
U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism - burnaway
https://theprivacyissue.com/government-surveillance/united-states-of-surveillance-us-history-spying
======
54thr
The threat of terror gives power to the State. Power seeks more power. The
State does not erode freedoms in support of safety. The State erodes freedoms
to achieve more power. Terror is the excuse. It is the State's greatest tool.

~~~
colordrops
The state is made up of individuals. Who are these individuals that are
seeking power?

~~~
harambae
The entrenched political class and those in (inevitably self-serving)
government positions. See Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

------
momentmaker
"Two reasons why people do stuff - one that sounds good and the real reason."
\- JP Morgan

~~~
ninly
[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/26/two-
reasons/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/26/two-reasons/)

~~~
dmix
TBH after reading that it still sounds like JP Morgan or Roosevelt is a safe
attribution choice there. The particular structure of the sentence combined
with "commonly used by" or "made popular by", etc is sufficient IMO. Quote
sourcing is always a bit vague.

Or maybe just saying "as the commonly used phrase goes" is better.

~~~
ninly
I don't entirely disagree, but I feel like quotations are so often used in
discourse without any context, and with a problematic sort of "pure"
attribution to the genius of the person quoted. Quotations from Einstein or
Lincoln are frequent examples of this, even where the quote is not
misattributed.

Of course, blatant misattribution is also so dang common that it seems better
to me in general to cite some kind of context or whatever. Plus (for me, a
prior editor) use of quote marks typically implies verbatim, citable
quotation, so that's a factor whether the attribution is "safe", as you
suggest.

Not to criticize anything here at all; I just wanted to throw in some of that
sweet sweet context!

------
aquadrop
The only measure that needed to be done after 9/11, and it's surprising why
this very effective measure wasn't implemented before - securing access to the
pilot's cabin. Everything else is overreaction cause by power grabbing by
"security agencies" and politicians trying to score. The whole security system
of today's world (especially in flying) is one pointless thing after another,
holding on the a fear of "what if".

~~~
amatecha
Doesn't help when it's a pilot who wants to crash the plane. Further, that
makes it impossible for anyone to intervene in that case.

~~~
kayfox
Screening of pilots for various issues, mental and performance wise, has
increased substantially since 9/11 as well.

~~~
AWildC182
Fuck no it hasn't...

The FAA still systematically pulls medicals for mental health issues rather
than allowing treatment. If your livelihood and a couple hundred thousand
dollars of debt depend on it, you'll conceal extreme depression just fine.
Pilots are terrified of getting help and an absurd proportion of the community
is suffering from depression as a result.

------
livueta
> The Privacy Issue is brought to you by the team behind IVPN. Get to know
> IVPN’s mission and download the app to browse privately and securely.

Ugh. It's a fine article, but I worry the VPN industry's constant mis-selling
of services under the banner of privacy will eventually taint the message.

~~~
anarchodev
What is the mis-selling exactly? Doesn't seem to me that they're saying using
their VPN will make you impenetrable to dedicated actors with nation-state
resources. VPNs do help maintain one small level of privacy (namely from your
ISP), and if you're using one it's a good bet you'll be interested in other
privacy concerns too.

There are a lot of VPNs with really bogus claims on their websites but I
didn't notice anything appalling about this.

~~~
remarkEon
I don’t have the time right now to do this, but someone with it (and probably
more technical experience than me in that field) should write up a no BS guise
to what these popular VPN services really are offering. It’s been hard, over
the last couple months especially it seems, to wade through all the new
products these companies are constantly dropping in this space.

~~~
jlgaddis
Tom Scott recently made an video [0] you might be interested in. It's well
worth the seven and a half minutes to watch it, IMO.

> _I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn 't happy
> about it._

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY)

~~~
remarkEon
Thanks for this

------
mLuby
Law enforcement, tasked with catching the baddies, always wants more ability
to complete their task: more surveillance, more laws, and more firepower.
That's as it should be.

The problem is the lack of heavy-weight counter-balance, always demanding more
privacy, fewer laws, and less firepower. The best we've got is "the status
quo" and a few non-profits (that thankfully are punching way above their
weight class).

