Ask HN: After the Paris Attack, have your feelings changed on NSA surveillance? - steven2012
======
dragonwriter
No, and I'm not sure why anyone would expect they would, given that the
flowering of mass surveillance and crystallization of opinions around it
happened in the wake of the much larger attacks of September 11, 2001.

Well, except that US _global_ mass surveillance, presumably targeting groups
including IS, has _existed_ for many years, and is _least_ restrained when it
comes to non-US targets, and yet _failed_ to provide information sufficient to
prevent this attack (apparently, the information that _an_ attack in the West
was planned did turn up, but from Iraqi intelligence, not our mass
surveillance, and not specific enough to identify even the targeted country.)

------
bko
I can't help but feeling reactionary when something upsetting happens. It is
true that early reports suggest that encryption was being used and obviously
low-tech communications like meeting in cafes. But despite the rather
extensive surveillance state that exists, it still did not prevent such a
massive, coordinated attack.

So yes, I am still skeptical of NSA style surveillance, however I am now more
likely to keep my opinion to myself as the issue is now so caught up in
emotion.

~~~
ant6n
Downvotes seem unwarranted. And slightly ironic.

------
Phlarp
Yes-- My feelings have become even more negative as this is yet another
instance where there was undoubtedly plenty of evidence within existing
surveillance programs to have prevented this.

As usual nobody could stop playing bureaucrat long enough to find it, but now
that it's happened NSA will surely have no problem helping france find targets
to hit in Syria and Iraq. To say nothing about how various agencies will use
this event as a flagrant power grab.

~~~
gizmo
Time and time again the terrorists turn out to be people who were already
being monitored by conventional intelligence strategies. However, the
difficulty is in spotting the difference between people with terrorist
sympathies and people who are an imminent threat. Harvesting more data won't
help with this at all.

~~~
jrowley
I'm genuinely curious, if it's not more data, what do we need to differentiate
between a would be terrorist and a run of the mill extremist? Like better
systems for prioritizing, filtering people?

~~~
Phlarp
The argument wasn't that we should be doing things better in order to make
these systems "valuable".

The argument was that these types of things simply cannot be done with the
current state of tech, and any attempts by governments to do so should be
viewed by the public as both useless wastes of public funds and thinly veiled
power grabs-- similar to how we view authoritarian regimes that try to extend
their own term limits or institute a national curfew in response to political
protests.

~~~
jrowley
ahh thank you! So instead of trying to prevent attacks by intercepting them
(which is probably doomed to fail anyway), we should work on the greater issue
of diplomacy in general.

------
contingencies
Fundamentally, you can't read people's minds, so you can't use surveillance to
stop individual actions.

A single motivated individual could likely have pulled off the worst of these
(the theater shootings).

The barrier of entry is low: any of [peculiar mental configuration],
[willingness to die], [overwhelming frustration or disenfranchisement with
society] or [extreme anger] plus access to a firearm (or some chemicals, a
machine shop and time... even access to a vehicle might be enough).

Given that many statistics indicate that mental health is deteriorating
globally across the developed world (not just due to aging population or
drugs, either, but due to fundamental structure-of-society issues), Donald
Trump's "this would have been different if there were more weapons on people"
takes the cake as the most idiotic response.

We can't stop these things, we can only make them universally reviled, and
that's already the case.

What I find interesting is the response of leaders: France has said it will
ignore EU rules, increase its prison and military budget, and refuse to drop
the latter for another 5 years citing 'national security' (following the
destructive and viral American model obviating respect for treaties, as China
and others now do). Simultaneously, it redoubles bombing of already suffering
Syrian targets, presumably on suddenly fortuitously acquired intelligence. One
of tens of remote wars since the mid 20th century in which vastly powerful
western militaries permanently shatter the fabric of societies half-way around
the world, deploying nationalist rhetoric that wouldn't have been astray in
Rome, and often leaving power vacuums that cause chaos for decades or longer,
one is forced to ask the question: who are the real terrorists? Read some
Chomsky.

“The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away
our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we
didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”
[http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-
inte...](http://www.thenation.com/article/what-i-discovered-from-interviewing-
isis-prisoners/)

------
Smushman
It is interesting this is being asked here. Even more interesting is/are the
responses.

My first thought (after the initial thoughts of OMG and etc.) when I heard
about the Paris attacks (lower case on attack is mine - when did attack stop
being a verb?) was the upcoming attack that would be perpetrated against civil
liberties in the name of freedom.

Maybe I am in the minority, and honestly my assessment is that readers here
are likely to be in the same minority group; but from a philosophical point of
view the rapid reversion to tightened control and monitoring by governments
was a significant setback to our race as a whole and the great strides made in
last 200-300 years regarding personal freedoms. We can marry whomever we want
in the US now, but heaven forbid I wanted to have a private conversation.

I don't know what our future holds; but I am quite sure that this won't bode
well. Knee jerk reactions are now a specialty of all governments and critical
analysis and discussions are no longer in vogue.

I sincerely hope that Edward Snowden has nothing he was looking forward to in
the US.

------
staunch
A few assholes with guns shouldn't scare you into giving up the rights that
millions of brave people have devoted their lives to defending.

