When the story first came out about the NSA leak my initial reaction was positive toward the whistle-blowing. Now that some data have been released I'm not so sure.

This morning's news had an item saying that Facebook, in the last half of 2012 was asked for information on 10,000 of their clients. Hmmmm. Given the vast size of the worldwide Facebook community, 10 grand is a minuscule number. Even if the request was limited to America, it hardly qualifies as little more than noise in the system.

Extrapolating that number to have the same request made of 100 organizations, and still staying within U.S. borders, it's only 1 in 3,000,000 people - hardly the picture being painted where all citizens must worry about every email and phone call.

I don't know what the figures are in terms of the number of terrorist activities thwarted as a result of the NSA spying but, even if it's just a few, it doesn't sound to me like a giant trade-off.

We all wander the web knowing that cookies are planted on our drives specifically to track us and build profiles on us, and we all sign up to various sites giving away personal information at the same time. Is it logical to think that the NSA activity is really more nefarious - particularly in light of the security objectives?

Bad math?

100 organizations x (10,000 x 2) (to annualize) users = 2,000,000 users, i.e. 1 in about 200 Americans "spied" on...quite a bit less "benign" than 1 in 3,000,000.

Edit: And that's without subtracting x million Americans who are too young to count or don't have computers.

I should have stuck with the Facebook number - 10,000 out of 1.1 billion.

And my math is spurious because it's pretty unlikely that each organization will be asked for info on different people.

I have a problem with your approach preferring 'relatively low' numbers of people subjected to blanket surveillance, as opposed to the necessary number, but with all appropriate safeguards respected. At what number would you start to have second thoughts? In this context, the often heard sentiment that 'you've got nothing to fear if you've got nothing to hide' doesn't reassure me at all, to the contrary.

I phrased that choice the way I did, because I see the biggest issue with the secrecy that surrounds the data gathering programs. It's not at all clear to me that proper oversight can and will be possible when you cannot even talk about the topic, as is so clearly the case here. We just don't know what we don't know. The more I hear, the more it sounds like a Catch-22 situation.

Think about it: the public/electorate at large depends on their political representatives, who may not be told all there is to make a balanced decision. The degree of trust necessary is hard to justify without sufficient data to base that trust on, particularly since the potential for abuse is so huge. After all, such powers are rarely rescinded, and tend to accumulate.

The reference to numbers was simply to point out the fallacy in what Snowden wants people to believe - that he could spy on anyone at anytime without control. He even suggested that he could spy on the President.

It seems to me that, given the possible numbers if this program was out of control, 10,000 out of 1.1 billion is sticking to the necessary number.



According to this morning's news, there are various government agencies, including the judiciary, who have oversight.



General Michael Hayden was interviewed this morning by Fareed Zacharia and explained what they look at and how. He says that they're not listening in on everyone's phone calls or the reading the content of their emails. He referred to it as seeing the outside of the envelope (name, address et cetera) but not seeing the letter inside.

They have a large database of phone numbers (hardly a big deal IMHO - since they're available in lots of places, including where we sprinkle them around ourselves). He gave the example of capturing a terrorist in Yemen and seizing their cellphone. They then enter that number into the database to see who that phone has been contacting, and then who those phones have contacted.

I assume, at that point, greater scrutiny is employed. And, I also assume that these are likely people who do have something to hide.

So far as Snowden is concerned, I don't see him as any kind of hero the way some are trying to portray him. He is called a "whistle-blower" when, in fact, he is not. There are procedures in place for whistle-blowing that allow it do be done in a safe way where the whistle-blower is protected by law.

Instead, he flees to a foreign country with documents ( that I'm sure the Chinese are happy to have) and his only rationale is that, in his opinion, something wrong is being done and he must expose it.

Of course, his exposition reduces the safety of his fellow Americans. He seems to have an extraordinarily high opinion of his opinion.

First off, let me make it clear (again) that this is not a personal issue between you and me. It's a discussion about opinions, peppered with (selected) facts, you, I and Snowden are all entitled to. I don't know what Snowden could or could not do, but I wouldn't expect any official to confirm that regardless of the truth. If nothing else, the law even forbids discussion of the topic, and hence any such statements are both meaningless and disingenuous. I certainly am not impressed, let alone convinced.

