The information released today includes a number
of internal NSA documents, training slides and
internal guidance, which demonstrate the care
with which NSA’s foreign intelligence collection
pursuant to Section 501 is run, managed, and overseen.
In other words, this selective declassification is not about being transparent and open. It's propaganda designed to take some of the flak off the administration. Not that there's anything inherently wrong or surprising about that since it's the kind of thing we've come to expect from our politicians. It's just that if I knew how different the Obama administration's actions would be from what 2008 candidate Obama's rhetoric led my 20-year-old self to believe, I wouldn't have donated money to him.
> It's just that if I knew how different the Obama administration's actions would be from what 2008 candidate Obama's rhetoric led my 20-year-old self to believe, I wouldn't have donated money to him.
If enough people felt this way, things could be a lot better. I can forgive someone who believed the rhetoric the first time, even though a lot of us didn't. It's a lesson we all have to learn, and if the lesson is learned, the mistakes aren't so bad.
Unfortunately, a majority of voters didn't think this was enough to prevent them from re-electing him in 2012, nor I fear, from electing another person just like him in 2016.
It's not like the other realistic choice in 2012 would have been any better about this stuff.
The root of the problem is that the majority of voters like this stuff. Americans are, by and large, terrified of terrorists (imagine that) and want their government doing everything imaginable to stop it. Never mind that terrorism is less dangerous than e. coli or sharks, it's an important issue to a lot of people. That is what we need to change, not a few politicians. Convince the public, and the rest will follow. Not that I have any clue how to even start.
Start with Hollywood. Perceptions can be changed through entertainment. It has worked well to promote equal rights. Bit by bit, entertainment can acclimate us to new ideas.
White House Down is an interesting example of a starting point:
[spoiler alert]
Instead of the terrorists coming from the Middle East, they come from the military industrial complex and secret service.
By your logic, why shouldn't Americans worry much more about E. coli than NSA surveillance? What evidence do we have from Snowden (or elsewhere) that NSA surveillance has killed or even harmed anyone in the US?
You can feel "terrorized" that the NSA might use its powers for great evil, but to the average voter that probably seems less likely than one or a series of high casualty attacks by foreign nationals.
I don't want to get into an argument about how we're all deeply harmed whenever laws are violated, and especially when the powerful can violate them at will. Sure. But the mortality rate argument is a loser: The public and policy makers will never make these kinds of serious decisions based only on a death toll. If they did, we'd have banned passenger cars decades ago.
I think people should, in fact, prioritize e. coli over NSA overreach. Worrying about being spied on is the sort of high-end top-of-the-Maslow-hierarchy luxury you can indulge in after you have reliable access to good food and such.
That's not to say that I don't think it's serious. But food safety is much more fundamental.
No, decisions will not be made based purely on death toll. But we must demand some sort of rational basis, and when it comes to terrorism, there is none.
You can't come up with half a dozen ways in which Verizon's phone records would be useful to prevent or analyze terrorist attacks? #1 for me would be training pattern recognition and social graph generation algorithms on real data. That sounds like a pretty rational basis for getting that data to me.
Whether its value is a good tradeoff vs. the resulting privacy concerns is a good debate to have, but surely the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events? The Marathon bombings alone caused more havoc than a typical e. coli outbreak, even if everyone had stood up, shrugged, and gone about the rest of their Monday afternoon business without a care for their attackers.
Why does the government have a responsibility to prevent mass casualty events more than preventing lots of individual casualty events? And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized.
Why does the government have a responsibility to prevent mass casualty events more than preventing lots of individual casualty events?
I think most citizens would like it to do both when the tradeoffs required make sense.
And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized.
I don't understand how you expect a bomb going off in a large crowd to fail to cause havoc, no matter how sanguine people are about it.
If something like the Boston bombing were happening once a month, people would rightfully be pretty agitated. Yes, more people are killed and maimed daily by automobiles, but people are not being irrational when they fail to be "terrorized" and demand the government ban automobiles. They understand perfectly well that banning automobiles would have a cost greater than the benefit. They support NHTSA's role in making automobiles safer, because that tradeoff makes sense. Another tradeoff that makes sense to a lot of people is letting the NSA run data analysis on phone call databases to try to identify attackers both before and after the fact. The cost to them seems minimal vs. preventing or capturing the perpetrators of even one attack.
If I understand you correctly, you're basically saying that people have decided, based on the information available and the priorities they have, that the government's reaction to terrorism is what they want. They think the tradeoffs in terms of civil liberties and government spending are worthwhile. And I agree, they DO think that!
But that does not translate into "the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events". If the people decided that policy for terrorism should be more like policy for cars than policy for threatening foreign powers, then the government should follow suit. There's no implicit responsibility to treat some causes of death differently.
