Arguing that these programs are effective by revealing a few foiled terrorist plots is entirely beside the point. Obviously monitoring every communication on the planet would help the government track down a few terrorist plots here and there. If they really want the debate to focus on the effectiveness of these programs then they should explain why they failed so spectacularly to prevent the Boston Marathon bombings, a plot carried out by two of the most careless and naive terrorists to date. Heck, even a direct warning from Russian officials fell on deaf ears. Perhaps the NSA was too busy listening to innocent people's phone calls to respond?
The effectiveness isn't what's at issue here, though. The problem is the loss of privacy for innocent civilians, to which Obama and other government officials respond to with wishy-washy arguments about "tradeoffs" between security and privacy.
I would argue that even if these programs were effective in foiling some terrorist plots, that it's still not worth it. I mean, we could probably could prevent some mass shootings if we put everyone with a history of serious mental illness in an institution for the rest of their lives but that wouldn't make it right.
And perhaps the bigger risk to using the 'it prevented terorrist plots' argument is that it creates a convenient excuse for more surveillance and curtailing of rights. All that needs to happen is for a few more terorrist plots to slip through, then the argument will be, 'We need MORE power to stop these people' or, 'If you just allowed us to do this, this, and this, we could've prevented that'.
Then long after a significant threat of Jihadist terrorist attack is gone, we'll still be dealing with a uber-powerful police state.
I would also add to the argument that the following things are also happening and will happen:
1) More money being wasted to support certain corporations (Booz etc) in return for future plum jobs by these representatives/senators or heads of these agencies. Thus the cycle continues in favor of supporting these programs rather than analyzing whether we really need it or not.
2) Abuses by contractors or employees when they have this much access and power in seeing all the private data
3) Corruption of these committees due to the feeling of being "in" where others are not.
Not only that, but I can imagine the number of false positives for a collection that large would have to be off the charts. Your assessment that they missed a direct warning from a tenuous ally because they were too busy listening (chasing down) domestic leads is probably even truer than you think.
It's always a tradeoff between privacy and security. The rules behind the use of the metadata are pretty stringent. For example:
Metadata is JUST number + duration. Not localtion, cell phone tower...
targetting cannot be done on citizens or permanent citizens, or people in the US. Permanent citizen in Madrid is safe.
No "reverse" targetting(targetting foreigner but really interested in US nat'l)
if citizen/perm. res accidentally targeted, info not used, FISA court signalled, house intel + judiciary signalled.
If targeted person is initially out of US, but venture in, targeting stops IMMEDIATELY.
Info accidentally gotten (for example, lag when stopping of the targetting mentioned previously), ineligible info is purged. All ineligible info is purged.
All targeting is reviewed beforehand , both by DNI and judiciary. All targets are audited
Plus this was used on less than 300 numbers. 20 people in the world have access to the info. The justification procedures are stringent.
This hearing restored some confidence in checks and balances. And a good point by Deputy AG Cole: This is for foreign surveillance ONLY. There used to be no oversight for foreign surveillance. Now there is through FISA Court and this second court order with all these rules in it.
Also, NSA can't listen to the calls without fixed warrant, and the brothers were in the US at the time of planning their thing, so out of NSA jurisdiction anyways.
AFAIK the NSA was not informed, the FBI was. They investigated and concluded that there was no firm evidence of intent, case closed. Due process at work in our police state, strange.
Also, a student with a naturalized American brother who travels to visit family and speak with radical Islamists at his old home is not the kind of thing that either collecting phone call information or using Facebook Open Graph^W^W^W Prism is going to work well against. There are other types of terroristic threats, Prism/phone watch lists will work better against those.
If anything Maj. Nidal Hasan would almost be a better example, except that the NSA system worked perfectly... it was only in the follow-up investigation that it was decided that Hasan was just making innocent probes, so it was the investigation that failed and not the NSA system.
Arguing that monitoring every communication on the planet makes no sense... even with contractor augments there are not enough U.S. citizens to monitor all world communications, and the pool of available analysts quickly drops when you consider security clearance issues, training required, pay available, the qualifications needed, etc.
So no, it doesn't follow that you could perfectly foil terrorist plots even with interception and monitoring of worldwide communications, so the fact that NSA is as successful as they are can't be waved away by saying "anyone could do it". They can't monitor everyone even with their Utah data center, so apparently they've been doing a good job at focusing their resources at the mission at hand.
