
NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance powers - panacea
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/10/nsa-mass-surveillance-powers-john-inglis-npr
======
jbapple
Here's a transcript of the NPR interview referenced in the article:

[http://www.npr.org/2014/01/10/261282601/transcript-nsa-
deput...](http://www.npr.org/2014/01/10/261282601/transcript-nsa-deputy-
director-john-inglis)

Regarding the subject of the HN headline, "at most one terrorist attack might
have been foiled", Inglis said:

"There's a candidate for that, which is the plot that was exposed in San
Diego. I think we were able to essentially tell the FBI that an individual was
materially involved in terrorism that they had, three years prior,
investigated based on a tip and kind of laid that case to rest.

And but for the 215 Program, which we essentially tied that individual to some
foreign terrorist activity overseas, the FBI would have let that case lain
fallow for quite sometime. Now I cannot tell you that that wouldn't have
turned up some other way. There wouldn't have been some other tool in the tool
kit."

------
mercer
While it seems like a good thing that the mass surveillance seems to not
actually stop terrorist attacks, I feel a bit uncomfortable about this line of
argument 'against' the NSA.

What if they _did_ foil many terrorist attacks? I might feel different if me
or mine had been affected by such an attack, but I'd like to think that I
would still be against mass surveillance, simply because the dangers of that
are not offset by being safer.

~~~
memset
I was mugged earlier this year. I live in a neighborhood that used to be quite
rough in Brooklyn but is getting better. It was 2am and I was walking around
by myself and I got mugged.

He didn't take much from me: my phone (big deal) and wallet (easy to cancel
credit cards.) Along with that phone he got a lot of photos - memories - of
things and at that moment I wish I had automatically backed up to a private G+
album. But I didn't because I'm pro-privacy, I think.

When I filed the police report, the detective walked up and down the block
with me, seeing if there were any cameras to see where the person went, or to
identify them. Ordinarily I would be part of the anti-mass-surveillance crowd,
what is this, England? but at the time I might've appreciated a few cameras
along that block so to maybe deter my mugger.

I often think about this when it comes to discussions of surveillance. I, like
so many hackers, want privacy, anonymity, and for the government to just go
away and let us enjoy the ability to live private lives. I want Google to stop
trying to save all of my personal emails, photos, text messages, and location
data to the cloud.

And then I say "but it would've been nice if there were a police security
camera on that block." Or "I guess I have principles about google plus but I'm
still out my photos."

I don't think it's so unreasonable, in a sense, for someone to feel that, if
in fact these efforts are foiling peoples' ability to do us harm, that they're
fruitful. What is the essential difference between wanting a stronger
police/watch/community force in my Brooklyn neighborhood versus the
surveillance we're talking about here?

Obviously there is _some_ difference. But what is it?

