The important thing to remember here is that the NSA was once started with noble goals in mind but it has since changed into an attack dog without much of a leash to hold it back. The NSA still has a useful function and indeed they'll compromise part of that function if their technical capabilities become too well known.
But to stonewall the general public on legitimate requests like these will cause people to use their fantasy as to what those capabilities really are, and that will likely overshoot reality. In that case any information the NSA is likely interested in will go underground so far that they won't be able to get at it in time to prevent damage.
On the other hand if they come clean and it will turn out to be (much) worse than people expected (and there is a good chance of this) then they will likely be reigned in diminishing their capability.
So they are damned either way.
Stonewalling is likely an indication that there is much more hidden than we know about today, otherwise coming clean would actually make them look better.
The best thing for the NSA would be for this whole thing to go away, organizations like that only work when they can do so in comparative secrecy. As soon as the spotlight is aimed at them some of their effectiveness (and in the case of the NSA likely quite a bit of it) will evaporate.
Those pesky foreign media and their relentless releases. Funny how the Guardian is the best place to get information about a United States institution, how Russian dissidents would move to the US and how a US whistleblower is now living in Russia.
It seems our (the general public) best chance in getting some progress in these matters is to play out nation states against each other.
I have no idea where this is all going but I could do with less surveillance in the name of (the war on) terror and a more constructive approach to geopolitical affairs to replace the 'might makes right' policy that we have today.
Damned? The best possible thing that could happen for the NSA as well as everyone else who is affected, would be for the NSA to be pared back to its only legitimate function, military intelligence.
Other good things that should come out of this are:
Strong gov't whistleblower protections, so that future potential leakers will not need to flee. A real threat of whistleblowers may tend to moderate illegal activities conducted in secret. Abuses may still occur, but they should be fewer, and more likely to be reported if whistleblowers had security.
International treaties to protect the security of political dissidents, including securing the freedom to travel.
Real, credible oversight. Relying on Congress didn't work. Relying on the Judicial didn't work. Relying on the press didn't work. We need something better.
To emphasize this: I just spent most of the night reading about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKMS. It's really kind of fascinating how dependent US gov/mil communications security is on these guys. The foreign-spying stuff is pretty much ancillary.
Sorry to nitpick, but the Guardian US, a subsidiary american company broke the story, and the reporter is an American citizen. Nothing really foreign there.
Going to go ahead and be the voice of reason and state that:
1. The NSA does not keep a "file" on you. Domestic matters are the FBI's territory. The NSA is tasked with strictly foreign surveillance. If information is contained in databases that correspond to your communiques, it is not catalogued as "Kevin Collier", because that would be a direct FISA violation and trigger administrative removal of the data along with reporting about how the violation occurred.
2. I can almost say with complete confidence that our national security resources aren't being used to target white suburban bloggers.
3. By flooding NSA public relations with these useless requests, you're blocking potentially real requests from being processed. If you really cared about getting actual information about programs, you would back EFF, etc. efforts.
>Going to go ahead and be the voice of reason and state that:
You aren't the voice of reason. You're the guy with his fingers in his ears and his eyes closed. You are the worst possible neighbor to have in a democratic society. Until you are directly and personally affected, you will continue to argue that those who oppose surveillance are all "unreasonable" to expect the gov't to follow the law, or for even "believing" that the gov't does not, despite clear evidence of wrongdoing.
>1. The NSA does not keep a "file" on you.
The NSA keeps _all_ of the source data. A file can be built at any instant by a simple query. The distinction of not having a "file" at some particular moment is without meaning. One might even argue that the architecture of the systems are designed to allow this "lie" to be told. At the very least, officials have demonstrated their willingness to exploit this semantic loophole, which by the strict rules of logic, evaluates as "true" but which all honest people consider "lying through your teeth".
> Domestic matters are the FBI's territory. The NSA is tasked with strictly foreign surveillance.
The NSA passes evidence of non-terrorism, non-national-security, ie domestic crimes to domestic law enforcement on its own accord, as has been reported widely in the press. Additionally, US intelligence services have in the past been caught passing inside information to commercial interests, also well beyond the scope of "strictly foreign surveillance".
>If information is contained in databases that correspond to your communiques, it is not catalogued as "Kevin Collier", because that would be a direct FISA violation and trigger administrative removal of the data along with reporting about how the violation occurred.
You have no proof of that. Even given the little that is actually revealed about the NSA so far, it is not reasonable to claim that the NSA has followed the rules in this particular scenario, given the many examples of rule-breaking, and the NSA's demonstrated contempt of FISC rulings.
>2. I can almost say with complete confidence that our national security resources aren't being used to target white suburban bloggers.
