The NSA and Me

[ilamont]

The solution is not to jail the whistleblowers, or to question the patriotism of those who tell their stories, but to do what Attorney General Edward Levi courageously attempted to do more than a third of a century ago – to have the criminal division of the Justice Department conduct a thorough investigation, and then to prosecute any member of the intelligence community who has broken the law, whether by illegally spying on Americans or by lying to Congress.

Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate. Half-measures and bullshit platitudes from the powers that be are insufficient. Justice must be served, and if necessary, people need to go to jail.

[rdtsc]

> Until the guilty are prosecuted, there won't be any real change in the way that the U.S. intelligence agencies operate.

I disagree. There will be changes, but for the worse.

Because now those running the programs have a real world validated proof that people don't care and there are no consequences. So that is a good signal to crank up the level a few notches.

[zeteo]

> Justice must be served, and if necessary, people need to go to jail.

Do you really think sending a few scapegoats to prison will solve anything? The problems are systemic. Some faces may change but the agencies remain organized and financed the same way.

[TrainedMonkey]

I agree with general sentiment, that things are suboptimal, but when prosecuting people where do you draw the line? This is no easy problem that can be readily solved.

[GigabyteCoin]

"Despite the threats, I refused to alter my manuscript or return the documents. Instead, we argued that according to Executive Order 12065, “classification may not be restored to documents already declassified and released to the public” under the Freedom of Information Act. That prompted the drama to move all the way up to the White House. On April 2, 1982, President Reagan signed a new executive order on secrecy that overturned the earlier one and granted him the authority to “reclassify information previously declassified and disclosed.”"

This is truly frightening stuff.

The NSA is above the law. Even when they're not; they have the power to change the law.

[arca_vorago]

I just want to point out that the real issue then and these days, is the potential compromise of the DoJ. In my mind, the level the 3 letters have risen to in the beltway and across the nation fundamentally undermines the justice system, and that includes SCOTUS. I don't know how much of the lack of will to prosecute is incompetence (Hanlon's razor), fear of bribery, blackmail, loss of financial gain or loss of power/position, though I have my ideas about how to find these things out, the bottom line is that the system doesn't work properly.

I am a USMC Iraq combat vet (most of my time was during the "surge"). I spent most of my years since I got out trying to follow the strands up the chain to figure out what went wrong, and quite frankly, every single branch of government, including the fourth estate, has been compromised by the security state aka the military congressional corporate industrial complex. The executive is compromised, justice is compromised, the legislative is compromised.

Nobody wanted to hear my rants on the NSA pre-Snowden. Now they don't want to hear me explain the why, and get too caught up in the how.

My real problem is that none of these concerns are being addressed in any meaningful way by any of the people at the top. If the transition from nation-state security matters to single-actor threats is as insidious as the security apparatus purports it to be, they should explain their logic. So far though, it seems they have decided to undermine in a very conscious manner the constitution of the United States of America, without so much as notifying the American public.

[koops]

Shocking stuff. I don't think it's an exaggeration at this point to say that politicians are afraid of opposing an organization that knows their, and everyone else's, secrets. And so they continue operate as they like.

[pmorici]

More likely they are hesitant to rock the boat because intelligence spending is _big_ business. There are billions of dollars of contracts at stake so even if you caught people on video clubbing baby seals there is going to be strong pressure to not kill that cash cow.

[javajosh]

It's almost certainly more complicated than this. The NSA is scary, but it's also not a revenue producing part of the government, and therefore it must justify its existence in the budget every year. Lawmakers therefore must be doing some sort of cost/benefit analysis and have determined (perhaps by looking at the NSA's secret output) that the cost is worth it.

tl;dr: If Congress wanted to chastise the NSA, all they have to do is not fund it.

[skolor]

Really? While you can argue that the bill might not do as much as you want towards cutting back the surveillance available, 1/3 of the sitting Congresspeople cosponsored a bill to reduce the abilities of FISA/FISC [1]. It has significantly more sponsors than things than the recent SSA ammendment (116) [2] and "Life at Conception Act" (132) [3].

