
Why it’s so hard to keep up with how the U.S. gov't is spying on its own people - Libertatea
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/20/why-its-so-hard-to-keep-up-with-how-the-u-s-government-is-spying-on-its-own-people/
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DickingAround
This all makes a lot more sense if you just accept that the government isn't
'working for you' or however people think of it these days. They're working
for them. They're playing a shell game to work around you. Not exactly
breaking news when we have long-standing political families and parties. It's
not a new thing. There is a political ruling class. We're not in it and the
people who are like this ability so they're going to hoodwink us to keep it.
It's just that simple.

~~~
rayiner
Almost everyone I know outside the HN echo-chamber is more worried about
terrorism (and dozens of other things) than they are about surveillance. In a
nutshell, they saw "V for Vendetta" as a fun movie, but not any more of a
plausible future outcome than any of those movies set in a post-nuclear
winter.

I don't have any evidence that the government is doing anything other than
what people want with regard to surveillance.

Keep in mind that the composite median voter is basically my mother: thinks
the world would be chaos without authority; thinks drugs make people morally
bankrupt; wants a big SUV; wants to ban guns; is nearing eligibility for
Social Security and Medicare, etc. She _loves_ Hilary Clinton. And of course,
she's going to vote. I'm not.

~~~
delecti
>she's going to vote. I'm not

And thus you admit to being part of the problem.

~~~
Thriptic
Not really. I would argue that I can realistically have a much greater impact
on politics by contributing reasonable amounts of money to a campaign, by
hiring a lobbyist, or by forming a vocal special interest group around my
ideas which has a PAC. Why be a nameless voter who a candidate doesn't give a
shit about when spending some money can literally buy me face time and
legitimacy. Moreover, I can do this regardless of who is in power; I don't
need to be constrained by political affiliation or a candidate's stated
platform which may not mesh well with my ideals.

~~~
delecti
> I can realistically have a much greater impact on politics by contributing
> reasonable amounts of money to a campaign, by hiring a lobbyist, or by
> forming a vocal special interest group

I think that's pretty unambiguously true, but voting is free and relatively
easy.

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misiti3780
From what I have witnessed, the average American I come into contact with
still doesn't seem to care about the spying. I have recently had conversations
in the past week since the Paris attacks with a few people that seemed to
really believe Snowden's leaks were a big reason this happened and anyone who
has "nothing to hide" should support the dragnet NSA policies.

The sad thing is that the US intelligence community apparently notified the
French spooks about the possibility of an impending ISIS attack(s) (which
seems ambiguous, after all, an attack could occur anywhere) and a few of the
attackers were on fundamentalist watch lists, and yet the attacks still
happened. Yet no major media outlet has (at least that I have seen) identified
this as an example of a failure of the US/EU ICs. Glenn Greenwald was on CNN
yesterday throwing CNN's anchor under the bus for allowing all these major IC
talking heads to come on and blame snowden, talk up dragnet, etc. - it was
pretty interesting.

Terrorist attacks, which are black swan events, are not preventable. So if I
have to deal with them, I would rather deal with them without the dragnet than
with it. I also cant think of a single example of the NSA/CIA preventing a
major terrorist attack in the US (at lets face it, if they had one, they would
have used this as a shining example by now). All of the attacks that were
thwarted were just by luck: shoe bomber, underwear bomber, time square bomber,
etc.

~~~
gjtorikian
I am in no way, shape, or form advocating for more surveillance. But I can
recall at least one event recently where a terrorist threat was thwarted: the
2010 Portland, Oregon Christmas car bomb:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Portland_car_bomb_plot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Portland_car_bomb_plot)

~~~
hexalicious
That plot wasn't discovered from mass surveillance. That was where the FBI
makes themselves look like they're solving terror plots by finding mentally
unstable socially isolated people and providing all the resources and planning
for a 'terror plot' they can then bust.

------
iamsohungry
I've said it before and I'll say it again: when law enforcement compromises
the security of a network without a warrant, they need to be prosecuted and
jailed under the same law that any other hackers breaking the law would be. As
long as there are no consequences for breaking the law, the NSA will continue
breaking the law.

~~~
cryoshon
The US has a long tradition of not jailing its political lawbreakers, though.
The way they pitch immunity in this case is to claim that a prosecution of an
NSA official that broke the law would cause the remaining NSA employees to be
on-guard for lawbreaking, and too busy to watching their ass to do their job
at the NSA effectively, leading to terrorist attacks against the US.

In effect, they say that it is unreasonable for us to expect the NSA to both
obey the law and do their jobs.

Nevermind that they've re-written the laws to make their invasive surveillance
completely legal.

