My personal opinion is we first need to release the NSA from impossible demands for perfect information. It seems like each time there's a terrorist incident people ask how it could be prevented and why didn't we know? The answer is if course you simply can't know everything, particularly what's going on in people's minds.
Since the impetus is always on NSA to gather intelligence and prevent the next disaster all they can say is "We need more data". No, they don't. No amount of data will prevent every criminal act. Instead we need to revisit the trade offs made between freedom, privacy and bringing criminals to justice.
We don't live in a Minority Report world. We can't put people in jail for what we think they are about to do. They actually have to commit a crime to be charged.
If you do prevent everything, people claim you did nothing. Your organization gets its funding cut because it isn't needed.
(America has had to ramp up it's military repeatedly for new wars. We routinely shrink our armed forces during peace time, feeling it isn't needed. I strongly suspect this shrinkage has helped make us a target at times. Then we ramp back up.)
I'm not being snarky but when did we say we expect perfection? And we want it at all cost (i.e., we'll give up liberty and freedom)? Yes, that's been the general narrative but where did it come from? Where there protests? Was there a vote? Are we getting what we want, or wanting what we get?
...and considering the cost of such perfection is considered tactless at best.
This is why the terrorists have won on 9/11. They wanted to damage the US, erode its institutions, make it weaker and less attractive in the eyes of people, and they achieved it. Not through killing people, of course, but through the continued reaction of those who stayed alive. This makes me sad.
Yes, but is being in tears asking "how did this happen?" license to diminish liberty / freedom? Or simply the ideal opportunity to do so?
Also, there was plenty of talk about who and where, yet close to zero discussion as to why. Why is important. The truth is, more than once, UBL warned "Get out of our neighborhood." The USA ignored those requests. That doesn't justify the attacks, but it certainly creates a case of "I'm surprised you're surprised." Yet the (American) public never got the true clear story.
Instead, someone cooked up a like about WMD's, a sovereign nation was invaded in that same area, and in the end over 100,000 __civilians__ were killed. Does that solve why, or re-enforce? And still no transparency?
Just a for instance, but I think the patriot act passed the senate 99 to 1.
And we got rid of that one guy who voted against, and we replaced him with a more "law and order" type guy.
So you gotta figure almost every American has at least had opportunities to vote for their senators. (We can agree that not everyone did, but the opportunities were there.) And those votes resulted in a senate where something like the patriot act could pass without more than a single vote against it.
Russ Feingold is the only politician I have been actually excited to vote for, and I wonder if he will run again in 2022. He will be fairly old by then.
I'm no expert but pretty much everyone was for the Patriot act. It was voted on like 2 weeks after 9/11. Crucially, it was also supposed to retire. And now we have the freedom act, essentially the same thing...(I'm like 80% on it being called freedom act)
Was it re-named? In any case, afaik, when the PA was renewed the reach and breadth of the Patriot Act was __expanded__. You'd be surprised how many people who are a fan of that administration have forgotten (?) theirs rights / liberty was diminished by BHO and the signing of PA #2.
The US Intelligence Community as a whole is under constant demand for perfection. Not every individual unit (I've worked with several, and it varies), but institutionally the executive branch and military leadership applies the pressure of perfection at the top, and that pressure trickles down, skewing data, analysis, and policy making (and policy execution!).
I personally blame Hoover for the state of things, but as a whole, our government is used to control, and complete control relies on complete information. If something is missed because it fell between the cracks in the IC's sampling rate, the executives publicly blame the IC for not informing them, which ends with demands for a higher sampling rate. Look deeply into the causes of our most recent invasion of Iraq, and you'll see this pattern pretty clearly.
The Intel community tries to predict and monitor international events and persons of interest. But none of that requires perfection. More false positives wouldn't be a problem if CIA or NSA could predict even ONE significant international uprising before it happens. But in 75 years of trying, they never have. So there's no reason to believe they ever will. Perfection be damned.
The reason Intel dragnets exist is that politicians always feel compelled to do SOMETHING after a domestic crisis, even if they know the ensuing compromise of civil liberties will accomplish nothing toward preventing the same crisis from recurring. But voters who don't pay attention (and don't really care) are appeased by bold reaction (and the thought that bad guys can't keep secrets from US). A symbolic knee-jerk usually violent reaction all they really wanted (like invading Iraq).
