
Why NSA Surveillance Scares Me - btilly
http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2016/01/why-nsa-surveillance-scares-me.html
======
blennon
I agree with the author wholeheartedly, except for the mathematical analysis
at the end.

I believe one of the existential threats to our country is becoming a
dictatorship. I'm always shocked when I share this point of view with people
around me and their reaction is basically, "that's so unlikely it's not worth
worrying about". There are many examples of this throughout history, e.g. the
Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, those that the author cites, etc. We
should not be so arrogant to think that we are somehow exceptional and immune
to this.

My personal belief is that there are certain constants in the dynamics of
human nature, and one of them is seek power. Broad, unchecked domestic
surveillance is a dangerous tool to give to a potential dictator. We should
not set up a framework where a power-seeking individual can circumvent our
democracy through coercion.

~~~
btilly
I deliberately made my analysis overly conservative because I didn't want to
come off as a paranoid nut. I could have easily come to much higher figures.

Here is an example. Let's suppose that we're observing the USA at a random
point in its history. Then there is a 10% chance that we're looking at it
within the last 10% of its history. The USA turns 240 this year, so that means
that there is a 10% chance of it collapsing in the next 24 years.

That figure is much, much higher than the 1% odds I used of collapse in the
next 30 years. It is also likely to be more realistic. "Stable governments"
survive in periods measured in centuries, not millennia. However that number
is so high that it would have left me more easily dismissed as a paranoid nut,
so I avoided it.

History demonstrates that humans tend to over-estimate the stability of
whatever exists now. And are surprised when the present turns out not to be
permanent. You should try to compensate for such perceptual biases when you
find them in yourself. And should try not to trip such biases in others.

~~~
moheeb
Can you explain the math as to how you know there is a 10% chance that we're
seeing the US in the last 10% of its history? I don't understand that part.

~~~
btilly
If we assume that we're observing at a random point in our history, we are
equally likely to be observing at a point in the first 10%, second 10%, third
10%, and so on. That's what the assumption means. Which means there is a 10%
chance that we're observing in the last 10%.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument)
for the most famous use of this line of argument. (It concludes that the human
species is likely not long for this universe.)

~~~
grraaaaahhh
What's stopping us from applying this math to other things? Like, every baby
at the 1 minute mark of their life. Shouldn't that mean that ~10% of all
babies born dies within a minute and a half?

We can take this to extremes. At the 1 minute mark we have a 99% change of
being in the latter 99% of their life (and thus a 99% chance of dying 99
minutes later). It's amazing how many of them beat these odds.

~~~
Houshalter
It's an uninformative prior
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability#Uninformativ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability#Uninformative_priors)).
Meaning it's the best estimate you can make, if you don't have any additional
information about the problem. Obviously we have a lot of additional
information on human lifespans, which allows us to build a more accurate
probability distribution.

Also see my comment above.

------
leroy_masochist
The problem with this analysis is that the problem set the NSA exists to
address is not limited to terrorism. Most of the work they do is spying on
foreign governments in order to inform U.S. policy. Building a cost/benefit
analysis of the loss of privacy effected by NSA operations on the number of
lives lost to terrorism does not provide an accurate measure of the value
delivered by the national-level SIGINT enterprise.

With regard to the author's general point: we should indeed be very concerned
with the potential for widespread surveillance to abet the violation of civil
liberties or even a totalitarian takeover.

~~~
coldpie
> Most of the work they do is spying on foreign governments in order to inform
> U.S. policy.