Sure, its not a "Defund the NSA" bill, but it is an effort to curtail some of the most objected to content from the Snowden stuff, and a pretty large number of politicians supported it, presumably without repercussions.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3361

[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/4190

[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1091

[fnordfnordfnord]

>In addition, calling the crimes “an international cause célèbre involving fundamental constitutional rights of United States citizens,” the task force pointed to the likelihood that the NSA would put political pressure on anyone who dared to testify against it. What’s more, the report added, defense attorneys for senior NSA officials would likely subpoena “every tenuously involved government official and former official” to establish that the illegal operations had been authorized from on high. “While the high office of prospective defense witnesses should not enter into the prosecutive decision,” the report noted, “the confusion, obfuscation, and surprise testimony which might result cannot be ignored.”

[infruset]

"But then the NSA got its revenge—when they handed me the 6,000 pages, they were all out of order, as if they had been shuffled like a new deck of cards"

A good occasion to practice one of those n log n sorting algorithms manually.

[TrainedMonkey]

I do not think pages were numbered 1-6000. I think there were multiple documents, so you would need to do something like:

1. Split all the pages into piles for page 1, page 2, page 3, etc...

2. Look at highest page pile first, because it would have least number of documents, work backward through page piles searching for matching previous page until you extract all of the pages[0] for that document.

[0] If pages were heavily blanked out, identification might have been difficult.

[jewel]

I think I'd use a most-significant-digit radix sort in real life.

Radix sort doesn't require comparisons, instead you examine the first digit and drop into one of 10 buckets. You then recurse on each bucket.

I think that'd be less frustrating than trying to do quicksort on such a large pile.

[Swizec]

I think they're called "interns" in real life.

[spacefight]

Great citation in any case. Remember that 4pt font size last year someone didn't like?

[cjg]

You could use pigeonhole sort with O(n) instead.

[suprgeek]

This story probably only hints at the truly terrifying power that the NSA can bring to bear. I do not think anyone is disputing the need to collect intelligence but the scale and scope of the NSA's no-holds-barred all the information all the time approach needs to be reigned in.

At this point (ironically) it may be fair to start treating them as one of the biggest threats to the functioning of democracy in the US.

Not terrorists, not violent militia, not soft money, not Income inequality - but an agency with virtually unchecked powers, opaque budget, no due process that Govt. Officials themselves daren't speak against for fear of embarrassment or worse.

[gallerytungsten]

For far more than a hint, I recommend reading all four of James Bamford's books.

[crazypyro]

Don't miss the link to the actual document, if you are curious.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/10/02/repor...

[gatehouse]

& the PDF is here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1304...

[wxs]

That document is surprisingly readable! I expected something very dry and bureaucratic, but this is written at a high level with historical context, and narrative.

[ChuckMcM]

I recommend his book "The Puzzle Palace" my wife originally read it as part of a class on espionage in college and passed it on to me to read.

[huhtenberg]

Have you not at all read the linked article? It is about this book.

[choult]

If you're interested in more recent aerial imagery of the Sabana Seca site, you can see it on Google Maps here: https://goo.gl/maps/PJuAd

[eyeareque]

To think if someone was to go up against the NSA today in a similar fashion, they would be in jail. Unless they were able to escape the country to hide out somewhere like say... Russia.

[S_A_P]

So has every one here just put a giant target on their back for reading this?

[S_A_P]

Not sure why I was downvoted here. Maybe this was interpreted as snark. I assure you that it was not. I am genuinely concerned that reading about snowden and NSA issues "flags" me and puts me on a list. I Don't feel like I've anything to hide, but it seems that the NSA wants this to go away. Maybe I'm paranoid.

[Istof]

According to NSA's three degrees of separation rule, I would say yes.

[jokoon]

I wish it would.