Any either way there's always a tradeoff. You wouldn't accept a 9/11 in your country every day to ensure absolute privacy as soon there would be no one left to be private from, so let's not act like the priority value is ∞. The staggering success of Twitter, Facebook and Google reveal how much people truly value their privacy.
Even the Constitution is in on the act, as both warrants and "reasonable searches" are explicitly mentioned as limits to Fourth Amendment rights, and people don't seem to freak out about those.
So while people may have different answers about where they fall on privacy <==> security (where a given program has a tradeoff between the two), don't act like the extreme choice is the only one; even the Framers didn't think that.
Is it me or are most (all?) of these hearings against companies or agencies in this case - a joke? I've watched some of them lately, and the Congressmen always seem to be butt-kissing the company or agency they are supposed to investigate.
These past 2 hearings don't seem to intend to shed any light on this. They seem to be held to help protect whatever NSA is doing.
Just think of the kind of blackmail material the NSA would have on our representatives under this program. All it would take is "probable cause", which seems very easy to get, to unearth that data and start blackmail or expose the person. These programs give the NSA an incredible amount of power, and it's easily misused.
"If you believe the security of the realm is at risk
you don't hold a security enquiry, you call in the Special Branch.
Government security enquiries are only used for killing press stories."
- Yes Prime Minister S01E08
More americans need to watch Yes Minister. It will disabuse you of naive notions like inquiries serving purposes other than finding its subjects innocent and generally hiding the truth.
There are lots of other apposite quotes but I can't seem to find any just now.
This is why the makeup of the committee is so important. The Chair controls the witness list and the order of questioning - and gets to ask a lot of questions. So, since Mike Rogers supports the NSA, there aren't any civil liberties witnesses; and 75 minutes into a 2 hour hearing we still haven't heard any skeptical questions at all, or anything that deals with the excellent points being brought up by those watching on Twitter.
The members of this committee, House Intelligence, generally knew what the NSA was doing in this area. (There are more secretive intelligence programs that are briefed only to the so-called Gang of Eight, a select group of House and Senate leaders that do not include all members of the Intelligence committees.)
Think of it this way: If you've been briefed on some supersecret surveillance since at least 2008, when the FAA was enacted, and you never raised a privacy alarm, what do you do when everyone else finds out? Do you say "I was wrong?" Or do you say "Nothing to see here, move along."
The committee usually sends their questions in advance to the people appearing in front of them. Seldom will you see the people testifying caught unaware. It's theater.
the chairman is doing it a bit. But some congresspeople are being particularly stringent (Check out what Schiff said concerning court oversight). Things are happening, and honestly what's being said here is pretty tempered, there's not much to get outraged about.
Deputy Attorney General: "We don't get any content...under this program." The use of language across all parties here is really incredible. The Google/Apple/etc denials so carefully worded, the lawyer-speak that avoid saying anything at all for hours at a time in the US gov't...it's amazingly Orwellian.
Edit: Did he just say that the fourth amendment does not apply because nobody expected privacy in the first place? I can't possibly have heard that right.
[edit] and here it is... "Under 702, we do get content"
[edit] I'm sure at this point the endgame here is gonna be a crazy dance around the word 'collect'. It's increasingly obvious that the secret definition they're using for 'collect' is "an analyst pulls it from our database, where we've already collected some broad swaths of communication by any reasonable person's definition of the term"
[edit] One interesting note is that there have been strong denials that the metadata contain any location/cell-tower data. Still wonder if there's another shell game there and it's available via some other source.
They may not get any content, but do they store any content? It could be that "get content" has a very narrow legal interpretation ("taking the book off the shelf and reading it").
He said that the fourth amendment does not apply to the collection of metadata of phone calls, etc, because we already freely expose that information to phone providers, etc.
4th ammendment doesn't apply to this metadata(call duration and number ONLY, no position) per a Supreme Court ruling 35 years ago about phone records.
This hearing , if you listen to all of it, went into surprising amount of detail concerning how these programs function. Just because they have to use big words (because this is about the law) doesn't mean they're trying to hide anything. This has been pretty illuminating.
Still some issues with the problem (notably "probable suspicion" clause concerning querying the database, there isn't enough oversight apart from in NSA).
Hopefully this will shift the conversation from "listening to phone calls" and "collecting internet records (eg: emails, browsing history)" to "storing phone calls" and "storing internet records (eg: emails, browsing history)".