~~~
carterehsmith
Ok... when exactly did millions of brave devoted their lives to defending
privacy? There were all kinds of reasons for fighting (many of them including
being drafted) but we never ever had a War For Privacy.

~~~
pdkl95
Yes, we did.

Justice Roberts in his opinion for Riley v California.

    
    
        Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding
        generation's response to the reviled "general warrants" and "writs of
        assistance" of the colonial era, which allowed British officers to
        rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of
        criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact on of the
        driving forces behind the Revolution itself. [...]
    
        Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience.
        With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many
        Americans "the privacies of life." The fact that technology now allows
        an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the
        information any less worth of the protection for which the Founders fought.

~~~
carterehsmith
So you are saying that we fought for independence because British were
invading our privacy? They were opening our snailmail and were reading it and
that's why we fought for independence. Right.

I have never seen any credible historian claim that. Good luck with that line
of reasoning.

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

~~~
pdkl95
Let me guess, you're a strict constructionist? This quibble about the specific
word "privacy" is a useless distraction and a waste of time.

If you aren't convinced, go research the various SCOTUS cases that recognized
that the right to privacy is implicit in the constitution. I quoted a recent
SCOTUS opinion already.

Also, Article 1, Section 1 of the California Constitution:

    
    
        All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights.
        Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring,
        possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety,
        happiness, and privacy.
                       ^^^^^^^

------
ant6n
Nope, not really. Snooping on people to find terrorists is reacting to the
problem - while we continue to create it (for example via drone strikes).

We should be preventing terrorism, which we can only with peace.

------
steven2012
FWIW I don't believe that the NSA programs actually help keep us secure,
similarly to how I don't believe the TSA or any part of the "Freedom" Act has
helped us significantly. I believe in 30 years, children will be reading about
this "terrorist-scare" the same way we were taught about the "Red Scare"
during the 50s.

That said, it certainly is an easy security blanket for some people, to
believe that "if we were monitoring everything, all those lives could have
been saved". I just don't believe it, and for example, it didn't help stop the
Boston bombings, even when that information was available.

But I'm curious if other people feel otherwise, and if so, what are their
reasons. Maybe I can be convinced otherwise.

------
decasteve
Yes. I've become more disgusted by those who use this attack as opportunism to
push for more surveillance.

------
rnovak
This is probably going to get super downvoted, possibly flagged, but what
evidence does anyone have that they could not have stopped it?

I think it's _PLAUSIBLE_ that the intelligence community knew and identified
this attack ahead of time, and chose to ignore it.

I'm not saying that's what happened, but it wouldn't surprise me (let's be
clear here: I'm not saying _they caused it_ , I'm saying they _knew_ and
_chose_ to do nothing).

That move 'The Imitation Game' raised a good point: If you have the ability to
read 100% of your enemies comms...what's the best approach for defeating them?

The second you stop 100% of every attack you know about, the jig would be up,
they'd know that their comms had been compromised, they'd switch to a
different technology, and you'd be on the defensive (instead of offensive).

It's not like _we 'd even know_ how many they stopped, I'm sure that material
is so classified not even analysts have access to it, let alone would it be
open to FOIA requests.

Anyway, just a thought.