Again you have to believe there is proper oversight, where critical details are off limits. Some would say 'conveniently so'. My main point is that the public at large (and to an unknown extent their representatives as well) is woefully underinformed and without means to effectively verify official statements, which are limited by law in any case. With regard to the number of people under surveillance, last time I checked quantity still didn't equal quality, except perhaps in the eye of the totalitarian. But far more important than the current focus on PRISM, however, is its context of the multitude of different programs collecting data on many if not most people, both by government agencies and commercial entities. Then there's the mutual interest of intelligence community and industry in technical information and capabilities, including backdoor access into many products. And let's not forget the activities of the various internet mafia factions and other criminals.

Many of these programs are to some degree or other let's say 'less than public', while many others are readily commercially available. Many of them tend to focus on some particular area of interest or expertise, and in and by itself may not be said to infringe much if at all on one's privacy. However, as soon as the various datasets and capabilities are linked, there is virtually no privacy left. Do you really think the use of ready-to-eat datasets acquired by government agencies from commercial or criminal suppliers is fully subject to oversight? Now again note in this context that the formal statements (conciliatory or otherwise) you're referring to are restricted to individual programs like PRISM, not to the final comprehensive intelligence overview of which there rarely if ever is any mention. And sure enough, whether readily available or quickly procurable, there you are, the Naked Citizen, in all your private glory of a full Life scan. You're free to disagree, but hopefully I've made you pause fore a moment.

Back to Snowden. A lot of the 'info' out there is premature, and quite openly ad hominem. In that respect, much of the US media coverage resembles a short course in character assassination. It tends to pique my curiosity when that happens. Snowden himself says he doesn't want to be called a hero, but on the face of it, and at considerable risk to himself, without obvious personal benefits, he disclosed information he (and many others) consider crucial for the public at large to know. That comes a lot closer to 'hero' than most people that are usually so qualified by the media for just doing their regular job, the description of which doesn't feature 'hero' anywhere.
A similar argument can be made of his qualification as whistleblower. This too he seems to deny, although I would disagree there, as with your view that because of the presence of institutional procedures for discussing issues, his behavior cannot be qualified as 'whistleblowing'. We've seen how the military handled sexual abuse in the ranks and the victims who tried to come forward. 'Nough said about those 'procedures'. But, as I said before, it's too early to make any calls, and we'll see how this turns out.

The number of people who can be spied on and the number of people who are spied on are not related. It is entirely possible that the system is collecting enough data that anyone CAN be spied on.

Regardless, the law is not a numbers game. If the government is engaging in criminal activity, it scarcely matters if there are 300 victims or 3,000 or 3,000,000. Illegal activity is illegal activity.

If I embezzle money, I hardly expect to be able to tell the judge "Well, the company I stole from only has 4 employees. That's not very bad; it's not like I stole from a company with 300,000 employees!"

Whoa!! I'm not sure what I said that would cause you to think this was in anyway a personal issue. That was not my intention.

I've simply noticed that we haven't, for quite a while, had any of the discourses in the lounge that we used to have on various non-technical topics. Since this topic is very current and sure to have strong opinions on both sides, I thought it was a good one. I also thought it might be better kick-started if I began with the side that would likely be less popular.

Although some have speculated about criminal activity, I have not been convinced. And I am less convinced when I read that Apple only turned information over if there was a court order. I assume that that control (judicial oversight) is available to any other entity who may be asked for information.

I also note that the Apple release said: "With the thumbs up from the U.S. government, Apple was able to reveal how much info it gave up."

Nothing in particular made me think this was a personal matter, but it could be, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to make my point explicit. I could have done a better job, though, and I'm sorry if I got to you there.

And yes, your serving of this topic is appreciated. And talking about serving, my responses above remind me of the reply I occasionally give a waiter collecting my utterly scoured-clean plate while asking 'how it was': 'I hated it, as you can plainly see!'

Lest we think that the Post Office respects our privacy: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

There are a couple of different issues here: information Apple (and Google and others) turned over to the NSA in response to a court order, and information the NSA gathered without the help of Apple/Google/etc without a court order.

