

Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated - zt
http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE95F00B20130616

======
Brushfire
This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake.

Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of
dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of
people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe
the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then
puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio, and should be
shutdown because it isn't effective at all and is a waste of taxpayer money.

Lose, Lose NSA - You're either violating our liberties or wasting our money.

~~~
threeseed

        But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio.
    

Sorry but this is just nonsense.

Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It
results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence,
business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in
areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter
GDP in 2011.

As an example in NYC alone 430,000 jobs and 2.8 billion in wages were lost in
the 3 months after 9/11\. Which in turn results in a big drop in the tax
collected.

Then finally there is the after effects. No 9/11 and there would have been no
costly invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan which has cost trillions of dollars and
an obscene number of lives. Major terrorist acts always demand a response by
the public.

So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems
like something that will always be "worth the money".

~~~
stretchwithme
There are many threats to human life. There is a cost associated with
preventing each life lost. Obviously it makes sense to consider it.

We could have never allowed foreign tourists into the country. That has a cost
associated with it, right? That would prevented Saudis from going to flight
school and booking those flights, right? Shouldn't protecting lives be before
every other consideration?

No, we have to balance things. Protecting life can not prevent us from living
our lives. Not everything the government chooses to do is worth the price.

~~~
rayiner
If we're going with a cost/benefit analysis, it should be noted that the NSA
accessing data that AT&T, Google, Facebook, etc, _already collect_ is just
about the cheapest sort of counter-measure you could have to terrorism. The
"good old fashioned police work" that people keep suggesting would be far more
expensive and invasive.

~~~
stretchwithme
Then let people volunteer for it in exchange for lower taxes. If the impact is
truly minor, there should be many takers and much savings.

~~~
rayiner
That makes no sense.

~~~
CamperBob2
What makes no sense is assuming that all of the data collection being
discussed has prevented a single genuine attack.

~~~
stretchwithme
Oh, they told us it has. Shouldn't that be good enough? They've been open and
honest so far.

------
EthanHeilman
I am reminded for an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart changes his grade
from 'F' to an 'A+'.

    
    
       Homer: [incredulously]  A-plus?!?  You don't think much of me, do you boy?
       Bart:  [almost proudly]  No sir!
       Homer: You know a D turns into a B so easily.  You just got greedy.
    

300 phone numbers is a such low number it is completely unbelievable. I would
expect a intelligence agency would be better at telling convincing lies, but I
guess they don't think much of us. For future reference I might believe
somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million. Also 300 is a surprisingly
round number.

~~~
cpleppert
>>300 is a surprisingly round number.

"[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database
of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA"

>>For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50
million

You think that there are at least 15,000 terrorists/foreign targets of
interest that would have any reason to call a US number?

~~~
stfu
Obviously not the OP but I would give a definite yes to the second question,
esp. considering what qualifies as a "terrorist" these days.

Let's take the Boston Bombers and make a low balling guess that each one of
them has called 20 unique numbers in the last 6 month, each of which have in
turn again called 20 unique numbers and we are already at 800 numbers under
surveillance.

------
uptown
If you look at the growth of the no-fly list, 300 sounds like an implausibly
low number considering the likelihood of adding-to-the-list whoever is on the
receiving end of each call.

No Fly List Statistics:

In mid-December 2001, two lists were created: the "No Fly List" of 594 people
to be denied air transport, and the "Selectee" list of 365 people who were to
be more carefully searched at airports.

By December 2002, the No Fly List held more than 1,000 names.

60 Minutes reported on 8 October 2006 that the news program had obtained a
March 2006 copy of the list that contained 44,000 names.

TSA officials said that, as of November 2005, 30,000 people in 2005 had
complained that their names were matched to a name on the list via the name
matching software used by airlines.

In April 2007, the United States government "terrorist watch list"
administered by the Terrorist Screening Center, which is managed principally
by the FBI, contained 700,000 records.

A year later, the ACLU estimated the list to have grown to over 1,000,000
names and to be continually expanding.

However, according to Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, in October
2008 the No Fly list contained only 2,500 names, with an additional 16,000
"selectees", who "represent a less specific security threat and receive extra
scrutiny, but are allowed to fly."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List)

~~~
mpyne
I don't know, maybe something happened around the 2008-2009 timeframe to cause
the executive agency to start changing the policies regarding the usefulness
of lists with millions of names on it... can't quite put my finger on what
that change might have been though.

------
motters
It's a bit like saying that they're going to install cameras linked to a spy
agency into every home, but don't worry because only a few homes will be
scrutinised closely.

------
zt
Oddly, the Reuters article and headline changed (and then the moderators
appropriately changed the HN headline). That's also why so many of the
comments below, particularly those referencing the 300 number, don't make much
sense.

Here is the lede of the originally linked article:

 _U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. government only searched for detailed
information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the
millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in
2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on Saturday.

The unclassified paper was circulated Saturday within the government by U.S.
intelligence agencies and apparently is an attempt by spy agencies and the
Obama administration to rebut accusations that it overreached in investigating
potential militant plots.