~~~
Nursie
The cameras don't seem to have much deterrant effect in the UK, nor do you
often hear of them catching people or convicting them through this footage.
Which makes me wonder wtf they are for...

~~~
gaius
A few months ago someone broke into my locker at the swimming pool, got my
iPad, BB, credit cards, cash and car keys. Thank God I hadn't driven there.
Anyway, leaving the pool, he was in full view of the CCTV. The cops reviewed
the footage, and the guy is just a black silhouette, no recognizable features.

So enemies of the surveillance state rejoice, there are cameras everywhere,
the footage they record however is worthless. And I dare say the thief had
figured that out for himself.

------
f_salmon
> But security officials are arguing strongly against curtailing the substance
> of domestic surveillance activities.

Right. How about just having a sane and humane foreign policy instead of
blowing up people all over the World? How about NOT creating hostility against
the US in the first place? Did that ever cross your simple minds?

Oh sorry, I forgot - this would make the NSA/military less important, so
that's no option, I suppose.

------
higherpurpose
NSA, DHS, TSA, NYPD's "intelligence office", FBI's terror plot manufacturing -
it's all one big security theater, and everyone is playing along with it.

If the Utah data center is not closed down/sold off, where they plan to keep
all the data on everyone on Earth, _forever_ , then they haven't ended
anything, regardless of what Obama will say on TV next week.

------
leoc
I'm a little skeptical of the conclusions drawn from these questions,
especially when they're phrased in terms of surveillance data directly
preventing specific attacks. From experience elsewhere it seems (I claim no
expertise here) that you rarely begin looking a terrorist's or potential
terrorist's communications at just the right time (neither too early nor too
late) to discover a planned terrorist attack for the first time. What happens
more often, apparently, is that you start looking at someone's communications
and you gather information useful to turning them or someone else into an
informer. _Then_ you discover attack plans drawn up in the future because your
double agent calls you up and tells you about them directly.

 _If_ the US is in fact using domestic surveillance effectively to generate
informers, and thus prevent terror attacks, then US alphabet-soup spokesmen
might plausibly be very slow to mention much about it in response to questions
asked about specific attacks being directly detected through surveillance,
both because a) the question as phrased doesn't cover such operations and b)
you want at almost any cost to say nothing about them. Though on the other
hand, if you _aren 't_ having success in those operations you wouldn't feel
like saying much about it anyway, partly because it means you're failing at
counter-terrorism ...

------
3stripe
"Fear is lucrative. Fear is big business".

Now that's actually a quote from a presentation about bike helmets and the
culture of fear around cycling
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9UhHf7GsQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS9UhHf7GsQ))
but I think equally applicable to the culture of fear surrounding terrorism.

------
thisiswrong
> Obama will follow the recommendations of a review group he set up, which
> suggested that the responsibility for the bulk domestic call records
> database should be transferred from the NSA to a third party, such as the
> phone companies

Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because
it is a merger of state and corporate power.''

It seems each 'reform' that these authoritarian sociopaths put forward just
further enables/legalizes their crimes.

~~~
warmblood
>Mussolini: '' Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because
it is a merger of state and corporate power.''

The word "corporatism" in this context is not a very good translation. It's a
real quote, but "corporation" in Mussolini's time would be more accurately
translated as "guild" or any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with
common interests. Corporations as we know them (commercial enterprises)
weren't a thing as far as Mussolini knew.

As much as I appreciate the sentiment this quote carries, it's just not
applicable to anything today. Snopes thread about this:

message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=36218

~~~
thisiswrong
> any arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common interests

From the Guardian article: ''Obama’s White House staff were meeting
representatives of tech firms on Friday, concluding a packed week packed of
meetings with surveillance stakeholders''

I damn well think you could call corporate surveillance stakeholders a
''guild'' or an ''arbitrary hierarchical group of people with common
interests''.

~~~
warmblood
Sure, and that's fine if you want to torture the meanings of words that way. I
don't have any problem with you doing so.

I have the same contempt for these people as you do but if we always let off-
context quotes, righteous as they may feel, go unchalleneged, it's a shame on
all of us.

The context of the Mussolini quote was not uttered with a commercial
enterprise in mind. Commercial enterprises called "corporations" were not a
real thing in Mussolini's world. That's all I have to say here.

------
Theodores
So the one 'attack that might have been foiled' was some bloke in San Diego
sending some money to someone in Somalia who might have had contact with
extremists, extremists that are in Africa, a whole continent and a dozen time
zones away.

Liberal left wing types that supported the bombing of Afghanistan on
humanitarian grounds ('we have to bomb them because if we don't then they will
all starve') did not imagine for one moment that the talk of 'terrorist
training camps' was utter bullshit. It was all true - to them when Donald
Rumsfeld was telling them. They thought that bombing them would only encourage
the terrorists.

So where are they?

There are plenty of immigrants fresh from Afghanistan in London, the ones you
meet work hard for a living driving taxis and doing jobs white people don't
like doing. So if the NSA/GCHQ have not caught any of them for being unduly
fundamental-extremalist and none of them have come here to join terror cells
so they can blow up thousands more innocent babies and puppies, what is going
on?

As a taxpayer I expect more from this clash of civilisations. I have not had
any days of work due to terror bomb threats, no postcard sites have been blown
up and I have no idea what the colour coded threat level is for the day.

~~~
mjolk
>Liberal left wing types that supported the bombing of Afghanistan on
humanitarian grounds... to them when Donald Rumsfeld was telling them.

I think you're confusing your political parties.

>There are plenty of immigrants fresh from Afghanistan in London, the ones you
meet work hard for a living driving taxis and doing jobs white people don't
like doing.

Nice casual racism.

>As a taxpayer I expect more from this clash of civilisations. I have not had
any days of work due to terror bomb threats, no postcard sites have been blown
up and I have no idea what the colour coded threat level is for the day.

While I question the notion of a "clash of civilisations[sic]," you're saying
this like it's a bad thing.