At this point it's become abundantly clear that everything is stored and indexed in a database, and the only defense against abuse of this database is only policies.
One of the worst cases to come out of this entire ordeal is the legal dance around the definition of "listen" and whether it refers to automatically capturing phone calls or an individual listening to a recording of a phone call after it's been captured.
>the only defense against abuse of this database is only policies.
This point is extremely important and is what Snowden continuously returns to. In yesterday's Q&A he said "policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens." This idea is critical to having an intelligent debate of the issues at hand.
"But if we do acquire any information that relates to a US person, under limited criteria only, can we keep it. If it has to do with foreign intelligence in that conversation or understanding foreign intelligence, or evidence of a crime or a threat of serious bodily injury, we can respond to that. Other than that, we have to get rid of it, we have to purge it, and we can't use it." (emphasis mine)
This seems very close to an admission that they both have and analyze the data before purging it. Combined with the idea that most people commit three felonies a day and pretty quickly all of these assertions about not spying on US citizens or people in the US goes out the window.
Here's the thing- if they get and store this data, in any way whatsoever, it's going to come out. With a 100% certainty, that fact will out in time.
And when it does, any word games they try to play now will just be devastating to them then. Absolutely devastating. It will not protect them, it will not help them, it will damn them.
So, given that it will come out and it will hurt them when it does...why play the games?
Either they aren't storing the data (which seems possible still, though less likely than I thought 2 weeks ago), or they're operating with the future planning capability of a fruit fly.
I don't know which it is,but this doesn't feel like it's going to end well for anyone.
As a person "outside the united states and not a US person" this doesn't fill be with confidence about using US based internet services. It also doesn't give me much confidence about communicating with "US persons".
Speaking as a US Person... Honestly, thank God for this. Hopefully lots of non-US-persons vote with their dollars and feet on this issue. I think the financial impact has better odds at moving the needle on US public opinion than flogging our representatives with regard to civil liberties or privacy.
I have a visceral negative reaction to what they're doing to my country, and it makes me want to say: please embargo us, foreign nations and citizens. It won't happen unfortunately.
Yes, now you know for a fact that using a US internet communications company will result in your data being stored or at least examined by the US government. Unfortunately there is no evidence that other countries will not apply the same tactics to whichever internet communications companies exist on their soil.
yeah exactly. One doesn't allow content to be captured, the other does, but only for non-american citizens, except when it is an accident... so when you combine all three incidences... yes they have full access and admit it several times.
"The documents that have been released so far ironically show the oversight"
...
I like what John Oliver said on the Daily Show - “We’re not saying anyone broke any laws, we’re just saying it’s a little bit weird that you didn’t have to.”
It's PR.
They say there's court involvement but it's a rubber stamp and then they access all data they got on you.
They do say there has to be reasonable suspicion but we all know how that goes.
One guy says people don't have an expectation of privacy because they are used to giving their data to the phone companies.
I think I heard enough.
And Europe and China, yes, all communications of your citizens are being recorded, and yes it's a privacy violation.
"Does the technology exist at the NSA to record american's phone calls, or read their emails?"
"No"
There's something weird going on -- this seems too far off from Snowden's reports to be true. Like, p(Snowden leak | no technology like that) is just too small relative to p(Snowden leak)
The get-out-clause here is that they avoid "American's" phone calls. However if an American phones a non-American, or sends an email via a non-USA IP address, they'll hoover it up.
That is consistent with what Snowden said in the Q+A with the guardian yesterday:
US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they're tagged with.
hmmm the argument that it is not reasonable that what I view on the internet is private is disturbing. I do have a reasonable expectation of it being private.
This is referring to the Attorney Generals statement that we do not have a reasonable expectation for our meta data not to be public.
Listening to this is absurd. Any intelligent human being can see that this open meeting is nothing more than a PR piece. So far I have heard three congressmen testify that this is legal and nothing illegal is happening. They are preloading the conversation and giving people the opportunity to tune out before General Alexander can even speak.
Get FISA Right has a Twitter list with live tweets from several accounts following the hearing -- EFFLive, Julian Sanchez, Marcy Wheeler, Michelle Richardson of the ACLU, etc.
A hearing like this reinforces secrecy and benefits only the people in that room. They are given a platform to legitimize their activities and deny the existence of anything that may violate the constitution or upset Americans.
