
The NSA and Me - evo_9
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/02/the-nsa-and-me/
======
ilamont
_The solution is not to jail the whistleblowers, or to question the patriotism
of those who tell their stories, but to do what Attorney General Edward Levi
courageously attempted to do more than a third of a century ago – to have the
criminal division of the Justice Department conduct a thorough investigation,
and then to prosecute any member of the intelligence community who has broken
the law, whether by illegally spying on Americans or by lying to Congress._

Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way
that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate. Half-measures and bullshit
platitudes from the powers that be are insufficient. Justice must be served,
and if necessary, people need to go to jail.

~~~
rdtsc
> Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way
> that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate.

I disagree. There will be changes, but for the worse.

Because now those running the programs have a real world validated proof that
people don't care and there are no consequences. So that is a good signal to
crank up the level a few notches.

~~~
mikeash
I think it's worse than that. Many people _do_ care, in the opposite way that
we think they should. There are a lot of people who outright approve of these
programs because they think they're necessary and that they help keep us safe.

I personally think that all the outrage at the government is misplaced. They
are ultimately just doing what the people want. The US isn't groping airline
passengers and holding terror suspects for years without trial and torturing
people for information and spying on its own citizens because the government
is running out of control and the people can't reign it in. They're doing
these things because "the people", as a whole, _want_ it. _Demand_ it in many
cases.

If we want change, we must convince the population of our views. The rest will
follow naturally if that can be done. No, I have no idea how.

~~~
nitrogen
The government _may_ be giving people what they want, but it also knows how to
convince people to want what they get.

~~~
mikeash
That's true, that's the other side of the coin. Still, I think trying to
change government without first changing the people is futile.

------
GigabyteCoin
_" Despite the threats, I refused to alter my manuscript or return the
documents. Instead, we argued that according to Executive Order 12065,
“classification may not be restored to documents already declassified and
released to the public” under the Freedom of Information Act. That prompted
the drama to move all the way up to the White House. On April 2, 1982,
President Reagan signed a new executive order on secrecy that overturned the
earlier one and granted him the authority to “reclassify information
previously declassified and disclosed.”"_

This is truly frightening stuff.

The NSA is above the law. Even when they're not; they have the power to change
the law.

------
arca_vorago
I just want to point out that the real issue then and these days, is the
potential compromise of the DoJ. In my mind, the level the 3 letters have
risen to in the beltway and across the nation fundamentally undermines the
justice system, and that includes SCOTUS. I don't know how much of the lack of
will to prosecute is incompetence (Hanlon's razor), fear of bribery,
blackmail, loss of financial gain or loss of power/position, though I have my
ideas about how to find these things out, the bottom line is that the system
doesn't work properly.

I am a USMC Iraq combat vet (most of my time was during the "surge"). I spent
most of my years since I got out trying to follow the strands up the chain to
figure out what went wrong, and quite frankly, every single branch of
government, including the fourth estate, has been compromised by the security
state aka the military congressional corporate industrial complex. The
executive is compromised, justice is compromised, the legislative is
compromised.

Nobody wanted to hear my rants on the NSA pre-Snowden. Now they don't want to
hear me explain the why, and get too caught up in the how.

My real problem is that none of these concerns are being addressed in any
meaningful way by any of the people at the top. If the transition from nation-
state security matters to single-actor threats is as insidious as the security
apparatus purports it to be, they should explain their logic. So far though,
it seems they have decided to undermine in a very conscious manner the
constitution of the United States of America, without so much as notifying the
American public.

------
koops
Shocking stuff. I don't think it's an exaggeration at this point to say that
politicians are afraid of opposing an organization that knows their, and
everyone else's, secrets. And so they continue operate as they like.

~~~
javajosh
It's almost certainly more complicated than this. The NSA is scary, but it's
also not a revenue producing part of the government, and therefore it must
justify its existence in the budget every year. Lawmakers therefore must be
doing some sort of cost/benefit analysis and have determined (perhaps by
looking at the NSA's secret output) that the cost is worth it.

tl;dr: If Congress wanted to chastise the NSA, all they have to do is _not
fund it_.

~~~
jessaustin
This is exactly backwards. No politician cares about revenue-producing parts
of the government; those things take care of themselves. They care about the
really spendy parts, preferably those that spend all that money in a few big
opaque unauditable chunks. Like the military, or espionage. That way, they
know they'll have the leverage they need to make sure large chunks of those
chunks eventually get back to them or their PACs.

That's [another, besides GP's] reason why Congress would never choose to
chastise NSA.

~~~
javajosh
If what you're saying is true, then it is (dis)provable. There must be ample
evidence of what you're talking about, as the votes themselves are public, and
resource allocation by geography is (probably) also public information.

I would argue that if you cannot prove it, then you should consider whether or
not the assertion is coming more from a negative, cynical sentiment than from
any real fact.