The administration has said that even though the NSA, according to top-secret
documents made public by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, collects
massive amounts of data on message traffic from both U.S. based telephone and
internet companies, such data collection is legal, subject to tight controls
and does not intrude on the privacy of ordinary Americans._

------
downandout
Yes, because they couldn't possibly have just made up a document saying a
random, small number of people were "closely scrutinized". It's also a little
odd that a document describing the allegedly tiny reach of still-classified
programs is somehow unclassified. This doesn't sound like it was designed for
the public at all.

------
swombat
That's nice. The rest are only recorded for posterity, but not "closely
scrutinized", right?

~~~
spullara
They also claimed to delete records more than 5 years old.

~~~
TillE
Plausible. They may have quite a lot of storage space, but it is finite.

------
spoiledtechie
I hate how the US Government says things after the fact that we have seen many
lies come from them over the past 6 months. Seriously, what do they expect?
For us to start believing them right away?

~~~
powertower
You're getting the word "fact" in your sentance confused with the word
"speculation". They are not the same thing.

~~~
spoiledtechie
Fact. NSA has been spying on all Americans without their knowledge for years.

~~~
powertower
...and now that the real facts are not fitting your narrative, you're starting
to contradict and deny those facts using every emotional response and every
fallacy you can think of.

~~~
nitrogen
What are those "real facts"? The Verizon Business court order alone is
damaging enough.

------
ihsw
One has to wonder how they'll define data-mining for the purposes of (for
example) credit fraud or insurance fraud, and whether that qualifies as
"closely" scrutinized.

There are a myriad of other questionable uses that could come from their data
set of _everything_ that don't require "close" scrutiny.

Just like how quickly DNS-based website blocking expanded beyond simple and
straight-froward "think of the children" child-pornography hunting turns into
"decency" enforcement, this NSA data warehousing program could quickly turn
unpleasant.

------
uptown
I wish somebody would ask whether computer-transcribed conversations are
considered to have been "listened to".

------
JacksonGariety
> "As everybody who has been associated with the program's said if we had this
> before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego - two hijackers -
> able to use that program, that capability against the target, we might have
> been able to prevent 9/11"

These politicians believe it's worth invading everyone's privacy in order to
prevent an attack on American soil. That's insane. A surveillance state is far
more of a danger to people than terrorism.

~~~
ahallock
I would say surveillance at this level is almost a form of terrorism. I don't
not feel safe using phone and web applications. I'm also fearful to post
libertarian-leaning comments or comments that could be deemed "anti-
government" for fear of being targeted in the future. It may be irrational and
slightly paranoid, but I think history has shown us not to trust people with
extraordinary power like this.

~~~
mindcrime
Well, I'm still overtly anti-government, anti-NSA, pro voluntaryist, pro
market-anarchism, pro libertarian, pro anarcho-capitalism, etc. If they're
listening to this conversion, well... fuck it, I refuse to be censored. The
worst they can really do is kill me. _shrug_ I wasn't planning to live forever
anyway.

------
sigzero
The key word there is "closely".

~~~
Zigurd
#leastuntruthful

------
Uchikoma
You can write all phone conversations to storage and still only closely
scrutinize 300 numbers.

------
ISL
But how many phone numbers do they have the _capacity_ to closely scrutinize?

~~~
nano111
Soon, they will apparently add yottabytes of storage with their Utah's data
center
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center))..
that doesn't say how much they can analyze but probably many more then 300..
(1 yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000GB)

------
brown9-2
Where is the title stated in the linked article?

------
jorg
I'm a little offended that as a non American, this invasion of my privacy is
apperantly a non issue.

------
danso
300 people of interest seems reasonable to me...but that number must not
include all the first-degree and second-degree contacts that each person-of-
interest has...if you saw that Alice was talking to Bob and Carla and
suspected Alice to be a terrorist, why wouldn't you also follow the rabbit
holes of Bob's and Carla's records? And when do you know to stop?

In this way, unhindered surveillance is a lot like torture...sure, you may
think it's _perfectly justified_ when you _just know_ that Alice is a bad
person. But when the dragnet brings in many non-guilty people, it's not just
about whether it's ethical to torture/warantlessly-spy on someone (guilty or
innocent), it's _also_ about whether you're actually accomplishing anything by
bringing in all this irrelevant noise.

So that's why 300 closely-inspected people (plus their network, but to a
limited degree) _seems_ reasonable...the NSA has finite resources and finite
analysts and can only conjure up finite investigations. Call me naive, but I
think it's possible that a good chunk of NSA staffers believe their main role
is to protect the nation from evil threats...(just like most military staff
joined for the "good of country", initially) and if any of them are half-wise,
they'd probably realize that wantonly spying for the hell of it doesn't get
them promotions nor serves their country...the NSA is still a bureaucracy,
after all.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the NSA won't evolve the technology to the
point that thoroughly analyzing someone's network and extended network is
trivial... _and_ , that all the good-hearted idealists who work for them don't
see the true nature of their work, due to the layer of technology and
bureaucracy...but...we know of the current controversy because Snowden was
able to walk out undetected with the files in a USB drive. So we're not
_there_ yet, so hence, it's possible this report is legit.

