

NSA Claims Surveillance Programs Aided Stopping Of 50 Attacks; Details Lacking - peter123
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130618/10230323518/nsa-claims-surveillance-programs-aided-stopping-50-attacks-details-lacking.shtml

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dopamean
I really dont like the idea that because some people may have been saved from
death that trampling on peoples rights is ok.

How many people died for us to end up with these rights? Thousands? Millions?
Tens of millions? So is it ok to dash away 4th amendment rights to save
hundreds? Thousands?

It just doesn't seem fair to everyone who sacrificed so much before us.

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tsotha
>I really dont like the idea that because some people may have been saved from
death that trampling on peoples rights is ok.

Isn't that exactly the argument inherent in gun control legislation?

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dopamean
Yes. I don't like most gun control legislation either. My only belief
regarding gun control is that if we want to do it properly we have to repeal
the 2nd Amendment.

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privong
This gets into the issue of where rights originate. Do they originate with the
government (or its founding documents) or are they an integral part of being
human?

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dopamean
I don't believe a right to bear arms is an integral part of being human. I
think the 2nd Amendment has outlived its usefulness.

~~~
tsotha
>I don't believe a right to bear arms is an integral part of being human.

Couldn't disagree more with this. I think the right to self-defense is very
much and integral part of being human.

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famousactress
Watching this play out was painful, but as much as I like the comments about
unicorns and being the Queen of England, for a moment let's assume that most
or all of the fifty cases were real threats on some level or another, and this
information played a role.

The problem that I see in the way these questions get asked or answered is in
the speculation they leave up to the answerer to interpret. Asking the FBI
whether an attack would haven't been thwarted if this tool didn't exist allows
the FBI to answer from the imaginary perspective of having no tool at all. I
feel like that's what we started seeing this morning.

It's a harder, longer conversation (than I suspect congress has patience for)
to thoroughly evaluate whether alternative tools could have done the same job.

I also feel like we saw a very selective use of speculation. When asked
whether this tool would have prevented 9/11 we got [paraphrased, barely]
"We'll never know, but I can tell you this tool didn't exist back then". But
when asked whether PRISM was essential in thwarting threats, or whether this
leak has affected national security ongoing... the speculation was suddenly
reasonable.

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ChuckMcM
It is painful, and typically the reasoning for not revealing details is that
it will compromise the method used to acquire said details. However that
reasoning completely fails when the _point_ of the conversation is that we
already know about how the information was acquired, so telling us what it
prevented doesn't change the status quo.

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anigbrowl
I'm not all that interested in how the information was acquired, but metadata
goes both ways. 'We acquired important information by reading ChuckMcM's HN
posts' tips off other people involved in conversations with you such as
FamousActress and myself, so open discussion of the details is tricky.

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jurassic
If you watch the video of Alexander's testimony, he says "potential terrorist
events" not attacks. So these could have just been meetings among people with
fringe political views. I'm not buying it.

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betterunix
_DETAILS LACKING_ is the key phrase here. Were these realistic attacks? Were
the attackers being egged on the by the government?

Also, am I the only one wondering why the number of attacks that these
programs supposedly stopped increases every few days?

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mikeash
Indeed. If there were 50 attacks like 9/11 that were only stopped because of
this, I would have to sit back and think real hard about my stance about the
fight against terrorism. On the other hand, if it was 50 attacks like the
idiots who were going to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting the support
cables with a blowtorch, then the program is obviously not even remotely
worthwhile.

Of course, the lack of details gives us some details already. If it really was
50 9/11-scale attacks, they would have said so. That they have not said so
tells us that these attacks were not important anyway.

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jpdoctor
I bet we could stop a lot more than 50 attacks if we gut the rest of the
fourth amendment too.

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MichaelGG
That doesn't make sense, at least inside the US. If 50 were stopped, to stop a
lot more than 50 (what, 100?), would require that many to have actually
succeeded or going to succeed. There's no evidence of that.

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spodek
How many attacks did they _provoke_?

How many people on the cusp of violent retaliation now feel justified to do
what they only thought about before?

How many people who wouldn't dislike the U.S. will?

How many governments who would partner with the U.S. won't trust the country?

How much reason did they give people to hate them?

How much did they breach the Constitution and how is that different from
anyone else doing it?

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tptacek
None. Look at all politically-motivated violent attacks that deliberately or
recklessly affected civilians; all of them were done by people who would be
uninfluenced by any detail of due process in the US.

No sane person tries to blow up an airplane over NSA surveillance.

I think James Clapper should be fired, that we need to reevaluate the FISA
court system, and (most radically) that NSA needs to be transitioned back into
a foreign intelligence agency and be firewalled off from domestic law
enforcement.

I don't think we should try to get there by making arguments that 99% of
Americans will immediately reject, in part because even people who are
sympathetic to the problem of an overreaching NSA will disagree strongly with
them.

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pvnick
>No sane person tries to blow up an airplane

You could have stopped there.

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tptacek
No, I don't think so.

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pvnick
Oh hey tptacek it looks like you've shifted your opinion on this whole NSA
scandal a bit over the past couple days to be less skeptical and more in line
with the rest of HN. Was there any particular story that made you change your
mind?

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tptacek
My opinion hasn't changed at all. I don't want to make another thread about
me, so if you have more questions, you can ping me via email.

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ianstallings
I have 50 pink unicorns in this box. I can't show you because it would
compromise their safety. I have them working on a cigarette that stops lung
cancer.