~~~
jessaustin
I'm not sure what you're asking for here. Is it a problem for my theory that
"intelligence kickbacks" isn't a category at:

[https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i&showYe...](https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i&showYear=2013)

These people are unaccountable ghosts; there's nothing to stop them from
masquerading as anything from "retail" to "misc manufacturing" to "pharma".
But back to your theory. What about "revenue producing" parts of the
government (which is what, the IRS?) would cause them to loom larger in a
politician's thinking than the sums of money recorded on the linked page?

------
infruset
"But then the NSA got its revenge—when they handed me the 6,000 pages, they
were all out of order, as if they had been shuffled like a new deck of cards"

A good occasion to practice one of those n log n sorting algorithms manually.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
I do not think pages were numbered 1-6000. I think there were multiple
documents, so you would need to do something like:

1\. Split all the pages into piles for page 1, page 2, page 3, etc...

2\. Look at highest page pile first, because it would have least number of
documents, work backward through page piles searching for matching previous
page until you extract all of the pages[0] for that document.

[0] If pages were heavily blanked out, identification might have been
difficult.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Today we'd run them through a portable scanner, upload the individual PDFs to
a crowd source site, and have the proper order in under a day.

~~~
wlesieutre
Not if they stick you in a room and say "none of these documents can leave,"
which is what it sounds like happened here.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Tethering/Hotspot + EyeFi Wifi-Enabled SD card.

It's possible the room is a faraday cage, but not likely.

~~~
jrochkind1
Back then it wasn't likely. Today? If the NSA has secure rooms for viewing
confidential documents that can not leave the room? It seems pretty darn
likely it is a faraday cage. You think they don't know what they're doing? Or
don't have the money in their budget?

~~~
toomuchtodo
> You think they don't know what they're doing? Or don't have the money in
> their budget?

Budget? Yes. I don't dispute that. Know what they're doing? Clearly they
don't.

~~~
jrochkind1
so we got nothing to worry about?

~~~
psykovsky
We have everyting to worry about. Would you feel safe/confortable with a
toddler waving a fire arm on your face?

------
suprgeek
This story probably only hints at the truly terrifying power that the NSA can
bring to bear. I do not think anyone is disputing the need to collect
intelligence but the scale and scope of the NSA's no-holds-barred all the
information all the time approach needs to be reigned in.

At this point (ironically) it may be fair to start treating them as one of the
biggest threats to the functioning of democracy in the US.

Not terrorists, not violent militia, not soft money, not Income inequality -
but an agency with virtually unchecked powers, opaque budget, no due process
that Govt. Officials themselves daren't speak against for fear of
embarrassment or worse.

~~~
gallerytungsten
For far more than a hint, I recommend reading all four of James Bamford's
books.

------
crazypyro
Don't miss the link to the actual document, if you are curious.

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/10/02/repor...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/10/02/report-
inquiry-cia-related-electronic-surveillance-activities/)

~~~
gatehouse
& the PDF is here:
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1304...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1304974/report-
on-inquiry-into-cia-related-electronic.pdf)

~~~
devindotcom
And the "prosecutive summary":

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1304...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1304973/prosecutive-
summary.pdf)

------
ChuckMcM
I recommend his book "The Puzzle Palace" my wife originally read it as part of
a class on espionage in college and passed it on to me to read.

~~~
huhtenberg
Have you not at all read the linked article? It _is_ about this book.

------
choult
If you're interested in more recent aerial imagery of the Sabana Seca site,
you can see it on Google Maps here:
[https://goo.gl/maps/PJuAd](https://goo.gl/maps/PJuAd)

------
eyeareque
To think if someone was to go up against the NSA today in a similar fashion,
they would be in jail. Unless they were able to escape the country to hide out
somewhere like say... Russia.

------
S_A_P
So has every one here just put a giant target on their back for reading this?

~~~
S_A_P
Not sure why I was downvoted here. Maybe this was interpreted as snark. I
assure you that it was not. I am genuinely concerned that reading about
snowden and NSA issues "flags" me and puts me on a list. I Don't feel like
I've anything to hide, but it seems that the NSA wants this to go away. Maybe
I'm paranoid.

~~~
mikeash
You get put on a list, then what?

If they were sending people off to concentration camps, I'd be cautious. As it
is, I'd be _proud_ to be on some NSA list. Come on, let's do it, NSA. What
exactly are you going to with me on such a list, browse my porn?