I can say with complete confidence that you are wrong again. Laura Poitras, Jacob Applebaum, many others have been receiving extralegal searches, seizures of their electronic devices at the border for years. Just a few weeks ago, a family received a visit by virtue of their internet searches. Even if you were correct, it is an extreme threshold for opposition to gov't lawbreaking. You think that no person should make a fuss, until the speech of "white suburban bloggers" is targeted?
>3. By flooding NSA public relations with these useless requests, you're blocking potentially real requests from being processed. If you really cared about getting actual information about programs, you would back EFF, etc. efforts.
Even if their tactic is ineffective or even counter-productive, I prefer it to your denialist condescention.
>1. The NSA does not keep a "file" on you. Domestic matters are the FBI's territory.
That's the law. We've already established that they don't care much for that.
>2. I can almost say with complete confidence that our national security resources aren't being used to target white suburban bloggers.
That's because they are uninteresting. Why do you assume everyone would be as uninteresting as you?
How about the interesting people, people that would be going forward what MLK was in the past, for example? How about whistleblowers, investigative journalists, people active in politics, people working on high end tech, etc?
3. All information gleaned from the NSA is real information, and you don't send it to the public relations department. Instead it is an actual department set up to handle these requests from the public who wishes to know what their government is doing.
That's implicit in "Domestic matters are the FBI's territory. The NSA is tasked with strictly foreign surveillance", but I wanted to be pedantic since the debate on NSA surveillance seems to take surveillance of foreigners as something completely natural and in no way wrong.
But honestly, assuming we get to a point where the US government has a file on every American citizen, does it really matter if the file is with the FBI and not the NSA? Of course the rules and laws covering the two agencies are different, but ultimately, it doesn't seem like the US government is very interested in strictly following the law.
As a peaceful protest / 4th Amendment exercise, please consider attaching an encrypted file with EVERY email you send from now on.
It's easy enough to do using TrueCrypt.
It needn't be a file the recipient needs to decrypt, or keep.
You needn't even remember the password.
If everyone did this every time they send an email to anyone, it would flood the Internet with literally millions, then billions, of encrypted files, thereby demonstrating our resolve to maintain some level of privacy, and protecting most if not all of us "fish" in the "school" from the "sharks" who prefer to eat us one at a time (a la Edward Snowden and Ladar Levison).
When fish in a massive school move together in coordinated ways, it frustrates predators.
If this idea seems worthwhile PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
> "Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries' compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."
Not surprising. They're obviously trying to prevent the situation where Mr Terrorist or Ms Spy makes a FOIA request for their file and—because the NSA has been handing out files containing non-compromising evidence to anyone who asks—the NSA has to either:
- Lie, and say they don't have a file (probably not plausible, and maybe illegal under FOIA)
- Construct a fake file (expensive, and similarly might be illegal)
- Hand over the true file, revealing what they know about the bad guys
- Refuse to hand over the file, revealing that they know something incriminating, and that it's time for Ms Spy to disappear for a while
In information theory, and therefore espionage, you can't unask a question.
There is a gulf of a difference between a private business tracking its users and customers for business purposes, which you may opt out of by not dealing with said business, and your government tracking its citizens for criminal purposes, which you don't have the option of electing out of.
Such web sites can not arrest, render, kidnap, or torture me. The US gov can. I get a little icon telling me when and how I'm being tracked by websites, I do not have one that tells me the NSA is tracking me.
Indeed, but to be fair those are standard for dailydot pages, I don't think they have a way for an author to opt out of the tracking for any specific page.
<quote>The NSA has admitted, separately, that it employs a practice called "contact chaining." That means that if one of their targets calls someone, who in turn calls someone else, who in turn calls you, agency's checking you out.</quote>
Ah. So when you get an appointment reminder from your dentist, you might just have been chained with a suspect who called that same dentist earlier. Or maybe your girl/boy-friend works at Domino's on the side and called you from there, and it so happens a suspect is one of their customers.... congrats, NSA file for you.
If you follow the link the author set on the NSA asking "My NSA" to stop offering semi-automated filings, it's clear that the NSA isn't trying to coerce or intimidate, but rather is simply pointing out that the service doesn't actually work, because it generates noncompliant filings that NSA is prevented by law from even acknowledging.
That's one hop away, on a link this author chose for the story, and yet I'm left wondering whether the author even read it.
Seriously, what a gimmick of a title. The whole article had no new information and his tone sounded like speculation and complaint that he didn't get some sort of special treatment.
The EFF publishes a Surveillance Self-Defense resource I'd strongly recommend. The tools page: https://ssd.eff.org/tech
Essentially: encryption, self-hosting, small-scale hosting (the NSA have scaling problems with vendors, though don't expect that to last), privacy tools including browser privacy (privoxy), tor, VPNs, the FreedomBox, and others.