"Hey guys, we're here to tell you all about anything except what you actually want to know about" = the game of secrecy vs the public
[+] [-] marknutter|12 years ago|reply
The effectiveness isn't what's at issue here, though. The problem is the loss of privacy for innocent civilians, to which Obama and other government officials respond to with wishy-washy arguments about "tradeoffs" between security and privacy.
[+] [-] GVIrish|12 years ago|reply
And perhaps the bigger risk to using the 'it prevented terorrist plots' argument is that it creates a convenient excuse for more surveillance and curtailing of rights. All that needs to happen is for a few more terorrist plots to slip through, then the argument will be, 'We need MORE power to stop these people' or, 'If you just allowed us to do this, this, and this, we could've prevented that'.
Then long after a significant threat of Jihadist terrorist attack is gone, we'll still be dealing with a uber-powerful police state.
[+] [-] vermontdevil|12 years ago|reply
1) More money being wasted to support certain corporations (Booz etc) in return for future plum jobs by these representatives/senators or heads of these agencies. Thus the cycle continues in favor of supporting these programs rather than analyzing whether we really need it or not.
2) Abuses by contractors or employees when they have this much access and power in seeing all the private data
3) Corruption of these committees due to the feeling of being "in" where others are not.
In other words, it's going to get worse.
[+] [-] austenallred|12 years ago|reply
"The 4th amendment doesn't apply under the Patriot Act."
[+] [-] dclowd9901|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|12 years ago|reply
This hearing restored some confidence in checks and balances. And a good point by Deputy AG Cole: This is for foreign surveillance ONLY. There used to be no oversight for foreign surveillance. Now there is through FISA Court and this second court order with all these rules in it.
Also, NSA can't listen to the calls without fixed warrant, and the brothers were in the US at the time of planning their thing, so out of NSA jurisdiction anyways.
[+] [-] knowaveragejoe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badclient|12 years ago|reply
You're also the kind of person that would be up in arms when the FBI takes someone into custody because Russia says he's trouble.
[+] [-] mpyne|12 years ago|reply
Also, a student with a naturalized American brother who travels to visit family and speak with radical Islamists at his old home is not the kind of thing that either collecting phone call information or using Facebook Open Graph^W^W^W Prism is going to work well against. There are other types of terroristic threats, Prism/phone watch lists will work better against those.
If anything Maj. Nidal Hasan would almost be a better example, except that the NSA system worked perfectly... it was only in the follow-up investigation that it was decided that Hasan was just making innocent probes, so it was the investigation that failed and not the NSA system.
Arguing that monitoring every communication on the planet makes no sense... even with contractor augments there are not enough U.S. citizens to monitor all world communications, and the pool of available analysts quickly drops when you consider security clearance issues, training required, pay available, the qualifications needed, etc.
So no, it doesn't follow that you could perfectly foil terrorist plots even with interception and monitoring of worldwide communications, so the fact that NSA is as successful as they are can't be waved away by saying "anyone could do it". They can't monitor everyone even with their Utah data center, so apparently they've been doing a good job at focusing their resources at the mission at hand.
Any either way there's always a tradeoff. You wouldn't accept a 9/11 in your country every day to ensure absolute privacy as soon there would be no one left to be private from, so let's not act like the priority value is ∞. The staggering success of Twitter, Facebook and Google reveal how much people truly value their privacy.
Even the Constitution is in on the act, as both warrants and "reasonable searches" are explicitly mentioned as limits to Fourth Amendment rights, and people don't seem to freak out about those.
So while people may have different answers about where they fall on privacy <==> security (where a given program has a tradeoff between the two), don't act like the extreme choice is the only one; even the Framers didn't think that.
[+] [-] mtgx|12 years ago|reply
These past 2 hearings don't seem to intend to shed any light on this. They seem to be held to help protect whatever NSA is doing.
[+] [-] trebor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonnieCache|12 years ago|reply
There are lots of other apposite quotes but I can't seem to find any just now.
[+] [-] jdp23|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] declan|12 years ago|reply
Think of it this way: If you've been briefed on some supersecret surveillance since at least 2008, when the FAA was enacted, and you never raised a privacy alarm, what do you do when everyone else finds out? Do you say "I was wrong?" Or do you say "Nothing to see here, move along."
[+] [-] chiph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] addflip|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wheelerwj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptoz|12 years ago|reply
Edit: Did he just say that the fourth amendment does not apply because nobody expected privacy in the first place? I can't possibly have heard that right.