~~~
S_A_P
I can see where you are coming from with that sentiment, kind of "they can't
arrest everyone". I guess what scares me is if things do escalate to a tipping
point life could really suck for the group that gets targeted. I even
generally think that the NSA is mostly filled with good people that want to do
public good. As big as snowden and the evesdropping story got, I still think
that most of the mainstream public thinks snowden did something WRONG akin to
espionage. Its one of those things that when reported on your average news
channel is easy to dismiss as just some rogue bad actor with an ax to grind.
The more I think on this the more I am blown away at what he did. This guy DID
put a target on his back. He exiled himself from his life over this. I wouldnt
be surprised if he was on a hit list. I think of having to be in his shoes,
and dont think I would have that same courage.

~~~
mikeash
Sure, but my point is that we're nowhere near Snowden. I wouldn't want to be
him, but to be the guy who gets put on some list with a million other people
for reading and discussing an article that's critical of the NSA? Bring it on.

------
alexbecker
> The agency’s metadata collection program now targets everyone in the country
> old enough to hold a phone. The gargantuan data storage facility it has
> built in Utah may eventually hold zettabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
> bytes) of information. And the massive supercomputer that the NSA is
> secretly building in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, will search through it all at
> exaflop (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second) speeds.

What? These numbers are clearly wrong.

~~~
pdkl95
> "may eventually"

That suggests a "Drake Equation" type estimate, probably something similar to:

    
    
        density = current_disk_density * moores_law * official_estimate_of_project_lifetime
        total = building_area * density * "round up for reporters/management" * propaganda multiplier
        round_up_to_next_si_prefix(total)
    

The actual value is probably somewhere between "current (much smaller) need"
and "how much do we need expand the budget", both of which are far smaller
than those numbers.

------
devindotcom
Fascinating article.

I was intrigued by the mention of the "Black Chamber," alias the Cipher Bureau
and the predecessor of the NSA. Looking it up, I was further intrigued by
mentions of institutional cryptography in Elisabethan England and so on. If
I'm interested in this at a purely layman's level (I'm more into the history
than the practical implications today) what books or essays would you
recommend my reading?

~~~
EthanHeilman
The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication[0] by
David Kahn is probably the best book in this area. Be warned it sits on many
bookshelves but due to its length few are the number that have finished it,
none the less it is an extremely rewarding read. It has oddles and oddles of
stories about cryptographers you have never heard of doing awesome things,
including the history and personalities behind many of the Black Chambers of
Europe.

It puts the Code Book to shame.

[0]: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Codebreakers-Comprehensive-
Communi...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Codebreakers-Comprehensive-
Communication-Internet/dp/0684831309#)

~~~
psykovsky
$55 - Kindle price? $20 more than the paper version? Nice try, amazon!

------
privong
In case anyone else is curious, the "elephant cage" mentioned is a Wullenweber
antenna[0].

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wullenweber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wullenweber)

------
trhway
nice. Everybody of course knows (at least deep inside oneself if the one is
too obtuse to acknowledge it publicly) that, starting from the ancient times,
all the encrypted communication stuff around has always been backdoored, yet
seeing actual confirmation is always assuring :

"Others contained clues to a secret trips that Friedman had made to
Switzerland, where he helped the agency gain backdoor access into encryption
systems that a Swiss company was selling to foreign countries."

~~~
pgeorgi
Switzerland, crypto devices headed to foreign countries, NSA backdoor? Must be
Crypto AG ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG#Back-
doored_machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG#Back-
doored_machines))

~~~
trhway
double nice:

"The owner(s) of Crypto AG are unknown, supposedly even to the managers of
firm, and they hold their ownership through bearer shares"

~~~
spacefight
They also have no money issues, ever. No, no citation available, sorry.

------
Zigurd
Not an actual democracy.

~~~
hawleyal
Never was.

------
icantthinkofone
Since the NSA is the most secret agency in the world, how does anyone know
anything he says in this article is true?

~~~
n09n
Trivially easy. If you want to believe it, it's true. If you don't want to
believe it, it's false.

~~~
harry8
hahahahaha. No. Documents. Snowden. Good try though...

------
autism_hurts
To steal a line from Mulder (The X-Files)

"And they call me paranoid."

Glad my phone, and my messages are encrypted. Filevault on my laptop.

~~~
opendais
They can get into the phone through the baseband. Its not safe to assume its
secure vs. targeted surveillance.

A good discussion is here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062489)

~~~
mey
A great starting point is asking how many general purpose computers are on
your phone. My count is currently 2-4. Your primary OS, the one you interact
with. The radio baseband, which you don't have control over. Your SIM card
which can speak to the baseband without your primary OS. Lastly depending on
your storage, (SD Card) may have it's own cpu, but this (I don't believe in
general) can be accessed by the baseband or sim card without passing through
the primary os.

~~~
scintill76
I've been thinking lately about a way to address this: get a "phone" with no
cell hardware, and pair it with a cellular/WiFi bridge such as MiFi. Get
internet-based replacement services for voice calls and texts. Now you have
one less undocumented interface or super-privileged CPU to worry about.

There's a lot of practicality questions in terms of battery life, expense,
convenience to carry around, but for certain security scenarios it seems like
a step forward.

