
US spies still haven't told Congress the number of Americans caught in dragnet - metheus
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/nsa-spy-law-up-for-renewal-but-feds-wont-say-how-many-americans-targeted/
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0xfeba
Reminds me of the TSA not revealing how many terrorists it has ever caught due
to "national security concerns" [1].

Yet they proudly blog about how many guns, knives and other prohibited items
they screen out--but this is not statistically different than the private
contractors pre-TSA.

What we do know is that when tested by Homeland Security, they failed
miserably [2]. I wonder if we have data from pre-TSA to compare it with?

[1] -
[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/11/does_the_tsa_ever_catch_terrorists.html)

[2] -
[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/tsa_not_detec...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/06/tsa_not_detecti.html)

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r00fus
The TSA are not failing at doing the one thing they were designed to do: spend
taxpayer money on private companies whose investors and executives are
politically tied to the politicians who legislate their funding.

Crony capitalism will rot the insides of this country until it's hollow.

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yuhong
My favorite is Medicare and drug prices. Notice both cases are funded by
budget deficits that increase the money supply.

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fritzw
> both cases are funded by budget deficits that increase the money supply

The potential for your example was high, but your explanation fell flat. There
is a connection between Medicare and pharma, but it's not that they both
'increase money supply'.

Big pharma lobbied government when writing drug pricing laws for mediacare. So
retail drug prices are standard and non-negotiable. The result is the largest
drug purchaser in the world must pay full price and can't get a lower price
for bulk.

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yuhong
The point is how the government pays for Medicare drugs.

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rrggrr
Seriously diminishing returns may be emerging in bulk collection. The
disgruntlement this is creating in the intelligence community work force and
the recruiting pool may not be worth the gains. Hard targets must be taking
counter-measures as awareness grows. But, in fairness to the IC, its really a
political problem. If zero tolerance is the goal for attacks against the US
then zero privacy is going to be the result.

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jjawssd
The real value of bulk collection is in the political elite targeting their
future opponents through exploitation of their flaws after digging through the
treasure trove of data obtained in the dragnet. THIS is the real danger to
society. Not, "we have nothing to hide so we don't care."

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StillBored
They don't know because they aren't trying but i'm guessing its basically
nearly 100% of the population. Its sort of a mathematical x degree's of
separation problem. They monitor a few tens (hundreds?) thousand suspects, the
direct contacts of said suspects and maybe or to two levels more. So its what
3-4 degrees of separation? Given that "direct contact" likely also means that
anyone found in proximity of the suspects for any length of time and its
basically everyone, after all you want to tract the contacts the suspects have
with people on the park bench. People forget that "metadata" isn't just phone
calls these days, its your cellphone pinging the tower with "I'm at location
x" messages every few seconds.

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dogma1138
It wouldn't surprise me if they simply don't know.

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daenney
That and/or the number they can reasonably come up with is possibly larger
than what they'd want to admit to.

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tracker1
The number is probably roughly equal to the number of cell phones in use,
within the U.S. Meaning most of the population.

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gozur88
The authority of spy agencies to do what they do derives from the people
through their congressional representatives. Congress should zero out their
funding. We can always start over without the bad apples.

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086421357909764
Congress zeroing out their funding wouldn't necessarily kill them, it's a
little more nuanced than that. For example, the CIA and Intelligence agencies
by and larger are contributors to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-
Tel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel). Not to mention the funding they
produce to generate funds within their black operations.

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dopamean
It's either a ton of people and they don't want to admit it OR it's very, very
few people and they don't want to be asked the obvious follow up question of
"who are they?"

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agd
It's a ton of people.

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rudolf0
I'm sure it is, but the issue is more complex than that.

How much data is stored on each person? How many hoops does an individual
analyst have to jump through, if any, to access that information for an
individual? Is it stored in an encrypted or anonymized way so that an analyst
can't access the details without approval from management? Are there jobs
constantly scanning this dataset and alerting on suspicious patterns, and if
so, what is the average false positive rate and does an alert give carte
blanche to read all of the data collected about that individual and their
connections and connections-to-connections?

I doubt Congress will ever get clear or entirely truthful answers to those
questions, let alone the general public.

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rl3
That's easy: everyone.

The only distinction is who's explicitly targeted and who isn't. In other
words, who analysts have actually examined or otherwise examine on an ongoing
basis.

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matt_wulfeck
How about the simplest and probably truest answer: _all of them_

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warsaw
Why did the USA fight for freedom against the British, Hitler, and Saddam if
America just ended up as a police state? All those American soldiers died in
vain.