According to the docs leaked by Snowden (and later confirmed by government officials), much of the information gleaned from places like Apple and Google did not come directly from Apple and Google. Instead, the NSA had installed "interception capability" in Internet backbone facilities like Verizon.

Most of the Internet's traffic travels, at some point or another, over a few central backbone connections, run by Verizon, AT&T, Level 3 Communications, UUNet, Sprint, Genuity, and C&W. These "Tier 1" providers handle almost the entirety of Net traffic, and nearly all Net traffic to large, busy sites like Google and Facebook.

The NSA intercepted and recorded traffic going over the backbone. They did this without a warrant or court oversight, because they did not consider this to be eavesdropping. According to their internal policies, they only needed a warrant in order to retrieve something from the huge pool of data they collected.

One judge was responsible for all of these court orders. Her name is Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. She approved nearly 100% of requests, often without any supporting evidence or anything beyond a signed statement that the information was lawfully required. When she was appointed to the position by President Bush, according to an article in the Washington Post, she "expressed concern to senior officials that the president's program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional, yet believed she did not have the authority to rule on the president's power to order the eavesdropping."

The NSA is forbidden by law to gather information or to investigate anyone on US soil; its task is only to perform surveillance on suspected foreign threats abroad. Yet, as you can imagine, the vast majority of the information it collected was sourced in the US and destined for US servers.

Apple was allowed to reveal how much information it gave to the NSA directly under court order. So far, no company has been permitted to reveal how much information the NSA gathered itself by siphoning data from the backbone, not even the Tier 1 providers who allowed the NSA to tap into their data flow.

Can anyone suggest a better alternative to avoid the development of terrorist groups and stop attacks before they occur?

Not me....and I am quite sure that the RCMP and CSIS conduct similar monitoring in Canada. However........

In April two men were arrested in connection with a plot to derail a VIA Rail passenger train. Earlier this week a man and woman were arrested in British Columbia for planting pressure cooker bombs at a Canada Day event - which would have had the same sort of result as the Boston Marathon.

If those arrests might also mean somebody knows I talk to my daughters on a regular basis or that my wife phones her Mother daily, fine.

I'm guessing there isn't. It seems to me that, while technologies like the internet and cellphones may facilitate terrorists in their planning et cetera, it is also where these people are most vulnerable. Such technologies leave "footprints" that can be tracked with the right tools.

It is only logical that those charged with the responsibility for preventing attacks would want to use the tools that provide the greatest advantage.

Well, first of all, there's no evidence that this pervasive monitoring has any value in stopping terrorists at all. The NSA claims it does, but it sure didn't stop the Boston Marathon attacks, even though the perpetrators were under FBI surveillance, and were on a State Department watch list after being under Russian surveillance, at the time of the attack. If surveillance worked, the Boston bombings should have been a great success story. It wasn't.

Second, there are a lot of ways to find a needle in a haystack, but all of them rely on one thing: Stop adding piles of hay to the stack while you're searching! It becomes much, much harder to sift through mountains of indiscriminate, random surveillance looking for suspicious activity than it is when the surveillance is more targeted. If you're looking for that one crucial bit of evidence in a database, it's a whole lot easier to find if the database has 300,000 things in it than if the database has 15,000,000,000 things in it.

Third, fear of terrorism is silly. Really, really silly. Statistically, you are far, far more likely to be struck by lightning six times in a row than you are to be a victim of a terrorist attack. Our fear of terrorism, and the things we are willing to give up to feel safe from that fear, is bizarrely overblown compared to the reality.

We're willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to stop bridges from being blown up by terrorism, when more bridges would be saved if we spent the same amount of money on repairing them in the first place! (This is of particular interest to me personally; the bridge that collapsed in Washington recently is one I drive on whenever I visit my girlfriend in Canada. I have personally driven over it many times.)

If our goal is "save American lives" and "protect American assets," our hyperactive, distorted fear of terrorism is making us waste money that would save a lot more American lives and protect a lot more American assets if it were spent in other ways...and that is a real tragedy. At the end of the day, we are giving up our rights for...nothing.

Actually, that isn't true. The Internet and cell phones, historically, has never been where they are most vulnerable. Time after time, in case after case, it isn't surveillance that has revealed terrorist plots before they are carried out. It has been friends and family members of the would-be terrorists talking to law enforcement.