Without such a counterbalancing agency, each small gain by law enforcement
rarely reverts, so rather than oscillating between a bit too much freedom and
a bit too much policing we have an arrow moving us steadily toward a police
state.

~~~
jdashg
Don't forget systemic pressure to make "more baddies"!

------
papito
But someone like William Barr digs the surveillance state quite a lot. It's
the kind of people we had in mind when we created it.

------
EGreg
Surveillance is easy when all our communications are going through centralized
services. Just another side effect of centralization.

------
president
I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance,
you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however,
need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that
people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
The structure of your statement has problems not related to the topic at all.
When you take something away that never (or rarely) happens, how do you
establish causality?

Suppose I told you that taking bazookas away from people that live in the city
prevents bear attacks? You might say that there aren't bear attacks in the
city anyway, which would be true, but you couldn't prove it one way or
another. Who knows, maybe there would have been one bear attack if people ran
around with bazookas shooting up the nearby forest.

Now add in the complexity that terrorism is more like a rate than a yes/no
question. What if I told you that taking away bazookas in the city reduced the
crime rate? Well, the crime rate in many cities _has_ decreased, but how are
those two related? Once again, we're left with a statement that might sound
good to some and bad to others -- and no way to reasonably discuss it.

The only thing we can say with certainty is that no matter what we do,
terrorism will continue exist. We can never eliminate it no matter how hard we
try. So unless we want each new terrorist act to wreak havoc with massive
changes on our societies, we're really talking about trade-offs here. How much
stuff do you want to give away for a 50% reduction in terrorism? And once you
come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things
actually was the thing that reduced it?

It's one thing when a pubic discussion has reasonable people talking about the
various sides. It's another thing entirely when we start injecting these
semantic landmines into our conversations. I'm not saying you're wrong or
right; I'm saying there is no way to know.

~~~
conception
I agree with your general thesis. The "And once you come up with that answer,
how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that
reduced it?" seems "simple" enough in that it would result in a number of
arrests involving the methodology of surveillance in question. You couldn't
say they wouldn't have been caught otherwise but you could at least say "X has
produced Y for these cases." no?

~~~
mhb
No. Because 1) X itself may enable Y which might not otherwise have occurred
and 2) since resources are finite doing X to yield Y means that you couldn't
do Z instead which you might value more than whatever utility you got from Y.

------
forgotmypw
As designed.

~~~
bronlund
Present the threat. Present the solution. Rinse. Repeat.

------
Shivetya
Is there any country which hasn't had this result? I didn't know anyone who
was fond of their own countries efforts.

~~~
mLuby
Germany seems to be moving in the other direction. I assume they can do this
because unlike the US, Germans can point to their own history with secret
police and authoritarian states as cautionary tales.

Not that other countries couldn't also look to Germany's example, but that
would require trans-national empathy so LOLno.

------
arminiusreturns
Surveillance is not about security!

It's about control.

Security is just how it's sold to the public, the politicians, etc.

------
krzepah
Today we hide behind computers and algorithms to do the "dirty job"

------
jorblumesea
How can you prove that clandestine operations do or do not help? If it goes
well, no one will ever know. If it fails, it's either covered up or is a huge
scandal. It seems contrary to the entire idea of cover intelligence to claim
success or failure.

~~~
dfxm12
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#Recent_trends)

This article links to a report that gives a number for terror incidents and
how many were foiled.

You can see a map here:
[https://www.typeinvestigations.org/domesticterror/](https://www.typeinvestigations.org/domesticterror/)
which talks about the incident, and in the case of foiled incidents, links to
something like court proceedings. This doesn't necessarily show clandestine
operations led to foiling them vs regular police work, though...

~~~
jorblumesea
Those are publicly known cases and just normal counter terrorism
investigations. This isn't applicable to clandestine US surveillance as seen
in the FISA courts. FISA courts very much fall into "US surveillance" law but
are kept secret.

------
pinkfoot
I remind readers that the Novichok assasins were identified via CCTV
sureillance monitored by Government authorities.