[fndrplayer13]

Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

[alexbecker]

> The agency’s metadata collection program now targets everyone in the country old enough to hold a phone. The gargantuan data storage facility it has built in Utah may eventually hold zettabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) of information. And the massive supercomputer that the NSA is secretly building in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, will search through it all at exaflop (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second) speeds.

What? These numbers are clearly wrong.

[devindotcom]

Fascinating article.

I was intrigued by the mention of the "Black Chamber," alias the Cipher Bureau and the predecessor of the NSA. Looking it up, I was further intrigued by mentions of institutional cryptography in Elisabethan England and so on. If I'm interested in this at a purely layman's level (I'm more into the history than the practical implications today) what books or essays would you recommend my reading?

[EthanHeilman]

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication[0] by David Kahn is probably the best book in this area. Be warned it sits on many bookshelves but due to its length few are the number that have finished it, none the less it is an extremely rewarding read. It has oddles and oddles of stories about cryptographers you have never heard of doing awesome things, including the history and personalities behind many of the Black Chambers of Europe.

It puts the Code Book to shame.

[0]: http://www.amazon.com/The-Codebreakers-Comprehensive-Communi...

[PhantomGremlin]

The story mentions David Kahn's "monumental history of cryptology". The book is The Codebreakers,[1] and IMO is definitely worth reading. It's quite long, perhaps too detailed for most people. But it's filled with little gems. E.g. did you know that Thomas Jefferson invented the "wheel cypher",[2] a very elegant and practical device used in secret communication?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Codebreakers [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_disk

[percept]

The American Black Chamber (there's some controversy surrounding the author, too)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Black_Chamber

Enigma: The Battle for the Code (I think that's the one I read)

http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Battle-Code-Hugh-Sebag-Montefio...

I know I read one specifically about breaking Purple, but can't seem to track it down (I don't believe it's the William F. Friedman bio).

I haven't read this one, but it also seems to be what you're looking for (and has a decent rating):

http://www.amazon.com/Code-Book-Secret-History-Code-breaking...

(You might check a public/university library for these and related titles--that's where I found them.)

[nl]

Simon Singh's The Code Book[1] is excellent, if around 10 years old:

The Code Book covers diverse historical topics including the Man in the Iron Mask, Arabic cryptography, Charles Babbage, the mechanisation of cryptography, the Enigma machine, and the decryption of Linear B and other ancient writing systems.

Later sections cover the development of public-key cryptography. Some of this material is based on interviews with participants, including persons who worked in secret at GCHQ.[2]

[1] http://simonsingh.net/books/the-code-book/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Code_Book

[privong]

In case anyone else is curious, the "elephant cage" mentioned is a Wullenweber antenna[0].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wullenweber

[trhway]

nice. Everybody of course knows (at least deep inside oneself if the one is too obtuse to acknowledge it publicly) that, starting from the ancient times, all the encrypted communication stuff around has always been backdoored, yet seeing actual confirmation is always assuring :

"Others contained clues to a secret trips that Friedman had made to Switzerland, where he helped the agency gain backdoor access into encryption systems that a Swiss company was selling to foreign countries."

[pgeorgi]

Switzerland, crypto devices headed to foreign countries, NSA backdoor? Must be Crypto AG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG#Back-doored_machines)

[EthanHeilman]

I wrote about this here, see the section on CryptoAG. I provide quotes and direct sources in the footnotes.

A Brief History of NSA Backdoors. http://ethanheilman.tumblr.com/post/70646748808/a-brief-hist...

[thornofmight]

Do you have examples of backdoored encryption from ancient times? I'm curious what you mean.

[Zigurd]

Not an actual democracy.

[hawleyal]

Never was.

[icantthinkofone]

Since the NSA is the most secret agency in the world, how does anyone know anything he says in this article is true?

[n09n]

Trivially easy. If you want to believe it, it's true. If you don't want to believe it, it's false.

[autism_hurts]

To steal a line from Mulder (The X-Files)

"And they call me paranoid."

Glad my phone, and my messages are encrypted. Filevault on my laptop.