Really? I'm not disputing this, but I'd love to see some evidence backing it
up. What I remember from the Snowden disclosures is the vast majority of the
leaked information actually did relate to violent threats to national
security. Am I remembering wrong, or did I miss something?

~~~
nickff
The NSA was founded in the early 1950s to be the primary signals intelligence
(SigInt) branch of the US Government, largely to gather information which
would be of strategic importance in the Cold War. You might look at the NSA as
a SigInt counterpart to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which runs
most of the spy satellites and other strategic imagery. The Wikipedia article
on the NSA is quite good.[1]

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

------
tptacek
On the off chance that it might clarify the thread a bit:

Is there a single non-throwaway commenter that disagrees with 'btilly on this?

Not, like, disagrees about whether it's the _most important_ NSA concern, but
disagrees that the gravity of this concern is outweighed by the importance of
the work that NSA is doing.

To be sure: there are _tons_ of people who disagree with him around the US.
But I'm surprised if many of them comment here.

~~~
Balgair
The issue is that we do not have the full data set. We only see those cases
where the NSA fails and select cases of success. Most successes, if there are
any, are hidden to maintain secrecy in operations. I'm not saying there are
any successes. What successes we do see are ones that are 'scrubbed' of
intelligence or were made with intel that is now known to be useless and only
then years after the fact. Again, if there are any successes to begin with. To
make an educated conclusion, we need the facts, something we cannot have.
Things could be worse or better, we do not know.

~~~
lvs
This is a fatally utilitarian response. You want to be able to calculate
whether an equilibrium lies between good and bad outcomes of a process. That
is a somewhat defeatist analysis to make because it implicitly denies the
gaping moral and ethical risks of the system.

~~~
Balgair
Yes, completely. But to make an assessment of moral risks, you have to have
the data. Something we are unlikely to get. Everything else is just
conjecture, perhaps well founded and correct, but still conjecture. Perhaps
then the issue is with over classification of intel, not the people in charge.
We may never know as a consequence.

edit: In the end, it is reasonable to assume we do not have adequate data on
the successes of these programs. 2 paths then arise. 1) Then you wait for more
data. 2) You examine those people that you reasonably know to have access and
take a look at their moral history and actions to determine the ethical
issues; it's the only somewhat good data you can add to the set to maybe get a
conclusion.

~~~
lvs
No, you're missing my point by saying "you have to have the data," and it
appears that you are missing some fundamental concepts in normativity.

You do not need data to make a moral argument based upon principle. There is
no conjecture involved. (You could read some Kant on this, if you like.) You
need data only to determine a particular consequentialist ethics that involves
a balance of good and bad outcomes often understood in lay terms as
"effectiveness." I think most commenters here would agree that effectiveness
is the wrong way to evaluate this system, since epistemologically we cannot
know its effectiveness. (... Although many doubt it could ever be truly
effective in the presence of creative adversaries.) We can only know that is
it categorically wrong.

------
jrcii
I agree with the dangers of an executive branch that has access to nearly
unlimited information on everyone, especially when you consider the
surveillance of Congress, governors, or Supreme Court justices.

The math doesn't sit quite as well with me. As someone recently mentioned, the
projected threat of terrorism cannot be effectively measured by deaths to-date
because those numbers can suddenly grow exponentially in the event of an
attack. The probability of extra surveillance is baseless, etc. The points are
valid, the statistical argument is weak and unnecessary.

~~~
Houshalter
I disagree. There is a lot of evidence that terrorist groups are incredibly
ineffective. Not just recent attacks in the US, but statistics world wide and
through all of history. Gwern wrote a detailed essay on how incompetent
terrorist groups are:
[http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective](http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective)

>9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by
just 29 days of car accidents in the US - and 9/11 was only _accidentally_
that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias:
besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name?
Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the
MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly
exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is
_unusual_ for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT
database puts the number of such attacks at _35% of all attacks_. Certainly
the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke...

>Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider
the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse,
or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings,
suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious
principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and
the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting
columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be
afraid.

Also see his essay _Terrorism is not about Terror_ :
[http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror](http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror)

~~~
GordonS
Some more examples of clueless morons being 'terrorists' are the 'underpants
bomber' from a few years ago, and the idiots in Glasgow that crashed a car
containing some propane cannisters into the airport terminal.

Not so long ago such ludicrous incidents would have been written off as being
the misguided actions of 'nutters'. Now of course they are 'attacks' by
'terrorists', prompting hyperbole about 'heightened terror threat levels' and
Al-Qaida cells.