~~~
x1798DE
I think the major problem is that it's easy to fill yourself into thinking
that you could have stopped it in hindsight because you already know what
happened.

If you took this one report more seriously you would have stopped it, sure,
but how does that help you going forward? It's the same kind of thinking that
makes you feel like you could have made a killing buying Microsoft stock or
Google or something. Easy to make a post hoc rationalisation that explains the
observed facts, likely impossible to do ex ante.

------
ionised
No, my feelings remain completely unchanged. I'm still very much against it.
I'm not convinced terrorists are the ultimate, primary target of this
surveillance, honestly.

Even if it were, we know this type of mass surveillance has been in use for
years now and it seems utterly ineffectual in preventing the kind of incidents
they are supposedely meant to prevent.

Also, seeing the exploitative opportunism in some politicans and the media
since the Paris attacks in spouting their thinly veiled fascism and
demagoguery really pisses me off. It just makes me that much more resistant to
any attempts to curtail our civil liberties.

The whole point of terrorism is to change the country it is inflicted upon
through fear tactics. This is exactly what is happening by spying on people,
censoring websites and introducing police-state like controls on our freedoms.

So you could say that by allowing ourselves to be led down this path we are in
essence _' letting the terrorists win'_.

Fuck that shit.

------
jiantastic
As with most things, I think that it is a trade off. There is a very delicate
balance between security and privacy.

 _Too much surveillance_

\- General public feels incredibly uncomfortable due to lack of privacy

\- An incredibly scary amount of power in the hands of whoever has access to
that information ( and who knows what they will do with it )

\- Reduced risk of terrorism and security concerns

 _Too little_

\- Increased risk of terrorism + massive security concerns due to lack of
intelligence ( it's like trying to find a needle in a huge haystack )

\- Public feels safe due to perceived increased privacy and yet feels unsafe
due to ( potentially ) increased number of terrorist incidents.

It's a rather difficult problem to solve. How can we extract critical security
information without invading people's privacy?

------
shoo
Apologies if this is blunt, but the western media obsesses over incidents of
terrorism where relatively small numbers of westerners are the victims.
Particularly if they die in unexpected and graphic ways.

Far more people die all the time due to many other reasons that we could
decide to care about.

E.g. 1.5 million people died from tuberculosis in 2013 [1].

E.g. in 2014, 45% of deaths of children under five were due to malnutrition -
3.1 million deaths per year [2].

E.g. 15 people die in my wealthy western country - Australia - every day, due
to alcohol [3] [4].

E.g. my hobby-horse issue political issue, climate change, will probably
directly or indirectly lead to the deaths of billions over the next century or
so, due to long-term lock-in decisions that have been made in the past, and
are being made now. Unfortunately the changes are gradual, most of the victims
haven't died yet, most of the victims won't be relatively powerful and rich
westerners, and there isn't a clear "other" for our society to demonise and
blame, and it would require the status quo to change, so there isn't much of a
fuss about it in the media - nobody in a position of power particularly wants
to hear about it, let alone do anything, and it isn't particularly newsworthy
as nothing much changes - it's just consistently bad news, getting gradually
worse over time.

[1] - [http://www.who.int/gho/tb/en/](http://www.who.int/gho/tb/en/)

[2] - [https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats](https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats)

[3] - [https://theconversation.com/australias-daily-alcohol-
toll-15...](https://theconversation.com/australias-daily-alcohol-
toll-15-deaths-and-430-hospitalisations-29906)

[4] - I am drinking a glass of wine as I write this.

edit: to become even more drearily pragmatic, as a society i think it is for
the best not to be concerned or distracted with relatively small losses due to
terrorism or any other cause. we cannot be completely shielded from risk. we
cannot bear the cost of being completely shielded from risk. the risks are
probably going to ramp up over the next few decades, as population continues
to grow, resource stocks decline and are exhausted, natural disasters
increase, climate changes, and global society becomes increasingly
interconnected, more efficient, and less resilient to damage.

~~~
bordercases
In the case of Paris it's not just about the losses. It's at least partially
about trust, meaning, can we trust millions of people who are profoundly like
us to integrate smoothly or are we instigating risks of further attacks as a
result.

I don't particularly like it when terrorist attacks are contextualized in
terms of deaths that are not political in nature at all. Everything you
mentioned are close to being "random processes" in the statistical sense.
Terrorist attacks may be somewhat chaotic in distribution (a brief arxiv.org
search shows researchers trying to prove otherwise); but terrorists are
adversarial, people who actively want to see you dead. On the other hand,
tuberculosis, malnutrition and alcohol could only be construed as adversarial
in a weak sense at best. A much more non-intentional perspective is better
suited for the latter than the former.