~~~
colejohnson66
And I remind readers that Russia warned us about the Boston Bombers and we
ignored them. One success does not equal success at all things.

~~~
pinkfoot
touché

------
datashow
> "U.S. surveillance laws failed to counter terrorism"

> "The patchwork of U.S. surveillance laws has proven ineffective at
> countering terrorism"

Where is the proof? I can not find it in the article.

~~~
dx87
Intel work is like IT; if you're doing it right, nobody knows you're doing
anything at all.

~~~
homonculus1
The bar is higher when you do wetworks.

------
thrillgore
Perhaps the surveillance state was never meant to stop terrorists, but to trap
innocents into an inescapable dragnet.

------
dheera
Most terrorists in the US happen to be white (and really just because it's the
majority race), but the media and government fail to use the term "terrorist"
if they are white. That in turn results in them being busy racially profiling
against colored people and foreign nationals and overlooking a lot of
culprits.

Also, nobody is born a terrorist. They're overly fixated on catching
terrorists instead of preventing terrorism altogether. Domestic crime,
including terrorism, is the result of a broken education system. If you want
to fix domestic terrorism, fix education, fix mental health, fix life in
general for US citizens, and a lot of problems will quite literally magically
disappear.

\- Number of gun deaths in the US in 2019: 15381

\- Number of mass shooting incidents in the US in 2019: 434

\- Number of deaths actually reported as being due to "terrorists" in the US
in 2019: 0

~~~
ftvy
Most terrorists in the world happen to be brown (and really just because it's
the majority race).

~~~
dheera
That's probably true. However the US government should really be putting more
effort into protecting its own residents at home, in terms of the most likely
actual threats. Calling all forms of terror "terror", regardless of the color
of the culprit, is probably a good first step.

------
blurps
Great informative article, but at times the posing is naive or supporting a
certain narrative.

For instance: The government goes after Islamic terrorists and Mexican illegal
immigrants. So what to complain about? Mix cause and effect to pose the
illegal immigrants as targeting based on race. Or pose the extremist religious
as vulnerable Muslims, targeted on religion. Remove their status as far away
from the cold-hard reality, so you can claim racism and prejudice and use that
to cripple surveillance. But the suspect is a "citizen"! All weasel words to
stay away from the real dirt. Let's go after the atheists for counter
terrorism, so we don't discriminate in the eyes of the ACLU...

Then the "ineffective against terrorism"-claim. This can't be supported,
because no clear numbers/cases are known. Then conflate laws against terrorism
with actual actions against terrorism: Sure, no law directly contributed
against countering terrorists, but the surveillance certainly did. Thanks NSA
for passing along information to my country many times, so we could capture
really dangerous people before they could strike.

Anti-terrorism is also a red herring for surveillance efficiency. Surveillance
predominantly used for other national security purposes, such as counter
intelligence, foreign intelligence, border safety, crime fighting, and even
economic espionage.

Sure, posing any immigrant as a bad hombre, potential MS-13 gang member,
selling your children fentanyl-laced drugs, is ridiculous. But the other side
of that same coin is posing bad people as vulnerable undocumented citizens who
are being targeted on race. It does not do justice to the situation on the
ground.

~~~
baybal2
> far away from the cold-hard reality

The cold-hard reality is that states who have established a system of domestic
surveillance have sent millions of their own citizens to crematoriums.

Sane nations have destroyed your political faction back in sixties.

Pro-communist, race chauvinists who look up to Mao for inspiration were thrown
in the garbage bin of history, and thank god for that.

Very fortunately, America of today is not Cambodia, nor Laos, and you all have
to thank Rockefeller commission for grinding the legacy of Allen Dullest to
dust

~~~
blurps
You are using the same tactic I described: State surveillance has the
potential to turn us all into Nazi's, so state surveillance is inherently bad.
How can I ever hope to support the good of state surveillance for national
security when I have to defend the Stasi? I can't. You (God)win.

It is intellectually dishonest to pose the effort of governments to combat
illegal immigration as a targeting of people based on race. It is a
sensitivity trap that shuts down our rational faculties. Yes... all religious
extremists are also religious. Most immigrants have a different race. Yes,
being an undocumented immigrant makes you vulnerable. But deserving of
coddling, because they happen to also share a protected variable? No.