~~~
jrcii
>Some more examples of clueless morons being 'terrorists'

Don't forget the Four Lions

------
shmerl
To summarize:

Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find
enough in them to hang him.

— Cardinal Richelieu

~~~
sliverstorm
If that's your position, then does it matter if they surveil you? There is
doubtless already far more than six lines of your script publicly available to
any who might desire it, at any time. Logging your activity, then, does not
increase your risk.

My point is they already have all they need, publicly available any time they
desire it. _You_ write it for them and publish it for them! It's fanciful to
imagine privacy protects you, IMO.

~~~
shmerl
The point of the quote is that those who claim that you don't need privacy if
you have "nothing to hide" are wrong, because the power always can abuse
information it gets, as long as it wants to target someone.

 _> My point is they already have all they need, publicly available any time
they desire it_

Which doesn't mean you need to be lax and give them even more, or even accept
such situation as normal. Don't feed the machine. To put it differently, the
argument that "privacy is dead, so ignore the issue" is invalid and actually
only facilitates the problem.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The point of the quote that many miss though is that Cardinal Richelieu wasn't
a clairvoyant, and by "six lines written" he _didn 't_ literally mean Twitter.
It's true that, as you say, "the power always can abuse information it gets,
as long as it wants to target someone". If it wants to get you, it will abuse
_any_ information available. If you protect your Facebook from them, they'll
break your e-mail. If you encrypt your mail traffic, they'll tap your phone.
Or pull out census and employment data. Or simply ask around.

I agree that you may be marginally safer if you're not "feeding the machine".
But let's not delude ourselves - if the government turns evil, we're fucked
either way, and no amount of Internet privacy will help much. There's too much
data out there, and even more in the physical, material world.

~~~
shmerl
_> If it wants to get you, it will abuse any information available_

That's exactly the point. Therefore helping that abuse (by either being lax
with privacy, or by assuming it's pointless) is not something that you should
be doing if you care about this issue.

 _> But let's not delude ourselves - if the government turns evil, we're
fucked either way, and no amount of Internet privacy will help much._

It's not an argument to ignore this. That's the whole point of pushing for
FOSS, privacy respectful technology, no DRM and so on. The more pervasive the
technology is in society (and it's surely becoming so), the higher is the
potential of that abuse if said technology is prone to it. So taking care to
prevent it on all levels is essential if you care about it as an individual.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I agree about FOSS/no DRM and abuse potential. I think that the biggest
problem here is not surveillance itself, but the power asymmetry it creates.
There are two possible options for an (idealized) solution - either no one
gets that power, or everyone does. The first one may be more desirable, but I
think it'll turn out that the latter is more practical / achievable.

------
cryoshon
As the author notes, we've tread this ground before when J. Edgar Hoover
essentially ran the country via intimidation/blackmail for decades. It always
shocks me that Hoover's reign is mentioned so lightly. Democracy wasn't
functioning during those decades because one unelected individual had hugely
outsized power.

NSA surveillance is a backdoor to democracy because it enables blackmailing of
politicians or inconvenient people. The CIA does this all the time abroad
using information the NSA gathered.

------
vonklaus
I have began to change, or at least think more deeply about survelience and
the role of gov't.

I still am pretty much the same mind of the author, and blanket survelience is
intrusive, ineffective and anti-anerican; both literally and in sentiment.

However, and I still not sure what role I trust the gov't to play here, the
need for defense is pretty strong.

Let's take this red test for example:

While $100k is a lot of money to me, we will assume many people could have
access to this amount.

There were > 1 million people in times square on NYE.

The strike cabanilities of an inclined individual are higher now than ever.
This is the negative sode effect of the otherwise positive shift in individual
autonomy and lowering of power distance between entrenched heirarchies and
individuals.

A flock of drones can be purchased and controlled remotely and outfitted with
bombs or guns and used to conduct an attack previously reserved for the u.s
militaries indiscriminate bombing raids on other countries.

Analytical tooling and conputation can be purchased cheaply. Trend analytics,
macroshift evaluation and near real time satelite imagery can be had for
little money.

Biohacking is quite new but even after the overhype of the synthesis of (i
think it was) smallpox from discrete labs, this is still semi-possible.

So, I don't think it is up to the government to fix this, especially with
blanket survelience, but we do need to come up with a reasonable way to
mitigate threats.

5 people and 100k could basically outfit a safehouse, a drone fleet, real time
intelligience and a small bio labratory giving those who would not use that
amazing luxury for good, the ability to create a high impact negative change
event.