~~~
shoo
Fair comment. Can you go into more detail regarding why this classification
matters?

I note you've refrained from taking a position regarding climate change - fair
enough, it is a gnarly subject. I don't think that it neatly falls into an
adversarial or "random process" classification. I think it is reasonable to
regard the consequences of climate change as both intentional, and highly
political, with large doses of randomness and uncertainty.

Here's a perhaps terrible analogy: for whatever reason, suppose people are
willing to pay money to watch me shoot a gun into the air. Perhaps they find
it entertaining. Occasionally bullets might fall in an unlucky place and kill
someone or damage property. I certainly don't intend anyone or anything in
particular any harm, but hey, I've got to earn some money to pay the bills.

~~~
bordercases
Don't read too much into me not saying "climate change is X". I refrained
because it involves human agency, but I wouldn't call it truly adversarial
either. Let's add "intentional" to the mix. ISIS/Da'esh is an organization
that has intentions to kill people, and is essentially a singleton in that
regard even if it influences people to kill in packs of autonomous cells
("autonomous" used loosely, they're on the Internet and talk to each other).

Climate change, on the other hand, doesn't really have a central bureau that
seeks to engineer more climate change. At best it's a nasty side-effect that
some large organizations might chose to ignore, but they don't explicitly
optimize for it and it's obvious it's not large organizations doing most of
the damage. It's like a tragedy-of-the-commons problem, which once again you
can construe as adversarial – I wouldn't. But if you continue to, I would
implore you to consider that the attacks are adversarial-intentional while
climate-change is adversarial-incidental. Terrorism isn't a tragedy-of-the-
commons, it's a design.

I think the classification matters because it alerts us to some facts that I'm
afraid we might underrate: like the notion that the people Actually Believe
This Stuff as the simplest explanation, rather than convoluting it with some
hammy sociological explanation, or even a statistical one. Because I think
that they Actually Believe This Stuff I continue to think that they are
ideologically incompatible with the West and should be isolated rather than
risk being welcoming to them (by accident). The deaths of the Parisians
should, if not be avenged, then be taken seriously as a failure of our ability
to protect ourselves from our enemies.

~~~
shoo
Genuinely - thank you for your careful reply, it is appreciated.

I don't think I believe that climate change is adversarial, and I really get
the tragedy-of-the-commons aspect. Perhaps "knowing criminal negligence" is a
better fit than "adversarial".

That said, perhaps from the perspective of victims/friends/families of
terrorism/climate change/etc, I suspect that it may not make all that much
difference if they were the victims of some adversarial action, or the victims
of the predictable yet semi-randomised results of negligence.

I get your point about a failure of our ability to protect ourselves. I think
the lesson here is not to try to completely protect ourselves (by yielding to
increasingly oppressive government surveillance), as complete protection is
not possible. It is particularly hard to defend oneself against, while
preserving some pretence of civilisation/democracy/rule of law, against people
who are willing to die in order to kill you.

I think the real lesson here is to understand that we, and our society, and
our civilisation, are all mortal, and will die some day, perhaps sooner than
we think, and there is nothing we can do about it. We are not in control. This
lesson is perhaps a hard one to internalise. I am not sure I internalise it.
There's some more words by someone more eloquent than I here: [1]