~~~
JonnieCache
I think you've missed a particularly oblique piece of sarcasm.

~~~
Theodores
Thank you!

Sarcasm and humour in general is usually not the way we deal with serious
things like the war, even here on HN.

This is a pity as humour, even if it is British rather than American (or
German) is a great way to make big, scary, difficult-to-understand-things a
bit easier to talk about. It is a tactic and we should be taking the piss out
of the politicians and the spies, rendering them to being pathetic 'Peeping
Toms', tantamount to being dirty perverts, lowest of the low.

That said...

...I am genuinely surprised at how we have been able to kill whomever we like
in The War Against Terror with a lack of reprisals from those we bombed. I am
sure soldiers in Afghanistan do not see it that way, but for the folks in
UK/USA there is practically zero terror threat.

To all intents and purposes those we have attacked and tortured are like
unwitting subjects for a follow up to the MKULTRA type of things that went on
50 years ago. I do wonder if there are those in the military that see it that
way, testing new weapons by killing a few people with them.

Fortunately those we bomb are people as opposed to complete psychopaths, so
they don't have the mindset of those in the arms business.

------
cookiem0nster
Even regardless of the outcome of each program, just the fact that we're
starting to have this discussion in the open is a big step forward, in my mind
at least. I do understand that by discussing some of these plans we are in
essence hampering their effectiveness, but my feeling is that in the grand
scale of things it's a price that I think I'm willing to pay. Just my
feelings.

------
joshuapants
Ignoring the privacy concerns, we spend an awful lot of money on the NSA. Tens
of billions for sure. Maybe if they'd been thwarting a 9/11 every week (or if
we were at risk for a 9/11-scale event semi-frequently) I'd feel that we
hadn't quite wasted that money.

~~~
f_salmon
You say "billions". But if you know this [0], then you start asking yourself
if all that money can really be just "lost".

[0] [http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/11/8-5-trillion-
taxpayer...](http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/11/8-5-trillion-taxpayer-
money-doled-congress-pentagon-since-1996-never-accounted.html)

~~~
EliRivers
The money isn't "lost"; what's gone forever are millions upon millions upon
millions of man-hours that could have been used to do something useful. Saying
the money is lost is just a handy shorthand for expressing what a waste it all
was.

------
pslam
Interesting logical fallacy they're employing: by inverting the inequality
such that the upside is capped, they're strongly implying that the value is
non-zero. This shifts the conversation away from the value being, in fact,
zero.

 _At most_ 1 person may have been killed by the official making that
statement.

 _At most_ 1 child may have been abducted by journalists mentioning Snowden's
name.

Nice trick. Wonder if it'll catch on with other officials?

------
middleclick
This fear mongering was expected. Let's suppose that this is true for the sake
of the argument. Does this still justify mass surveillance? No it doesn't. But
the NSA knows how to play this. Most people think the NSA is doing a good job
and since people think they have "nothing to hide", they would keep on
supporting the NSA because it "keeps them safe".

------
uslic001
To me it does not seem to be worth the huge cost/enormous effort/loss of
privacy/loss of guaranteed constitutional rights.

------
res0nat0r
Actual article title: NSA makes final push to retain most mass surveillance
powers

------
Istof
I would rather know how many politicians they blackmailed

------
rwmj
At least the NSA is issuing an honest statement.

------
Zigurd
Fencepost error

------
ye
If we spent all the billions of dollars on healthcare or medical research, we
would have saved million times more people.