~~~
walid
You set a scenario for a potential disaster but what has surveillance done to
protect those in times square on new year. This question has no answer and the
answer if it exists is NOT something a democracy has access to.

So if surveillance is an answer to a potential terror plot then what needs to
be known is whether it can actually be effective. Terror plots are not the
norm of human life. They are feared more because we humans are designed by
nature to be afraid first when we see a lion, run away and think later. If we
stood there contemplating the possibility of of having a deep conversation
with that lion that lion would have managed to have a meal deep in its
stomach. Thought is very low on mother nature's agenda. Even other great apes
don't comment here! Basically we are more afraid of the danger because we are
primed to be so. I guess what I'm trying to say is that while fear is a danger
is a logical thing it shouldn't be the only thing to consider when deciding on
surveillance. Currently it is the only reason presented to the public and it
is not good enough on its own.

~~~
vonklaus
I agree and, except for the "terror plots aren'the norm" conclusion, im with
you.

What I am driving at is that while the blanket "people" who watch fox news and
are scared of brown people label terroists as myslims, i am proposing a
different idea of "distuptive event".

It had nothing to do with edgecases like 9/11\. Look at it like gun violence.
I think people should be able to own guns, but the more people own guns, the
more ahootings there are. If 0 people had guns, there would be 0 shootings.

So, suppose you were (i am) willing to accept x amount of ahootings to keep
this right and we know some people will legally pr illegally obtain guns and
do ill with them.

My point, is that eventually, people will have the same access to the strike
capabilities of small governments in the 90s for very little money. I believe
we should retain these rightts, we will have casualties to such freedom, but
we also need to expect that as peoplehave the ability to affect global change
positively, they do negatively as well.

Whena group of small people have the power to go to mars for example that is
great, however similarly many peoplewill have access to satellites in > 10
years. So we need to be pretty cognizant of how we handle this.

------
staunch
Either you stand by your principles when they're tested, or you don't have
principles.

------
Houshalter
This is the best argument I've read on the subject. Before I really didn't
worry about the NSA. I mean I didn't think they were doing much good, since I
think terrorism isn't a significant threat. But I'm not that cynical or
conspiracy-theory-ish to worry that they would abuse their power
significantly. This is the first time someone's tried to show that's a real
threat with examples from US history.

~~~
btilly
Thanks. Reaching people like this was exactly my hope.

It is easy to preach to the choir. It is much harder to produce an argument
that can reach people who don't alread agree with you.

------
Outdoorsman
I think it's important to differentiate between countries of our present era
and countries that "fell" in past eras, when evaluating or speculating on the
potential for longevity...

The technologies of today, especially the ease and rapidity with which
information can be exchanged by private citizens, seems to me at least, a
hindrance to an "overthrow" of our government...a freely functioning "Fourth
Estate", journalism--the press, also acts as a safeguard...

At the point where either of those are verifiably co-opted I'd become very
concerned...