I saw a website that that was devoted to writing up a request, you just entered in your name, address, etc. and it would write up a formal request for you. They said they had a few hits, but at an extremely low success rate (maybe a dozen responses, after thousands or tens of thousands of requests) -- although the successful responses were self-reported, so they may or may not be legit. It was on hacker news a few months ago, but I can't seem to find it.
> "Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries' compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."
Please stop polluting the front page with Snowden and NSA related stuff unless it adds something new. This is just a fluff article which helps you read along an automated government response. At least link directly to the scribd document next time.
Hackers News works on basis of votes. The submitter added a link to something that the person thought was interesting. 69 other people agree. Thus there is no pollution, you're just do not want to see it. That's different.
[+] [-] jacquesm|12 years ago|reply
But to stonewall the general public on legitimate requests like these will cause people to use their fantasy as to what those capabilities really are, and that will likely overshoot reality. In that case any information the NSA is likely interested in will go underground so far that they won't be able to get at it in time to prevent damage.
On the other hand if they come clean and it will turn out to be (much) worse than people expected (and there is a good chance of this) then they will likely be reigned in diminishing their capability.
So they are damned either way.
Stonewalling is likely an indication that there is much more hidden than we know about today, otherwise coming clean would actually make them look better.
The best thing for the NSA would be for this whole thing to go away, organizations like that only work when they can do so in comparative secrecy. As soon as the spotlight is aimed at them some of their effectiveness (and in the case of the NSA likely quite a bit of it) will evaporate.
Those pesky foreign media and their relentless releases. Funny how the Guardian is the best place to get information about a United States institution, how Russian dissidents would move to the US and how a US whistleblower is now living in Russia.
It seems our (the general public) best chance in getting some progress in these matters is to play out nation states against each other.
I have no idea where this is all going but I could do with less surveillance in the name of (the war on) terror and a more constructive approach to geopolitical affairs to replace the 'might makes right' policy that we have today.
[+] [-] fnordfnordfnord|12 years ago|reply
Damned? The best possible thing that could happen for the NSA as well as everyone else who is affected, would be for the NSA to be pared back to its only legitimate function, military intelligence.
Other good things that should come out of this are:
Strong gov't whistleblower protections, so that future potential leakers will not need to flee. A real threat of whistleblowers may tend to moderate illegal activities conducted in secret. Abuses may still occur, but they should be fewer, and more likely to be reported if whistleblowers had security.
International treaties to protect the security of political dissidents, including securing the freedom to travel.
Real, credible oversight. Relying on Congress didn't work. Relying on the Judicial didn't work. Relying on the press didn't work. We need something better.
[+] [-] derefr|12 years ago|reply
To emphasize this: I just spent most of the night reading about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EKMS. It's really kind of fascinating how dependent US gov/mil communications security is on these guys. The foreign-spying stuff is pretty much ancillary.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
Citation needed.
[+] [-] pivnicek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icantthinkofone|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bazillion|12 years ago|reply
1. The NSA does not keep a "file" on you. Domestic matters are the FBI's territory. The NSA is tasked with strictly foreign surveillance. If information is contained in databases that correspond to your communiques, it is not catalogued as "Kevin Collier", because that would be a direct FISA violation and trigger administrative removal of the data along with reporting about how the violation occurred.
2. I can almost say with complete confidence that our national security resources aren't being used to target white suburban bloggers.
3. By flooding NSA public relations with these useless requests, you're blocking potentially real requests from being processed. If you really cared about getting actual information about programs, you would back EFF, etc. efforts.
[+] [-] fnordfnordfnord|12 years ago|reply
You aren't the voice of reason. You're the guy with his fingers in his ears and his eyes closed. You are the worst possible neighbor to have in a democratic society. Until you are directly and personally affected, you will continue to argue that those who oppose surveillance are all "unreasonable" to expect the gov't to follow the law, or for even "believing" that the gov't does not, despite clear evidence of wrongdoing.
>1. The NSA does not keep a "file" on you.
The NSA keeps _all_ of the source data. A file can be built at any instant by a simple query. The distinction of not having a "file" at some particular moment is without meaning. One might even argue that the architecture of the systems are designed to allow this "lie" to be told. At the very least, officials have demonstrated their willingness to exploit this semantic loophole, which by the strict rules of logic, evaluates as "true" but which all honest people consider "lying through your teeth".
> Domestic matters are the FBI's territory. The NSA is tasked with strictly foreign surveillance.
The NSA passes evidence of non-terrorism, non-national-security, ie domestic crimes to domestic law enforcement on its own accord, as has been reported widely in the press. Additionally, US intelligence services have in the past been caught passing inside information to commercial interests, also well beyond the scope of "strictly foreign surveillance".
>If information is contained in databases that correspond to your communiques, it is not catalogued as "Kevin Collier", because that would be a direct FISA violation and trigger administrative removal of the data along with reporting about how the violation occurred.