As I said way up in my original comment, the problem here is the people themselves. We must convince the public to take a more rational approach to terrorism, one in which the effort expended in countering it compared to the potential threat it poses is more in line with the ratio dedicated to other threats.
One part where we disagree is where you say that people would "rightfully be pretty agitated" with one Boston bombing a month. Would people be "rightfully agitated" if a similar number of deaths and injuries was happening in Boston every month, but spread out across the entire month? Because I'm pretty sure that's the case, but most people don't get agitated, and we tend to think that those who do get agitated at the daily grind of death and mayhem that makes up life are a bit insane.
> In other words, this selective declassification is not about being transparent and open. It's propaganda designed to take some of the flak off the administration.
That was pretty much the public explanation given when the order for declassification was issued (it was framed as an effort to reassure the public about the programs in the wake of the leaks), so that shouldn't be too surprising.
Yup. When the order was announced I interpreted it as "Find as many documents that support our policy position and doesn't tell the public what they don't already know. Also, feel free to redact anything that might be interpreted as negative, so that whatever documents you release are seen in a positive light."
James Clapper and Co are not qualified to determine what the US people need to know here. A mutually trusted third party or parties should be going through the documents and figuring out what should be released.
>I look at it actively -- as a starting point to motivate more whistleblowing, as a ratchet to push for more release, as a tool to promote more openness in government.
I agree, that would be the ideal outcome of this trend of whistleblowers and the subsequent reactions. But the government will fight tooth and nail every step of the way. Julian Assange wrote a very cool essay about the role of information flow in an authoritarian conspiracy and how if the different nodes in the graph can't trust each other with information then the conspiracy breaks down and, presumably, truth and transparency replaces it [1]. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Daniel (Chelsea) Manning, David Weber, Gina Grey, the recent Secret Service harassment whistleblowers, etc.
Few of them have the press that Snowden did, but Snowden isn't an isolated whistleblower. That said, seeing the lives that Manning and he have been relegated to post-whistle, I'd be surprised if the current administration hasn't scared off a good bit of would-be whistle-blowers from doing so in the future.
It isn't clear to me that he meant "trend of whistle-blowers" to mean "whistle-blowers inspired exclusively by Snowden". Both Snowden and Chelsea Manning (who previously went by Bradley, not Daniel) are a part of the presumed trend.
This isn't a reaction to Snowden so much as the EFF's ongoing FOIA lawsuit explicitly seeking release of the documents, which are still pretty heavily redacted. (Among the blackouts: the name of an official that briefed FISA court judges, the number of years that the Bush warrantless wiretap program had proceeded without judicial sanction, and solid pages of blackout apparently characterizing what it collected.)
Clapper may claim instead that the release was the result of a sudden dedication to openness, but he did also claim before Congress that there was no ongoing widespread surveillance of Americans at all.
Do keep in mind that Snowden's documents have provided much more solid legal ground upon which the EFF can gain standing. The EFF has had a great deal of difficulty getting even into the courts because they couldn't show actual documentable evidence of much prior to these releases. Snowden's release provided a beachhead from which EFF can finally now inch forward through the courts.
Strikes me as a smooth blend of both. But the segment of the public that inspired this move can see through the translucency and won't be satisfied until they stop giving us scraps and start inviting us to the table, so to speak.
I love how key definitions of terms are redacted for purposes of national security. For instance, the definition of the term "associated" is redacted in the training guides for establishing an RAS (reasonable articulable suspicion) used to justify targeting of communication metadata.
It Just Works. Good enough for me, especially if it was something they needed to throw up in a day vs. waiting months of decision-making from managers and authorizing IT resources to build a public site.
>Created at the direction of the President of the United States, IC ON THE RECORD provides immediate, ongoing and direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities carried out by the U.S. Intelligence Community.
from the about us column. You could probably credit Obama's social media team, or maybe the man himself. Interesting.
If you haven't noticed, Obama is big on taking advice from those around him. The people who surround him are mostly young and new age. So tumblr is the way to go.
Obama himself is a speaker, a talker, a rephraser. And a very articulate one. His intelligence (or lack thereof) has never truly been revealed because he never does the thinking.
"The information could be used only for counterterrorism purposes."
Am i understanding correctly that all instances where parrallel reconstruction was employed were in fact terrorist cases?
Terrorism is anything the government doesn't like.
In all seriousness, how would we realistically ever find out which criminal cases were hinged upon parallel construction of evidence? The whole point is to conceal from judges and prosecutors (not to mention defendants) the true nature of the evidence-gathering techniques used. This completely flies in the face of due process of law, and I doubt anyone in government would willing own up to specific examples.
This is true. There were a few anti-nuke protestors arrested about a year ago. A catholic nun and some other folks committed to pacifism.
They were able to breach the security perimeter of a nuclear facility and erect some home-made banners promoting pacifism. What happened to the contractor that was supposed to be securing the site? Nothing.