Surveillance, per se, doesn't worry me so much...tens of thousands of covert
operations are in play every day around the globe...those in play to guard
against terrorism on U.S. soil are likely just the tip of a vast iceberg...

------
differentView
I hope I am wrong, but I can't imagine a modern day Hoover, with better
surveillance, to not have already placed blackmailed politicians in all key
political positions and is effectively ruling the United States.

------
kra34
Governments and more specifically democracies evolve over time. They benefit
from all the ones that have come before them and failed. It could be that the
inevitable conclusion of any democratic society is a last ditch power grab
made by the unlucky person standing in office when if all falls apart. It's
happened quite a few times before, and I don't see any reason why this time
around would be different. I for one welcome our new overlord Trump and look
forward to the new government that forms in his wake.

------
golergka
> Surveillance sliding into dictatorship is one of the most common ways that
> democracies fall.

What? Give me one example where surveillance was the _reason_ and main tool
for ascending dictator.

~~~
distracted_boy
In Nazi Germany the Stasi was quite effective in monitoring people,
suppressing the people and keeping them in constant fear.

Maybe not the main tool for Hitler to reach his position as Fürer but it was
certainly one of the main tools to keep him in power.

~~~
hiram112
The Stasi was East Germany's post WWII security apparatus. You're confusing it
with the Gestapo.

I understand and agree with what you were probably trying to say ;)

------
TeMPOraL
A HNer, whose identity shall remain undisclosed, posted an insightful
extension of the statistic games that later got deleted, probably because of
the downvotes. I believe this is an important thing to consider, so let me
take the karma hit and restate the problem.

The poster pointed out that if we're taking a 3000 years view, it's worth
considering the great filter hypothesis[0]. If one is to believe it's ahead of
us (as an explanation for why we haven't seen any signs of aliens yet, and
mind you, this is not a joke), then it stands to reason we'll likely fuck
ourselves over with some future technology. Given that, mass surveillance may
be a way to avoid this fate.

Also, the poster pointed out that "the debate is silly. This level of
surveillance is inevitable."

\--

The comment I was about to post in response:

Actually, I do agree, for two reasons.

1/ SIGINT is basically inevitable, barring total collapse of technological
civilization. We're only starting to be good at data gathering and processing,
and there is no reason to suspect we won't be getting much better very
quickly. Look - 100 years ago we could barely record a person's voice. Today,
we use sound to acquire pictures. We use light to acquire sound. Between cheap
microphones being good enough to pin-point the position of a firearm discharge
in a big city and your mobile phone about to be equipped with a 3D geometry
sensor and _a fucking radar on a chip_ , with NASA being able to map ocean
floor using _gravity sensors_ , that by the way happen to be Cold War-era
technology, does anyone really believe we can stop mass surveillance? It's a
side effect of useful high-tech tools. You basically can't have one without
the other.

2/ Progress of technology also keeps increasing the amount of power a single
person can wield. Throughout almost all history, the biggest damage an
ordinary individual could do to other people is to set something on fire. Burn
down a building, maybe. 100 years ago, an ordinary citizen could at best drive
someone over, or blow something up. In the last few decades, bombs had become
easy, and people were worried about terrorists with crude nukes. Today, a
teenage hacker could do anything from blowing up a gas station to shutting
down power in a large area. _Tomorrow_ , your high-school friend may be
playing with potentially dangerous viruses in their basement.

This is not a joke. We're entering an era where playing with self-replicating
machines is getting very easy very quickly. Today it's not just big biotech
companies doing that - your local hackerspace is most likely doing baby steps
with reprogramming bacteria too.

Now tell me, honestly, _how are we going to defend against that_? And keep in
mind - it's not the angry that are the problem. It's the crazy ones.

Surveillance will probably have to be a part of the answer, but I fear it will
be far from enough.