Most people are not terrorists. Most Muslims, most radicals, most people are not terrorists. When people do decide to commit acts of terror, they often talk about it with friends or family or peers first, and it is here they are by far the most vulnerable.

Beside the point. If you're that one person, it won't hurt any less.

I am willing to be discomforted or embarrassed by something found in one of my conversations if it will stop someone else from suffering the loss of a loved one in a terrorist attack. It seems somewhat selfish to think otherwise.

That was essentially what the German people told themselves as the Nazi party was establishing absolute control over every aspect of their lives. Personally I think Benjamin Franklin had it right when he said, If fear drives us to give up essential liberties, we become indistinguishable from the terrorists and they have won.

I suggest the Boston Marathon bombing was less a failure of surveillance that it was a failure to act on the knowledge gained by the surveillance.


I find that a bit misleading when I watch my computer (not the fastest model) conduct millions of checks in short order after a directory rebuild. If the NSA is cross-checking phone numbers from a terrorist phone to phone numbers in their database, I'm sure they have sufficient technological muscle to get their results quickly.


I'm with dboh on this one: "I am willing to be discomforted or embarrassed by something found in one of my conversations if it will stop someone else from suffering the loss of a loved one in a terrorist attack. It seems somewhat selfish to think otherwise."


The truck that hit that bridge, causing the collapse, had a permit for a load measuring 15.75 feet where the bridge at its lowest point is 14.5 feet. However, there is no sign to tell truckers the lowest point because Washington state law doesn't require posting clearance heights less than 14 feet 5 inches.

That collapse could have been avoided with a few signs.


I don't think you can make a blanket statement like that when we don't know the role of surveillance in preventing the dozens of terrorist acts that have not been made public.


We agree, and I would add that it's too bad so many people make the leap from some peoples' faith to "must be a terrorist". That leap is also an argument for secrecy so that, when a plot is quashed, the faith of the radical isn't made public.

The Nazis? Really? It seems a bit of a stretch to compare surveillance used to prevent further actual attacks against the nation with a leader (of a nation not under attack) who publicly denounced entire groups of the nation's citizens.


So, going back to dboh's original question, what do you suggest as a better alternative to avoid the development of terrorist groups and stop attacks before they occur?

It is not beside the point, if your son or daughter or spouse or friend dies of something that could have been prevented by spending that money differently.

The total Federal budget is zero sum. Every dollar that is spent on NSA surveillance is a dollar not spent on something else.

If 1 human life is saved by spending $10,000,000 on surveillance, and 125 human lives are saved by taking that same $10,000,000 and spending it on better inspection of food or drugs, then basically what you're saying is you are so frightened of terrorists that one terror victim is worth the lives of 125 people who die of other things, and that's deeply, profoundly messed up.



That's privilege talking.

We see, over and over again, that when surveillance becomes widespread, the damage is more than embarrassment.

I'm going to make some assumptions about you. Given the demographics here, you're probably white, you're probably male, you're probably middle class or above, and you probably have a job that gives you the money and the leisure time to discuss things like that on the Internet. That gives you a privileged position in our society; you have little to fear from surveillance.

But history shows us many examples of surveillance creep, and it is almost always people who aren't middle-class white men who suffer from it. Women thend to be uniquely vulnerable; there are many examples of law enforcement who abuse their access to law enforcement databases. The victims are disproportionately women, especially attractive women, who may be harassed or stalked by the people who do this.

The problem is even worse for people who hold unpopular religious or political ideas, even when those people are clearly no threat.

You don't see the costs of a pervasive surveillance society because you don't have to pay them. You have nothing to fear except maybe some level of temporary embarrassment. The stakes are higher for other people.



And that's part of the zero-sum game.

Tamerlin and Dzhokar Tsarnaev were on the FBI's watch list for years, and the State Department and FBI had received warnings from the Russian government in 2011 that they had been radicalized and were likely involved in planning terrorist operations, but they were not being actively monitored...

...because the FBI said it did not have the money or manpower to follow up on the lead.

Meanwhile, the NSA has at least 40,000 employees who have access to PRISM, and a very large number of non-government-employed contractors (the exact number is classified but it's at least in the tens of thousands), all of whom are gathering and processing information on millions of people who are NOT suspected terrorists and who do NOT have any indications that they're planning terrorist activities.