~~~
iamsohungry
> The way they pitch immunity in this case is to claim that a prosecution of
> an NSA official that broke the law would cause the remaining NSA employees
> to be on-guard for lawbreaking,

Good. Government officials should be on guard for lawbreaking.

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cryoshon
FTA: ""This is yet another trick move in the never-ending shell game that the
NSA is playing with the American people, and apparently with the secret court
whose oversight it is trying to evade," said Kevin Bankston, the director of
New America's Open Technology Institute. "New rule: if the NSA claims that a
particular surveillance program has ended, or that a particular type of
surveillance has halted 'under this program,' assume that it is still going on
in another program.""

It's hard to keep up with the latest abuses because, as the article mentions
explicitly, the government is perpetually playing a shell game with its
surveillance programs in order to deceive the public and its other enemies
which the programs target. The government works from the assumption that an
outed surveillance program is a surveillance program rendered ineffective,
meaning that there's consistent internal pressure to reorganize, rename, and
reconfigure existing programs that get hit with daylight. In order to kneecap
oversight, regulatory questions are answered as literally as possible, using
the most deceptive and narrow terms as possible. The terms that they use are
typically internally defined in bizarre and obtuse ways for the purposes of
propaganda, and these definitions are never made explicitly clear to the
public or regulators. This is how we get to the point of a very
straightforward, unambiguous term such as "collection" actually being defined
by the NSA as "processing data for intelligence purposes after it has been
found, categorized, scraped via algorithm, and stored."

In summary: it's hard to keep up because the surveillance agencies are
intentionally being evasive of public and political oversight, because they
are engaged in immoral programs which are perpetually extralegal.

EDIT:

An additional bonus of this maskirovka-style strategy is that the press will
be bungled up habitually by reporting in the government's desired terms. This
means that if the press even does understand the true meanings of the
propaganda terms used, the public will be getting a confusing and often
inconsistent narrative that is hard to make sense of. The press will also
typically publish articles detailing the denial of wrongdoing from the
government, and will rarely publish the highly detailed and factual
accusations of wrongdoing in the first place.

~~~
reacweb
Some illegal activities of IC may happen. I consider it acceptable as long as
it is really small scale. In order to fight terrorism efficiently, we may need
some large scale monitoring of phones (and/ot car movements). These large
scale monitoring should be unambigously regulated. The principle of separation
of powers (I am french) should apply.

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jimrandomh
The shell game is as much for the courts as it is for the people. The courts
have demonstrated a de facto inability to enforce judgments and subpoenas
against the US intelligence community, and part of the trick is obfuscating
responsibility.

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mtgx
Because the so called "oversight" committees are acting like the NSA's biggest
cheerleaders, instead of making sure they don't exceed their legal powers.

Feinstein even admitted after the Snowden revelations that she wasn't even
aware of many of the leaked programs NSA uses. A failure to punish the abuses
only increases the number of abuses, as they learn that they can "get away
with it" with no accountability.

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eip
Most people want to be able to subdue and/or kill other human beings which
disturb their daily lives, but they do not want to have to cope with the moral
and religious issues which such an overt act on their part might raise.
Therefore, they assign the dirty work to others (including their own children)
so as to keep the blood off their hands. They rave about the humane treatment
of animals and then sit down to a delicious hamburger from a whitewashed
slaughterhouse down the street and out of sight. But even more hypocritical,
they pay taxes to finance a professional association of hit men collectively
called politicians, and then complain about corruption in government.

[http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml#twentyfour](http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/sw4qw/index.shtml#twentyfour)

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voidz
_" There is a reason for all the secrecy: The government argues it has a
vested interest in keeping capabilities secret so that terrorists and other
targets aren't able to figure out how to evade surveillance. That's one of the
reasons some intelligence officials were quick to blame Snowden in the wake of
the recent Paris attacks, arguing his revelations may have given terrorists a
road map for how evade detection."_

Didn't they use unencrypted SMS messages to coordinate?

~~~
etiam
_" But no evidence has yet emerged that the attacks were coordinated using
tools that protected communications through encryption, a security tool
Snowden often recommends to everyday users looking to ensure their digital
privacy. In fact, the information available so far suggests that the attackers
sent an unencrypted text to coordinate the launch of the attack, and several
of them had been known to Belgian investigators."_

~~~
voidz
Oh. Thanks. Seems I misunderstood "text" in this context... In our country
we're used to calling this SMS messages and I can never get used to "text
messages". Hat tip to you.

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oldpond
If your email account is hosted on the Cloud on US soil, and the email
provider decides to migrate that part of their Cloud to the Philippines, for
example, would that email come under the purview of the new program and be
considered "outside" the US?

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority)

