

For NSA chief, terrorist threat drives passion to "collect it all" observers say - 1337biz
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/for-nsa-chief-terrorist-threat-drives-passion-to-collect-it-all/2013/07/14/3d26ef80-ea49-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html

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ck2
_" you have to know everything in order to be completely safe"_

    
    
        - Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi, East Germany

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jivatmanx
A General should not have been allowed to attain this much political power. Or
repeatedly lie to congress without repercussions.

Yet more checks and balances that are clearly out of whack.

~~~
bilbo0s
Checks and balances were designed to keep political leaders from running amok
in our nation.

The idea, of course, being that the political leaders would keep the military
leaders and governmental policy makers from running amok.

That was the IDEA anyway.

~~~
johnchristopher
And yet the first president was a military leader. Checks and balances twisted
from the start.

~~~
mpyne
Mere military service does not mean a President is hopelessly compromised.

One of the most-quoted critics of the military-industrial(-Congress?) complex
was the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during WWII, after all.
Sometimes the guy from the military can tell you _exactly_ how screwed up it
is.

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fnordfnordfnord
Look how prescient the NSA are. They've been working on this capability for
sixty years or more.

~~~
srean
Upvoted you back up. Sarcasm is not always easy to detect.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
No worries.

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w_t_payne
Here is a seemingly innocuous little question for you all:

Now that PRISM's cover has been "blown" \- what sort of personality type do
you think will be most attracted by the prospect of getting a job at the NSA?

Might I suggest that a career with the NSA has suddenly become a compelling
and attractive alternative for all those creeps that find idea of power
without responsibility positively intoxicating.

Indeed, I suspect that the recruiters and security screening personnel are (as
we speak) busy filtering out anybody who might leak - i.e. all those
candidates who actually posses a conscience - making it much more likely that
over time the NSA & it's sister organizations will become increasingly
sadistic and power-hungry in their institutional cultures.

Regretfully, this seems like a foregone conclusion, given that the present
public attention to the issue is not making a jot of difference to how the
security services operate. Indeed, they are as clearly unmoved by public
opinion as their operations are (effectively) beyond the reach of the law.

As a result, we should not only consider the consequences of this untrammeled
power-grab by the security services as a potential worst-case threat:- We
should positively expect this threat to materialize.

In addition to this expectation of malicious intent, we should also expect the
technological advantage that the security services have over the general
population to increase over time. The "internet of things" is coming, and it
will not be too long before disposable "smart" sensors can be mass produced,
making the surveillance state truly ubiquitous.

The tele-screens of Orwell's 1984 already seem quaint in comparison to the
surveillance capabilities enabled by the ubiquitous smart-phone. How much more
in thrall to the authorities will we be when sub-millimeter scale sensors can
be purchased by the thousands-to-the-dollar, and scattered almost invisibly
across the urban environment; maybe even in the food supply - certainly
embedded in fitness and health-insurance tracking applications.

Orwell had his vision of a "boot stamping down on a human face - forever" \-
my fear is based on a vision that is a little different - given our
increasingly intimate relationship with technology - a vision of the latex-
clad hands of the state -- violently engaged in the mass rectal exam of the
human race -- forever."

Remember - if Nixon got into power under the full glare of public scrutiny -
just think of the personality types that proliferate in the shadows.

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motters
These things are always a tradeoff. The number of terrorists is a tiny
fraction of the population, and the amount of damage which they cause is small
compared to road accidents, tsunamis or common and preventable diseases. Is it
really worth compromising everyone's communications because of such a low
level threat? Collecting everything isn't even remotely proportionate to the
scale of the problem, and it's counter-productive even in utilitarian terms.

The main issue is that it's not really about terrorists. The NSA recruiters
admitted as much in the audio recording in which they attempted to define the
term "adversary" to an audience which was smarter than they had bargained for.
It's very clear that they consider everyone to be an adversary, whether or not
they're engaged in terrorism or crime and regardless of their nationality.

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Raticide
If we installed cameras inside everyones TV that allowed the government to
view inside everyones home I can guarantee we'd catch a lot more terrorists.

~~~
nsns
Or better still, incarcerate everyone, there'd be no more crime at all (" _it
's for your own good!_").

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marshray
Translation: "He's only guilty of loving too much"

~~~
wavefunction
This is like the old interview chestnut "what's your biggest weakness?"

"I just work too hard and care too much sometimes!"

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ajays
Once in a while, there's a scandal about the Whitehouse pulling up IRS records
of opponents (or so it is claimed).

Just wait till the day some jerk in the WH decides to pull up __ALL
__communications of opponents: every phone call, every text, every email. He
'd be able to blackmail the Congress into doing anything he wanted.

~~~
subsystem
Blackmailing would be far too transparent for the military.

"Information Superiority (IS) is defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as
the 'degree of dominance in the information domain that permits the conduct of
operations without effective opposition'."

[http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/defense/97_jwstp/jw4a...](http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/defense/97_jwstp/jw4a.htm)

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mindcrime
What I want to know, is why this asshole still has a job? Or James Clapper for
that matter. And Barack Obama.

I don't know about you guys, but more and more I'm reminded of that old
Queensryche lyric:

 _Let 's tip the power balance and tear down their crown. Educate the masses,
We'll burn the White House down. Speak to me the pain you feel._

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6L5Jo09l7U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6L5Jo09l7U)

~~~
tzs
> What I want to know, is why this asshole still has a job?