~~~
alexqgb
Potentially pink unicorns, to be precise.

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stefap2
In the former communist block there was virtually no organized crime, except
maybe some small time crime. The secret police had everything under a tight
control, screening phone calls, mail etc. Indeed, it was a very safe place to
live if you did not stand out from the crowd and did what was expected.

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pilsetnieks
The organized crime in the Soviet block was put away but not eradicated
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vor_v_zakone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vor_v_zakone)
.) Which, of course, resulted in a shitstorm after the collapse of USSR.

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diminoten
What set of facts would the NSA be required to show before those who oppose
these surveillance measures in general start saying what the NSA has done is
reasonable?

Is 50 threats stopped that wouldn't have been enough to justify the intrusion
of privacy? Would 100? Maybe 1000?

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CWuestefeld
In my book, there's no number.

The question assumes that this is all negotiable, that there's some level at
which we should be prepared to surrender fundamental freedoms. I claim that no
such value exists.

Since the primary source of these threats seems to be from militant
Islamicists, it would seem that we could get some measure of safety from
banning Islam from America. How many thwarted attacks should it take for us to
toss out the First Amendment?

It's difficult to prove that somebody is conspiring with a terrorist
organization. Surely the need to prove a defendant guilty before a jury, is
opening the door for terrorist attacks. How many thwarted attacks should we
expect before we're willing to discard the Seventh Amendment? Oh, wait, we've
already done that one in Guantanamo. Maybe we are on the way...

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anigbrowl
_Since the primary source of these threats seems to be from militant
Islamicists, it would seem that we could get some measure of safety from
banning Islam from America. How many thwarted attacks should it take for us to
toss out the First Amendment?_

Surely you've noticed that there's a small but vocal minority that is heartily
in favor of this, along with things like militarizing the border with Mexico,
rounding up 1--12 million illegal aliens, and so on.

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CWuestefeld
Indeed. And I'm comfortable lumping those xenophobes into the same group as
those who believe that we should throw out the 4th Amendment, and have already
discarded the 7th (and chunks of several others).

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diminoten
Don't you hear yourself? You're as unreasonable as the people you deride...

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CWuestefeld
Well, I guess that depends on what you consider "unreasonable". I'll admit to
idealistic, resolute, and maybe even impractical.

But it's actually my point that it's the ideals that matter. We can never say
that the ends justify the means, because there's never actually an end: time
just keeps rolling on.

So tell me: do you see me being unreasonable in a _bad_ way? (This is a
sincere question: what am I missing from my point of view?)

~~~
diminoten
Okay, you do recognize it's not useful as a means of determining policy and
legislation (practical).

That's fine. The world needs idealists, but you have to understand when you
don't get your way.

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silveira
"By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away." Lisa Simpson

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shill
I'm sure the Stasi prevented a few heinous crimes in its day too.

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SkyMarshal
I wish somebody would leak the details on this too.

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orblivion
How many people would have died in 50 years under a totalitarian surveillance
state if this information didn't leak?

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vijayboyapati
"Trust us, we're the US government, what have we ever done to make you wary of
that trust?"

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gummydude
meh, all that data not a preemptive measure against terrorists but to
blackmail ppl whenever necessary.

I know what u did last summer!!

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pasquinelli
50 is on the highish side of reasonable, seems like a good choice. still, i
would've gone with a bazillion, just to really wow people.

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throwaway10001
_NSA Claims Surveillance Programs Aided Stopping Of 50 Attacks; Details
Lacking_

Yeah, I'm the Queen of England. Really, but details are lacking.

Sorry NSA but I am not buying it, some megacorp is worried about losing
billion dollar checks from FedGov

