person, they definitely don't spend time allocating human resources to read through each one unless its been flagged. As I said previously, this is simply impossible from a logistical standpoint, and would require hundreds of thousands of personnel.

 

From what I've read your assumptions, as usual, are incorrect. Perhaps not as blatent but a lot of actionable intel has been gathered by a number of intel services (not just US) through such collection efforts. Osama was fairly paranoid about such things which is one reason it took so long to get him.

They weren't secret if you put them on line or at least you couldn't guarantee their secrecy. Indeed this program may have gotten people to think a bit more about just what they are putting on line and why.

??? What are you talking about? If you are talking about 9-11 then you are either deliberately trying to mislead people or you have no idea at all what you are talking about (the two are not mutually exclusive). In any case PLS point to a mission they have executed that required such assistence. Forcing the Soviets out of Afghanistan is the only one that has any sort of merit and even that is debateable.

 

That is far from clear. Indeed I strongly suspect it is incorrect. One of the keys to recent successes overseas against terrorist has been attacking the money trail and some of that comes from the US. Note this doesn't require AQ operatives to "get into the US".

That is an important issue. Indeed there's a question of whether even civilian organizations should be doing so. But also what constitutes spying is the fact that x called y really expected to be private?

 

While a very good essay, this is all philosophical and ignores almost every practical concern.

On the car crash analogy -- every government in the world has taken significant action to lower fatalities, including the US. In fact, I can't think of any activity that the US government hasn't taken action to reduce fatalities in (you name it, everything from heart attacks stemming from bags of chips to breathing problems from pollution to helicopter crashes). Your point is?

I'll say again, I don't like the degradation of personal freedom and the increased involvement of government at every level. Frankly, the government has no right to tell me what trees on my property I can cut, how many bags of garbage I can produce each week (as ridiculous as they seem, these are both actual regulations in my county). As a rural resident, I shouldn't have to pay part of my municipal taxes so that people in subdivisions can have their sidewalks plowed, fund public transit in the city that I have never used, or cultural programs for new immigrants. Likewise, part of my federal tax should not go towards funding political parties.

There's a lot of this type of crap that I don't like because it is useless or doesn't do anything for me. Given this, I'd sacrifice a bit more of my 'freedom' to allow a program that *may* stop some jihadist from blowing himself up at a shopping mall while I'm inside buying some books or some nut from planting a bomb at the town square. Furthermore - I am still not convinced that this actually reduces my freedom in any substantial way than, for example, telling me I can't build a wooden fence in my backyard because some endangered salamander was spotted there (this happened to my neighbor about five years ago).

I don't agree with that. With the massive chemical weapon stores in Syria, and the strong involvement of Jihadists in the conflict, I believe that the possibility of an international terror group getting their hands on these is much higher than most people admit. Not to mention the dozens of MANPADs that have disappeared from Gaddafi's former armories in Libya that could down airliners with ease. Unfortunately the US (and most of the west) has a giant sign on it that says 'target' -- to brush off the possibility of another major attack is very optimistic and wishful thinking.

You state what we need to replace this, but present no mechanism for doing it. I agree with the above, but there is no way to implement it. How exactly does one go about strengthening society? Honesty? We all know that is impossible without incredibly substantial changes that will never happen. Increased government involvement at every level so that we see them as the 'good guys'? No thanks. Armed revolution? Tell me how that works out.

I like to think of myself as a realist. I'll say it again -- its easy to say 'this is bad, get rid of it', but a tangible plan is much more difficult to come up with it. And I haven't heard one tangible plan to replace the surveillence programs besides 'do nothing'.

 

You don't need blanket surveillance on all citizenry to follow a money trail to / from overseas.

 

Well Alan, to quote you; "I disagree", so that's all I'm gonna say about that.

 

Fair enough. I've never seen the point of online debates the descend into an endless slugging match and accomplish nothing in the end.

 

That's exactly the wrong way of looking at the problem, and how the control freaks are "selling" their very questionable programmes. Something bad is happening, we are doing something, so what we are doing is automatically good ... sorry but thinking in terms of opposites when dealing with complex systems is simply absurd, without looking at "cost effectiveness" any response is just as likely to be damaging as it is to be useful and most likely to be a waste of effort.