[+] [-] famousactress|12 years ago|reply
[edit] and here it is... "Under 702, we do get content"
[edit] I'm sure at this point the endgame here is gonna be a crazy dance around the word 'collect'. It's increasingly obvious that the secret definition they're using for 'collect' is "an analyst pulls it from our database, where we've already collected some broad swaths of communication by any reasonable person's definition of the term"
[edit] One interesting note is that there have been strong denials that the metadata contain any location/cell-tower data. Still wonder if there's another shell game there and it's available via some other source.
[+] [-] motters|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] centralism|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtpg|12 years ago|reply
This hearing , if you listen to all of it, went into surprising amount of detail concerning how these programs function. Just because they have to use big words (because this is about the law) doesn't mean they're trying to hide anything. This has been pretty illuminating.
Still some issues with the problem (notably "probable suspicion" clause concerning querying the database, there isn't enough oversight apart from in NSA).
[+] [-] ihsw|12 years ago|reply
At this point it's become abundantly clear that everything is stored and indexed in a database, and the only defense against abuse of this database is only policies.
One of the worst cases to come out of this entire ordeal is the legal dance around the definition of "listen" and whether it refers to automatically capturing phone calls or an individual listening to a recording of a phone call after it's been captured.
[+] [-] pvnick|12 years ago|reply
This point is extremely important and is what Snowden continuously returns to. In yesterday's Q&A he said "policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens." This idea is critical to having an intelligent debate of the issues at hand.
[+] [-] tghw|12 years ago|reply
This seems very close to an admission that they both have and analyze the data before purging it. Combined with the idea that most people commit three felonies a day and pretty quickly all of these assertions about not spying on US citizens or people in the US goes out the window.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
And when it does, any word games they try to play now will just be devastating to them then. Absolutely devastating. It will not protect them, it will not help them, it will damn them.
So, given that it will come out and it will hurt them when it does...why play the games?
Either they aren't storing the data (which seems possible still, though less likely than I thought 2 weeks ago), or they're operating with the future planning capability of a fruit fly.
I don't know which it is,but this doesn't feel like it's going to end well for anyone.
[+] [-] MisterWebz|12 years ago|reply
General Alexander: "No we do not have that authority."
I think it's pretty clear by now that they're collecting phone call content.
Here's another and I'm paraphrasing:
"Is there something else being collected?"
"Besides the 215(?) and 702(?)? I'm not sure as I don't know whether that info has been declassified."
[+] [-] motters|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] famousactress|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtvanhest|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] famousactress|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
Yeah well the ones we know. Now we need to know the others.
[+] [-] wheelerwj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pezh0re|12 years ago|reply
I like what John Oliver said on the Daily Show - “We’re not saying anyone broke any laws, we’re just saying it’s a little bit weird that you didn’t have to.”
[+] [-] _k|12 years ago|reply
One guy says people don't have an expectation of privacy because they are used to giving their data to the phone companies.
I think I heard enough. And Europe and China, yes, all communications of your citizens are being recorded, and yes it's a privacy violation.
I've heard enough.
[+] [-] benburleson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlss|12 years ago|reply
"Does the technology exist at the NSA to record american's phone calls, or read their emails?"
"No"
There's something weird going on -- this seems too far off from Snowden's reports to be true. Like, p(Snowden leak | no technology like that) is just too small relative to p(Snowden leak)
[+] [-] codeulike|12 years ago|reply
That is consistent with what Snowden said in the Q+A with the guardian yesterday:
US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it's important to understand that policy protection is no protection - policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection - a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the "widest allowable aperture," and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn't stop being protected communications just because of the IP they're tagged with.
[+] [-] lettergram|12 years ago|reply
This is referring to the Attorney Generals statement that we do not have a reasonable expectation for our meta data not to be public.
[+] [-] nathas|12 years ago|reply
He referenced a court decision about that. Can someone who knows what the case might be find it?
[+] [-] wheelerwj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdp23|12 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/GetFISARight/nsa
[+] [-] pezh0re|12 years ago|reply
(probably because that's exactly what they're arguing)
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
Should be interesting.
[+] [-] nodata|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoytie|12 years ago|reply
"Hey guys, we're here to tell you all about anything except what you actually want to know about" = the game of secrecy vs the public
[+] [-] LoganCale|12 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/efflive/status/347019679073710082