Have you considered the possibility that the people in a position to decide
whether or not he has a job have more relevant information than you do, and
are better qualified to evaluate it, and so that when they come to a different
conclusion than you it could be that you are the one who is wrong?

A lot of smart people inexplicably overlook this possibility.

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danenania
Your logic can be used to justify literally any action by those in power who
have access to secret information.

Rolling over and saying "our leaders have all the info so they know best!" as
your rights are violated hasn't exactly been a winning strategy throughout
history.

~~~
tzs
You seem to have misread my comment as saying something like "they know more
than we do, so we should trust them", which is nowhere near what I actually
said.

What I actually said was that someone with more information might be better
able to evaluate a situation and come to the right conclusion, and we should
take this into account when evaluating the actions of those who have more
information.

This should be uncontroversial, unless one wishes to argue that less
information puts one in a better position to make correct decisions.

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visarga
I don't buy it. It's not for terrorism - we've been fighting terrorism for
long, without total surveillance. It's for controlling the society.

~~~
mpyne
Well the whole point is that it took Gen. Alexander to finally bring about the
changes to law and org. structure needed to even do it on this level.

That doesn't mean it's not for counter-terrorism at face value, though the
_purpose_ behind the systems wouldn't change how dangerous they are anyways.

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D9u
What _drives his passion_ to lie to the nation to which he swore an oath?

~~~
hkmurakami
He mentioned something about General Hummel and The Rock and how he was doing
the right thing...

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contingencies
Any five page article featuring phrases like _Alexander’s sensibilities_ is
fluff. _His proposed solution: Private companies should give the government
access to their networks_. Really? Let's not get too far in to the obvious
totalitarian risk and sheer bureaucratic idiocy of such a perspective.

Pathetic puff piece on a morally bankrupt individual.

~~~
rayiner
Is it possible to disagree with someone about the appropriate scope of
surveillance without their being a "morally bankrupt individual?"

Imagine a world where most people don't think information privacy is a big
deal. Imagine a world where most people do think terrorism is a big deal. This
is a hypothetical, so don't argue the hypothetical (i.e. whether information
privacy is important or whether terrorists are a threat). Is it possible, just
maybe, that a non-morally bankrupt individual could put those two things
together and come to the good-faith conclusion that collecting large amounts
of data to protect against a terrorist threat is in the public interest?
Especially if that individual conservative but reasonable legal opinions
stating that data held by private companies about their users are not within
the scope of the 4th amendment?

That hypothetical is probably closer to reality than you'd like to admit. My
in-laws are not afraid of the NSA. They are afraid of Al Qaeda. Many legal
experts reasonably read precedent like
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland))
to give a narrow scope to the 4th amendment when it comes to information in
the possession of third parties. These people are not all "morally bankrupt."
They just don't share your values and priorities.

Probably most relevant is that you'll never convince my in-laws otherwise by
dismissing them as "sheeple" or be able to effect any change by dismissing
anyone who interprets the 4th amendment differently as "morally bankrupt."

~~~
jivatmanx
"Imagine a world where most want to... x"

What a majority want or do not want is entirely orthogonal to whether it's
moral or not.

~~~
foobarbazqux
Different people can have conflicting morals. If the majority thinks something
is moral, it's moral for the majority.

~~~
clicks
I think relativistic morality has it very wrong.

I mean, surely you don't accept that killing Jews can ever be considered
moral, or owning slaves, or cutting genitalia of little girls is moral just
because a local majority happens to think that it is moral. In this day and
age, with having gone through the Enlightenment with having such an abundant
supply of literature on psychological sciences we can more or less reasonably
agree on what is moral and not: physical and emotional pain is bad -- we know
these things intuitively, we learned it over thousands of years -- fire bad,
skin being cut bad, seeing my brother get killed bad, hugging good, we don't
need human customs, politics, or some piece of paper dictate what is moral or
not.

See here Sam Harris better argue for an absolutist morality informed by
science:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_...](http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html)

I think all intelligent people should aggressively campaign the idea of
absolutist morality to all ends of the earth.

~~~
foobarbazqux
Let's see. In my system of morals, different people are allowed to have
different morals. In your system of morals they are not. You are not okay with
my morals. I am okay with your morals, as long as they don't infringe too
badly on my own. I certainly understand that you have them. I suspect that
absolute anything is going to be a problem eventually. I know that I'm very
unlikely to be able to change your morality, so why pressure you?

By the way, I don't think it's moral to call another person's morality
horseshit. Your system of morals says this is okay. We have a small conflict
there. No amount of science will convince me otherwise.

Basically I believe it's legitimate for morals to be defined by individuals on
the basis of their experiences in life. Yes, we know most of them intuitively.

~~~
Demiurge
"By the way, I don't think it's moral to call another person's morality
horseshit. Your system of morals says this is okay. We have a small conflict
there. No amount of science will convince me otherwise."

Hold your horses! He can perfectly well find it immoral to call your morality
horseshit, and be conscientiously acting immorally!

~~~
foobarbazqux
Yeah, okay, and I knew that too. Intellectual dishonesty.

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coldtea
> _For NSA chief, terrorist threat drives passion to "collect it all"
> observers say_

Classic BS attempt to make something systemic, widespread and decades old look
like the "personal crusade" of a "bad apple" and/or a "all too human" good
guy.

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SimHacker
He should satisfy his OCD by playing Pokemon instead.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVp-
zIONsrs](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVp-zIONsrs)

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stephen_cagle
that, and pokemon.

