
NSA Improperly Collected U.S. Phone Records a Second Time - echevil
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/26/nsa-improperly-obtained-phone-call-data-after-saying-issues-were-fixed/1568914001/
======
DigitalTerminal
ROFL. Actually click through and read this document:
[https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/nsa-foia-documents-
quart...](https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/nsa-foia-documents-quarterly-
reports-intelligence-oversight-board-nsa-activities). The title is super
misleading. It has the NSA being the subject of the sentence, the entity doing
the verb. If you read the document, it's clear that the NSA followed the law
in how they sent requests over to the phone companies, and a couple companies
made errors in what they sent back. When NSA discovered this, they reported it
through the proper channels. This is like, the opposite of nefarious action,
guys. A better title would have the phone companies as the subject of the
sentence. "Phone companies improperly sent data to the NSA for a second time,
documents reveal." Of course, being honest in the title wouldn't misinform and
scare people...

~~~
nerdponx
Maybe HN should hide the "comment" button until you've clicked on the link.

~~~
lmm
HN was pretty good at self-policing until dang introduced a rule against
accusing other users of not reading the article.

~~~
nerdponx
You're still allowed to reply to their post quotes from the article that make
it clear that they didn't read the article. I've also just done the "I know
it's against the rules but did you read the article?" thing in the past.
Haven't gotten banned yet.

I do wonder what the point of that rule is.

~~~
dang
"Did you even read the article" is a cheap shot that commenters routinely take
at each other. It has nothing to do with the topic at hand, so it adds noise,
not signal. Since it's a putdown, it provokes others and degrades discussion.
If you take out the cheap shot and preserve the correcting information, the
comment becomes better in every way.

You can think of it as a special case of this rule: _When disagreeing, please
reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2,
not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."_ But it's a special case worth
singling out, because it's so common, and it's bad for HN in two ways: mean
and predictable.

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freeflight
A "second time" makes it sound like it's some kind of limited process that
happens extremely rarely and was stopped after the "first time" became public.

When in reality we are talking about surveillance [0] and surveillance doesn't
work with "probes", it's based on constant monitoring and thus requires
massive infrastructure [1].

So when was this supposedly stopped, to make it a "second time"?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center)

~~~
Fnoord
Great point. I guess a better way of saying is that the NSA _got caught_ a
second time.

------
mLuby
NSA's job is to eavesdrop on hostile foreign actors' communications, while not
infringing on the privacy of US citizens.

AFGSC (formerly Strategic Air Command)'s job is to provide a credible nuclear
deterrent while not losing nukes or irradiating Americans.

Let's imagine if the NSA were in charge of the nukes:

\- "Whoops, someone stole a bunch of our nukes. But those were old nukes—we
have better nukes now."

\- "Whoops, turns out we _were_ nuking American cities. But Congressional
oversight committees knew about it."

Seriously, I can't even facepalm hard enough. I guess security is
hard—everyone's annoyed with you until there's an attack and then everyone's
blaming you for not annoying them more to prevent it.

>These documents provide further evidence that the NSA has consistently been
unable to operate the call detail record program within the bounds of the law.
-ACLU

>NSA identified additional data integrity and compliance concerns… The issues
have been addressed and reported to congressional oversight committees. -NSA
spokesperson

~~~
FDSGSG
This is a super disingenuous comparison.

~~~
hjek
I also think that comparison is a bit of a stretch, although those US nuclear
facepalm moments do exist[0].

[0]: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-
bo...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-
carolina-1961)

~~~
cf141q5325
Also, a list of the nuclear weapons which got lost

[https://interestingengineering.com/broken-arrows-the-
worlds-...](https://interestingengineering.com/broken-arrows-the-worlds-lost-
nuclear-weapons)

There is a drove of stories around nuclear weapons, I also enjoyed

"Missile doors left open while Air Force nuclear officer slept" with the
explanation, that they left it open for the food delivery guy.

[https://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/23/us/air-force-nuclear-
silo...](https://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/23/us/air-force-nuclear-silo-doors-
opened/index.html)

John Olivers episode on it is also amazing.

[https://youtu.be/1Y1ya-yF35g](https://youtu.be/1Y1ya-yF35g)

For a weird one meet one of the masterminds responsible for them:

[https://youtu.be/1Y1ya-yF35g?t=439](https://youtu.be/1Y1ya-yF35g?t=439)

------
xfitm3
As someone pointed out the NSA is following the law - but the 90s are over.
Wiretaps are now obsolete through layer 7 data collection..

------
sarcasmatwork
But the NSA was never collecting data.... <James Clapper/John Brennan>

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BorRagnarok
We all know that the NSA will never be regulated. They have the most dirt on
everybody.

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Pulletwee12549
I did NOT see this coming.

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harry8
"Second." I'm pretty sure the words "at least" and "confirmed" are missing
from this headline.

Or just go with a straight up accurate headline. "The NSA Have Again Been
Caught Lying Again and Have Zero Credibility"

Accurate, unbiased and factual. You don't do middle ground between good and
evil and call it balance. Facts are facts whatever you think of them.

An opinion would be the NSA needs to be shut down, disbanded and a new
department setup with clear guidelines for anything the NSA was doing that is
deemed to be still worthwhile. Agreeing or not with that opinion doesn't alter
the facts.

~~~
oil25
Well said. Unfortunately I can't help but feel the Snowden revelations have
had such a profound chilling effect on free speech and the press, that we are
now afraid to go on record - even with pseudonyms - to denigrate the NSA, CIA
and other government agencies. The thought that any idea, written or perhaps
even not, is cataloged for eternity and scrutinized under unknown pretenses
certainly gives me pause before I write or reply online now. Truly, I am
afraid saying the "wrong" thing today may in a few short years turn out quite
badly.

~~~
harry8
That reads like you're threatening me, fwiw.

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Epopeehief54
What did you expect? Real Journalism? Its the Wall Street Journal, not real
news. They need click bait titles in order to get more exposure and sell more
ads. What ever it takes to get a few more clicks...Their motivation like most
news companies today is making money, not informing the public. They are for
profit corporations after all.

~~~
dang
Would you please not take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents? They are
predictable and therefore uninteresting. They also quickly get nasty.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302240)
and marked it off-topic.

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spsrich2
Wow, shocker!