Frankly, after 75 years of 99% fruitless and increasingly expensive machinations by the OSS and CIA and NSA, all of us who are paying attention know know damn well that US Intel agencies really don't accomplish much that's useful to peacetime national security. That is, unless Intel's unblinking eye is turned toward targets who are of personal interest, domestically like MLK or PETA, or internationally like Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega. Then politicians unconcerned with due process like Nixon and Cheney can freely use that intel to attack their personal "enemies of the state".
30 years after the end of the cold war, THAT's why domestic Intel agencies continue to exist. All of the US military services have their own Intel agencies for use during war. They don't need the CIA or NSA. Only Presidents do. And IMHO, for all the wrong reasons.
> More false positives wouldn't be a problem if CIA or NSA could predict even ONE significant international uprising before it happens.
Just because it's not in the headlines doesn't mean they didn't do anything. It's just that if the successfully stopped a terrorist attack for example, you wouldn't hear about it, both because it's no longer big news (nothing happened), and because those agencies would want to prevent the lose of assets as much as they can, so they wouldn't publish the information either.
I think the CIA and NSA have probably done a lot for the safety of America and US citizens (especially in times of peace). However (based on no evidence, just a hunch) I think that most of those cases, they just needed the basic tools already in their disposal (like monitoring suspects based on actual evidence and following a court order approval), and that the extreme means they use don't have a big impact when it comes to the security of lives (US or global).
Do you think that spy agencies' powers and budgets are a direct response to public opinion or public demand? I find that intuition kind of strange because NSA, for example, was created by a classified executive order and operated for two decades or so before its existence was publicly acknowledged by the government at all.
The problem is that politicians are acutely damaged when there are successful attacks, and are not affected when surveillance is overly broad, so of course they favor less privacy.
To correct this, politicians must be at least as susceptible to surveillance as the general public, if not more so.
One way to do this is to make all collected information public after 25 years. Long enough to avoid compromising ongoing investigations, but short enough that politicians will be thinking of themselves.
I really like the start of your comment. I see that if something bad happens, the politicians shift blame to the Intel community for missing it. Then they put pressure for more complete information from them. Then later, when there's civil outcry over a surveillance state, the politicians shift blame onto the Intel community for being too invasive. Politicians man.
The NSA prevents thousands of potential terrorist attacks each year...we just don't hear about it because it's classified information. Of course one or two will always slip through the cracks. No process is perfect.
And here is the problem with the unaccountability of the NSA: if not even the broad outline of its operational statistics is available for public scrutiny, and we can't trust the politicians who do have that data available (assuming it is), how can we have a meaningful public debate about this?
There are implicit agreements that society has to itself and the entities that coalesce in it. A major event tends to have a disproportionate impact on the population's perception of its institutions. It is in human nature to search for something to blame, it helps people rationalize the issues at hand. I don't think people realize how many incidents are resolved before it even reaches the TV and that is a good thing.
Even if society was willing to exchange more privacy for a higher number of unpredictable 'negative' incidents, the question changes from what, to how many. For example, how many incidents of X magnitude would be required for people to change their minds? What if you only need 1 incident of Y magnitude to change the shape of your society in a negative way, potentially rocking its very core? Would you take the risk for your individual's privacy? You have to remember that an event can be come in different ways such as a terror attack, a semi-natural disaster, a cyber attack, an espionage that rocks the foundation of a key industry in your country, etc.
I think some of the questions society should be asking are: What is an acceptable degree of personal privacy that we should strive for? What are the blockers to ensure the material is not used for nefarious reasons? Are the right institutions in place and are they solid enough? How can society engage more and have a better understanding of the issues at hand?
I think EVERYONE doing data collection, the NSA and all the surveillance capitalists are hoarders.
I think it's a rookie mistake for newly minted officers in the armed forces to delay decisions because they want perfect information.
In the same way, commercial entities collecting information don't NEED it, but they're collecting it and swapping it and screwing up society by doing it.
I think scaling back all this nonsense will make us all happier and healther.
Since the impetus is always on NSA to gather intelligence and prevent the next disaster all they can say is "We need more data". No, they don't. No amount of data will prevent every criminal act. Instead we need to revisit the trade offs made between freedom, privacy and bringing criminals to justice.
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