When we start to analyze the programmes we find:
- large amounts of money has been spent,
- there has been no independent evaluation of effectiveness, far less cost effectiveness,
- no oversight on the use of the data (how can there be one when NSA wouldn't even admit the data existed in the first place),
- no accountability for abuse,
- a couple of US agencies now qualify as criminals according to the laws of many NATO allies
- cosiderable damage has been done to US reputation
- some self inflicted damage has been done to "social cohesion" (the trust relatiuonship between citizens and government)

... should I contnue? I see lots of negatives and very few positives here.

The only thing on the plus side is that "possibly" some terrorist acts have been prevented, though no independently checkable data has been released, but I'm ready to bet those were from idiots that were more likely to blow themselves up than do any damage, that sort of surveillance is close to useless against anyone with brains. Against a moderatly clever opponent this system has as much chances of success as the "Vietcong sniffers" that the guerrillas countered by attaching rags inbued with urine to trees to createfalse reports.

BTW if I was a bad guy I could buy a "botnet" (the capability to send a few to send a few thousands hard to trace spam mails costs a few hundreds bucks on the "black internet") and flood the systems with false positives apparently coming from mail accounts belonging to my opposition, automated scanners are intrisically highly vulverable to that sort of attack.

 

It may be, but what I said still stands. What do you do to replace it?

I said before that most of these guys are morons, which is why it works. There are some incredibly basic ideas if you are trying to remain below the radar -- and staying off the internet is one of them. This is a fact that none of these people get.

 

They certainly didn't seem to hide on the sattelite phones while directing the Mumbai pawns.

 

You don't need it to detect and follow some of it on the otherhand it helps identify links that likely wouldn't be found any other way. Of if they would be found it identifies them much faster and in more detail.

 

@Geroge Patton, only. Yes, now I am really addressing you.

Imagine that it wasn't the US who spied on own citizens but your "favorite" country - North Korea. Would you still advocate the blanket surveillance so fiercely in the opposite case too? Or you just adjust your own conclusions to fit your prejudices? Put down your ideologically tainted glasses just once if you still can or your problem with sound reasoning is beyond your capability to see.

 

I hope you do realize that was a joke, right?

And North Korea has regularly attempts to spy on most of the civilized world, and has failed miserably in almost every case. Now, a lot of the time agents can't even fit into the South because they are so alienated from modern society. My opinion on this is fairly obvious -- If I were to travel to North Korea, I would expect to be spied upon. I also hope that you realize surveillance in the DPRK is completely different than the other sigint-type programs employed by the west, and as such are not compatible in any legitimate way. The [suspected] way the North Korean system operates is only possible because of the extremely repressed nature of society, making it possible to completely monitor the few forms of allowable communications. If you are implying that the US is headed towards a repressed Neo-Stalinist state simply because of the NSA, you really need to sit down and think that one over.

I can't understand what you wrote, nor what you are trying to imply. You really have to work on your rebuttals, my friend.

Ideological-tainted? You are the one with the strong ideological bias here, among other things praising a convicted spy and advertising a poor artwork showing the US president (who I in no way support, but still respect as the office-holder) as a war criminal responsible for killing 50 million people and starting a world war.

If you want to have a serious argument, stop the straw man.

 

I think our problem wiht sound reasoning is not our inability to see it, it's the fact that it is completely absent from your postings.

 

My impression is quite the opposite. Now I'm not sure I've seen much to confirm this by my impression is that this program is an outgrowth of the "analytics" (really just good old fasion OR) practiced over in SWA. It has been extremely effective over there. Further more some of the algrithms are difficult even for a competent technically savy opponent to negate.

Which might or might not have the impact you suggest. Indeed such an attack might create an information trail back to the perp.

This article addresses some of it
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20130826.aspx

 

An unattributed article (at least, I saw no author attributed) on a web site making generic statements, without references? It doesn't address anything, to be honest. It speculates, and attempts to rationalize. It attributes behaviour to people the author has unlikely ever met. So while the general gist of the article may well be true, I'd hardly take what is stated with reference to terrorist behaviour as gospel.