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

~~~
walid
On the 2 points you raise:

1/ I agree with you on the premise that it is somehow inevitable but it is a
lawless arena today.

2/ Also the single person does end up having more capability but also
protection from them is also more possible.

But the problem with it is that in its current form surveillance is secret and
the decision of action based on the surveillance is done in secret. There is
an exclusion of democracy in any country when it comes to surveillance. Laws
governing response to surveilled information are non-existent. This means we
don't as a people have known effective means of using surveillance nor can we
come to know unwanted side effects. Also citizens of a democracy are treated
as unqualified individuals to know about surveillance. There used to be a
caste system in the past of people who were worthy and those who are not.
Kingdoms, dictatorships and communist states are the classical examples. Today
the caste system is whether you belong to the surveillance community or not.
Yes we need it but we need it to be governed by rules. Surveillance is a
product of wanting to have an upper hand on the international landscape
however we are discovering that it is slipping into domestic situations like
the parallel construction cases exposed by Snowden. So while surveillance is
inevitable and necessary it really is the wild wild west of government.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _2 / Also the single person does end up having more capability but also
> protection from them is also more possible._

I would like to believe that, but for now if it comes to biohazard events, I'm
not reassured. If we had good enough mitigation strategies today, people
generally wouldn't catch communicable diseases so much as they do. And I
haven't heard of any potential research on something that could tip things in
favour of defense. Again we encounter the same dynamics that make airport
security theater ineffective - the assymetry between attack and defense. The
defender has to handle _all_ possible attack variations, while the (either
human or random in nature) attacker can just focus on one strategy, a strategy
that will not be known to the defender beforehand.

For now, the best short-term strategy is infrastructural - basically what the
health services are doing today, but even more of it.

I totally agree with you about present surveillance situation being a total
Wild West. I have no clue what to do with it, and while I don't really mind
data gathering _per se_ , I'm very much against the shenanigans governments
and private companies are pulling on us with said data. We desperately need to
figure out a good solution.

I think that one obstacle on the road to that solution will be attempting to
protect the idea of privacy at all costs. I think we'll end up having to give
up a big part of it, or even the whole concept entirely - in exchange for
reducing the power it gives to the governments and corporations. For instance,
you can't really blackmail people with stuff everyone knows everyone does,
because nobody will care.

~~~
walid
From a digital point protective measures such hack proof system can be
_expensively_ engineered
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc1MTg](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc1MTg)
but biology is a little bit trickier. I can think of biosuits of the future
being like what we see in SciFi which is currently unrealistic but still
plausible. I don't know where future protective technologies can go but there
has always been some form of measure and countermeasure being developed in
parallel one as a byproduct of the other.

As for privacy, I think we don't have as much privacy as we think we do. The
thing that technology introduced is the recording of our already public
moments. Now they can be played back at someone else's discretion and that
someone else can control the narrative of our lives portraying us against our
will in whatever way that someone wants. We're stuck here.

------
dmix
> Even then, organized crime was prioritized below his private anti-Civil
> Rights Movement vendetta. Even though this put his policies at odds with
> several Presidents.

Not many people realize the FBI started as a domestic intelligence agency
first and only became primarily a federal law enforcement arm later on. This
would make suppressing foreign-backed or (what they deem) dangerous political
dissent their priority early on.

------
fweespeech
While I don't agree with the way he is pricing in government failure...because
it can be argued and its ultimately weakening to the argument.

The fact J Edgar Hoover controlled the FBI for more than half of its
existence. He is also 1/12th of the people who have held the position.

I'd say that is a strong enough argument in and of itself. You just need one
guy at the top of the surveillance pile pulling the same tricks and 1 in 12
odds is pretty high.

[ Yes, I'm aware this isn't technically accurate but its close enough for
rhetoric purposes. ]

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
I think the author's two points were that by mixing an unscrupulous individual
with a lot of power and access to immense amounts of information you have the
recipe for totalitarian control, and those ingredients are much closer than we
would like to think.

------
bedros
surveillance is a power grab, whoever controls the people's private lives,
controls the people.