You have no proof of that. Even given the little that is actually revealed about the NSA so far, it is not reasonable to claim that the NSA has followed the rules in this particular scenario, given the many examples of rule-breaking, and the NSA's demonstrated contempt of FISC rulings.
>2. I can almost say with complete confidence that our national security resources aren't being used to target white suburban bloggers.
I can say with complete confidence that you are wrong again. Laura Poitras, Jacob Applebaum, many others have been receiving extralegal searches, seizures of their electronic devices at the border for years. Just a few weeks ago, a family received a visit by virtue of their internet searches. Even if you were correct, it is an extreme threshold for opposition to gov't lawbreaking. You think that no person should make a fuss, until the speech of "white suburban bloggers" is targeted?
>3. By flooding NSA public relations with these useless requests, you're blocking potentially real requests from being processed. If you really cared about getting actual information about programs, you would back EFF, etc. efforts.
Even if their tactic is ineffective or even counter-productive, I prefer it to your denialist condescention.
[+] [-] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
That's the law. We've already established that they don't care much for that.
>2. I can almost say with complete confidence that our national security resources aren't being used to target white suburban bloggers.
That's because they are uninteresting. Why do you assume everyone would be as uninteresting as you?
How about the interesting people, people that would be going forward what MLK was in the past, for example? How about whistleblowers, investigative journalists, people active in politics, people working on high end tech, etc?
[+] [-] uptown|12 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...
[+] [-] TomJoad|12 years ago|reply
2. Not bloggers, just American families: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-k...
3. All information gleaned from the NSA is real information, and you don't send it to the public relations department. Instead it is an actual department set up to handle these requests from the public who wishes to know what their government is doing.
[+] [-] dictum|12 years ago|reply
...if you are an American citizen.
That's implicit in "Domestic matters are the FBI's territory. The NSA is tasked with strictly foreign surveillance", but I wanted to be pedantic since the debate on NSA surveillance seems to take surveillance of foreigners as something completely natural and in no way wrong.
But honestly, assuming we get to a point where the US government has a file on every American citizen, does it really matter if the file is with the FBI and not the NSA? Of course the rules and laws covering the two agencies are different, but ultimately, it doesn't seem like the US government is very interested in strictly following the law.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dylangs1030|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperventilator|12 years ago|reply
As a peaceful protest / 4th Amendment exercise, please consider attaching an encrypted file with EVERY email you send from now on. It's easy enough to do using TrueCrypt. It needn't be a file the recipient needs to decrypt, or keep. You needn't even remember the password. If everyone did this every time they send an email to anyone, it would flood the Internet with literally millions, then billions, of encrypted files, thereby demonstrating our resolve to maintain some level of privacy, and protecting most if not all of us "fish" in the "school" from the "sharks" who prefer to eat us one at a time (a la Edward Snowden and Ladar Levison). When fish in a massive school move together in coordinated ways, it frustrates predators. If this idea seems worthwhile PLEASE COPY AND DISTRIBUTE
[+] [-] nshepperd|12 years ago|reply
Not surprising. They're obviously trying to prevent the situation where Mr Terrorist or Ms Spy makes a FOIA request for their file and—because the NSA has been handing out files containing non-compromising evidence to anyone who asks—the NSA has to either:
- Lie, and say they don't have a file (probably not plausible, and maybe illegal under FOIA)
- Construct a fake file (expensive, and similarly might be illegal)
- Hand over the true file, revealing what they know about the bad guys
- Refuse to hand over the file, revealing that they know something incriminating, and that it's time for Ms Spy to disappear for a while
In information theory, and therefore espionage, you can't unask a question.
[+] [-] fetbaffe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheald|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
Somewhere in there is a bit of a difference.
[+] [-] jacquesm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crdoconnor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arbuge|12 years ago|reply
Ah. So when you get an appointment reminder from your dentist, you might just have been chained with a suspect who called that same dentist earlier. Or maybe your girl/boy-friend works at Domino's on the side and called you from there, and it so happens a suspect is one of their customers.... congrats, NSA file for you.
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
That's one hop away, on a link this author chose for the story, and yet I'm left wondering whether the author even read it.
[+] [-] toble|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twiceaday|12 years ago|reply
Why am I not surprised?
[+] [-] laxatives|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pivnicek|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
Essentially: encryption, self-hosting, small-scale hosting (the NSA have scaling problems with vendors, though don't expect that to last), privacy tools including browser privacy (privoxy), tor, VPNs, the FreedomBox, and others.
[+] [-] jacquesm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoyer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laxatives|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unicorn_1123|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fetbaffe|12 years ago|reply
Windows Defender in Windows 8 says nothing about it.
[+] [-] bobbo3|12 years ago|reply
What's the story here?
[+] [-] northwest|12 years ago|reply
You just can't be more full of sh#t.
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastfade|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pearjuice|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkor|12 years ago|reply