

Time for Answers from the NSA - t0dd
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356098/time-answers-nsa-john-fund

======
miles
The establishment is veering completely off the rails:

 _Former NSA director Mike Hayden, in a speech to the Bipartisan Policy Center
last week, dismissed the nation’s most outspoken transparency groups and
privacy advocates as “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous
twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six
years.”_

~~~
chris_mahan
I speak to my wife on a daily basis (too much, she says, especially at parties
-- yes, we go to parties, and we get invited back too!), and I deeply care
about privacy, so Mike Hayden is slightly wrong. Oh, and I haven't been a
twentysomething since the Clinton administration.

------
niels_olson
This is from a magazine founded by William F Buckley, Jr. Quite possibly the
conservative antithesis to Noam Chomsky. The only people in favor of these
programs are those who gain power from them through the imbalance of
information they provide.

~~~
rdl
I'd be willing to bet even 10% of people _within NSA_ are against the current
scale and scope of domestic operations of NSA. Certainly >30% of the rest of
the IC, and probably >50% of DOD and non-security parts of government (random
NASA guys, etc.)

To the extent that federal government employees tend to be more educated and
informed (since they're professionals) than the public as a whole, employees
of the federal government are quite possibly more against these programs, at
least at their current scale and scope, than the general public (and certainly
the voting population, who skew old and paranoid and white and rich).

~~~
ferdo
"...I additionally believed that one of our best defenses against the national
security state was the perennial proclivity of clandestine organizations to
piss off their own employees."

-J. Orlin Grabbe, 1995

[http://peculium.net/2013/04/03/the-end-of-ordinary-money-
by-...](http://peculium.net/2013/04/03/the-end-of-ordinary-money-by-j-orlin-
grabbe/)

~~~
rdl
That is why automation, cloud computing, drones, etc are terrifying. Once bad
activities take only a very small number of read in personnel to accomplish,
it is a lot easier for them to do worse stuff for longer.

------
CoreSet
Coming from the NR, this represents a real (albeit small) addition to the
growing chorus of concerned voices.

And it only increases my respect for the leakers' strategy of releasing new
information bit-by-bit: it allows a parade of NSA apologists to concoct a
fresh new excuse for each revelation, then look like the untrustworthy puppets
they are once the next abuse blows their ad hoc rationale out of the water.

------
ape4
We know what they'll say: its limited, necessary, etc. But the answer is
nonsense.