~~~
timsally
It's not just about lives saved. This type of analysis is complicated because
the costs are not always straightforward to analyze:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6890606).

~~~
Cushman
Is it that complicated? An American life is generally considered (by our
government) to have a value somewhere in millions[0]. Back-of-the-napkin math
suggests that from an order-of-growth analysis, it may well be just about
lives saved. (Roughly, each million lives saved saves a trillion dollars in
economic value.)

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Estimates_of_the_value_of_life)
As a lower bound, the lifetime earnings of an individual are $1m and up:
[http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf](http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acsbr11-04.pdf)

~~~
timsally
Loss of life from 9/11 was about 3,000, which using your numbers works out to
be twenty million, but the total direct and indirect costs of 9/11 are in the
trillions
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_effects_arising_from_the_September_11_attacks)).
The insurance losses alone totaled forty billion. Innocent life lost under any
circumstance is a tragedy. That said, its a multifaceted problem. Large
amounts of economic damage also results in the loss of innocent life.

~~~
Cushman
Right, but I think you missed what I was saying about order of growth: the
loss of life on 9/11 was very small, so economic damage due to death was
relatively very small. But as loss of life increases, it makes up a larger
portion of economic damage, to the point that it outweighs direct effects of
terrorism.

To wit, to offset that $40b loss we could either a) prevent a 9/11 scale
attack or b) prevent at most 40,000 deaths of any cause. The operative
difference being 1) we know for a fact that many more than 40,000 preventable
deaths will happen in the next year alone and 2) we can make a good prediction
about what the cost would be to prevent them.

~~~
timsally
Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed,
but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing
terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use
technology), as can money spent on stopping preventable deaths. As a logical
person I'll of course agree to spending money in the most effective place; our
disagreement will be in how to do the cost-benefit analysis. For example, you
mention preventable deaths as a good place to spend money, but the devil is in
the details. Smoking, being overweight, and alcohol are the leading causes of
preventable deaths in the United States and the government has been waging a
campaign against these in some form or another for decades. In the case of
alcohol we're actually coming up on a century. It's not a given that spending
more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you
should justify it.

My reason for entering the debate is I think people generally don't think
about the true cost of a successful terrorist attack. For example, a
successful attack on a nuclear power plant would cost $700 billion. Even if
people were thinking about costs accurately, I recognize even then there will
be disagreement and I'm happy to have that debate about whether anti-terror or
anti-smoking is the right place to spent money. I'm just pushing for people to
think more accurately about costs because the usual level of discourse is how
cars kill more people than terrorists and thats just not the whole story.

~~~
Cushman
> It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help
> and if that's your position you should justify it.

This is a statement that applies to _terrorism_ , not to all-cause mortality.
Statistically, it is a given; we can spend $Xm addressing Y different causes
of death, watch how death rates respond, and have a pretty good idea which was
the best investment. That's the whole reason the various departments have this
dollar figure for a human life; they do this sort of analysis all the time.

Trying to apply that sort of economic analysis to a statistically nonexistent
phenomenon like major terrorist attacks is utterly useless by comparison. It
doesn't _matter_ how accurate or inaccurate our assessment of the costs is,
because we have no idea how likely they are to occur in the first place, and
no framework to assess what the cost of preventing them would be.

~~~
timsally
> Trying to apply that sort of economic analysis to a statistically
> nonexistent phenomenon like major terrorist attacks is utterly useless by
> comparison. It doesn't matter how accurate or inaccurate our assessment of
> the costs is, because we have no idea how likely they are to occur in the
> first place, and no framework to assess what the cost of preventing them
> would be.

That's complete bunk! What's so special about terrorist attacks that make them
so hard to model, as compared to other things governments routinely model like
inflation, technology transfer from NASA programs, etc? An absolutely
ludicrous assertion.

~~~
Cushman
Okay, let's do it. I'll get us started: in 2013, inflation was around 1%.
About 30% of Americans were obese. There were roughly zero major terrorist
attacks.

Your turn: In 2014, what will the inflation rate be? How many people will be
obese? How many major terrorist attacks will occur?

Approximate answers are fine.

~~~
timsally
You're completely off the rails here. You've devolved back into discussing the
probability of dying from a terrorist attack instead of a whole system
analysis. Some questions to answer your questions. Do you think the government
knows things about the economy they don't release to the public but use to
inform their monetary policy? Do you think the same might be true for
terrorist attacks and their security posture? Does the fact that you don't
know something mean that it is inherently unknowable?

~~~
Cushman
So your answer is that you have no idea what the chances of a major terrorist
attack are, and no way of finding out, but you think the government does,
because they have secrets.

Well, there's no way for me to argue with that. Good talk.