[1] - [http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-
how...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-how-to-die-
in-the-anthropocene/)

~~~
bordercases
I just want to thank you as well for your willingness to engage with me,
especially with how delicate the subject matter is. It gives me hope for the
state of modern political discourse.

You've presented an interesting distillation, that's for sure (on your
recommendation I shall read the article). It's worth noting that there are
probably multiple lessons to this experience or event and the relevance will
change from person to person, but in a way that's nitpicking.

My response to the notion of looking at these risks with fatalistic
acceptance, is that we shouldn't completely evaluate the impact of things like
malnutrition, disease, violence, {climate change side-effects} in terms of
death. Death is a nice common impact measure, same as money, which is why
they're so popular as they make the incomparable, comparable. But they should
be seen as approximate representations of what we value, rather than what we
value. Even if there isn't a whole lot we can do to gain knowledge of when
people are attacked or when they die, there are still values beyond
death/money for which these events have meaning. Something could be done for
those shared values even if it can't be done for ourselves.

I agree with what you're saying RE: surveillance. Two things:

(1) I don't think we quite know the extent for which our military agencies are
preventing harm, only the extent to which they haven't. There could be a "Red
Queen" effect where less surveillance is a net loss but more surveillance does
nothing, or is also a net loss. Just a thought, and I wouldn't be surprised.

(2) ISIS is using our compassion and our values against us: they say as much
in their magazine.[0][1] If we don't do the same to them then the fight will
keep being asymmetric, but I don't have any answers that aren't probably wrong
in some way. Already I've been drawing conclusions that I thought were
correct, but they were expecting and wanted. Russia is the only country with
the balls to fight a ground war but NATO is not on best terms with them,
either, among other things.

(An aside: While Silicon Valley's techno-optimism is perhaps one of the most
productive, proactive and pragmatic stances one can take to the world's flaws
and inefficiencies, I try to remember that it's probably an exception rather
than the rule. SV exists in a bubble of its own and is ultimately dependent on
much else being stable.)

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10579975)
[1] [https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/islamic-states-goal-
elim...](https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/islamic-states-goal-eliminating-
the-grayzone-of-coexistence-between-muslims-and-the-west/)

------
kbart
Not. But I hate NSA&Co even more as they use such tragedies to further their
agenda[0]. If spy agencies did their primary job and focused more resources on
actual spying and infiltration of terrorist organizations (not mass
surveillance as they do now), I'm sure results would be much better.

0\. [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/encrypted-
mes...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/europe/encrypted-messaging-
apps-face-new-scrutiny-over-possible-role-in-paris-attacks.html)

------
saluki
I expect all/most communications are and will continue to be
monitored/recorded by someone (NSA, gov, fbook, goog, etc.)

If this monitoring does prevent an attack from happening that's great but I
don't think we have or will have a choice or even will know what is being
monitored and logged or by who.

I mean we are all paying to carry around tracking devices (phones) 24/7.

If someone told you 10 years ago that in the near future everyone would be
forced to carry a device to track their every move and that could listen in on
their communications what would you have thought?

The privacy ship has sailed.

------
lovelearning
It has for me.

When the Snowden revelations first came out, as an engineer, I was in awe of
the NSA's capabilities.

But slowly, the awe has reduced to "meh, they're just another inept government
agency" levels. If they were so capable, how does one explain the rise of
groups like ISIS since 2003? It's hard to believe such a well trained well
financed group can rise and take over vast territories without emails, IMs and
mobile calls.

------
mindcrime
No, not at all. Freedom is its own end, and State sponsored mass surveillance
is inimical to freedom. Even IF this stuff kept us safer, which I doubt, it
wouldn't be a trade-off that makes sense to me. If you're not free, why live
at all? To me, agency, the freedom to make our own choices, to live our own
lives, is the most fundamental essence of what it means to be alive.

------
lastofus
What does illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA have to do with recent
attacks across the pond?

Are you asking if we now feel more ok with our rights being violated, because
we are so damn scared for our own safety after what happened in Paris?

I personally will take liberty/privacy over supposed security any day.

------
mbrock
I feel more strongly that such massive violations undermine the legitimacy of
the government(s) involved.

They say the terrorists hate "us" for our freedom and democracy... but we
don't even have that.

------
bawana
Shame on the CIA chief for grandstanding on the cover of the NYTimes. 14 years
after 9/11 and we are no further along. Isn't he ashamed of himself? Why
should we have more of people like him? Terrorist activity is borne out of
desperation. Where does the money come from? What has that not been traced and
revealed?

------
marssaxman
No. Why should they? Surveillance has nothing to do with this.

------
emocin
Not a single bit.

------
kardos
Not at all

------
openfuture
No.