That's incredibly stupid.

If we are spending so much money and manpower collecting data that we don't have the money or manpower to follow up on leads for people who we know are planning terrorist acts, then what good is this doing us?



Except that isn't what they're doing.

They're accumulating enormous mountains of data--basically, everything that passes through the Internet or the phone system, including (quite likely) this forum, and archiving it, then later mining it for information of all kinds, not even necessarily related to terrorism.

A lot of people erroneously associate programs like PRISM with terrorism, but that is only part of the NSA's mandate. In addition to terrorism, the gathered intelligence is used for political spying, corporate espionage, and other purposes.

And it's important to understand that the primary use of such a database isn't preventing terrorist activities, it's putting the dots together afterward. We don't know what phone numbers belong to terrorists until after we know they're terrorists. This system doesn't tell us that; other things, like tip-offs from friends and family, do. PRISM gathers data but it can't say "this person is a terrorist." It can say "Oh, this person blew up a bridge? Well, here's a list of all the posts he made on Facebook and all the phone numbers he called." How, exactly, does that go back in time and prevent the bridge from blowing up? How does that identify other terrorists if they are, I don't know, using throw-away cell phones with numbers that aren't attached to their names?



Yep. And the bridge collapsed because it was structurally unsound and had been known to be structurally unsound for years.

Right now, the state of Washington has 135 bridges that are classified as "structurally deficient." It has only enough budget to repair 15 of them.

This same pattern repeats throughout the nation. Our infrastructure is literally falling apart.



Oh, c'mon, seriously? Are you for real?

When law enforcement agencies thwart terrorist attacks or make big, splashy arrests, they put it all over the news. Remember when Faisal Shahzad tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, or Quazi Mohammad was arrested plotting to blow up the Federal Reserve last year? Even if the intelligence that leads to the arrest is secret, the US government makes sure the arrests get plenty of air time. It's the terrorism equivalent of cops who pose on TV next to mountains of drugs they intercept.

But that's beside the point. We can not make rational risk assessments based on things we think might possibly be happening that we don't know about and actions that some government agency could possibly be doing to prevent them. That's ridiculous.

Especially when it means we all agree to be spied on without judicial oversight in violation of US law and the US constitution.

I mean, hell, I'm sure crime would go down and lives would be saved if every house had a police officer assigned to watch all the people in it all the time, but is that actually the society you want to live in?

How do you make the leap from the sincere suggestion that some of us don't mind a little loss of privacy, if it saves someone else's life, to the assertion that it's akin to putting a dollar value on human life?

Yes, the total Federal budget is zero sum. However, there is such huge waste elsewhere that a proper allocation of those tax dollars could achieve both the reduction in deaths from terrorism and from poor food and drug inspection.

A good place to start would be the hundreds of millions handed out in tax benefits to giant corporations. It's the tax system that's "deeply, profoundly messed up". Corporations don't need welfare.


I guess also you're going to tell me that J. Edgar Hoover never spied on a U.S. President.

The problem isn't about the ability to have surveillance, it's about not having sufficiently strong penalties, rigorously applied, that a person will think twice before they participate in such behavior. The same applies to your next argument.


No doubt about it, this is absolutely despicable and abhorrent behavior. But the answer isn't throwing out a valuable police tool because of a few renegade cops. Let's apply that logic to another area where women are vulnerable...the Doctor's office...where women continue to be seduced or assaulted. It seems to me it's best to get rid of the renegade Doctors, not the field of medicine.


I'm pretty sure that, when cell phones and other items, like plans, are seized during raids in places like Yemen, it's not illogical to assume they belonged to terrorists. Therefore, when the numbers that cell phone called are in America, it's not unreasonable to start looking closely at the person(s) with those numbers.


It's about allocation, see "Corporations don't need welfare" above.


Who said they didn't want oversight? Isn't the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Department of Defense, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Department of Justice enough?

Oh, c'mon, seriously? Are you for real? (The Devil made me do that ) But, seriously, just how much oversight did you want?

You're one out of four, so much for your assumptions. I have, however, read enough history and lived long enough to have a sense of the real pain caused by terrorism.

Setting aside the offensiveness of your remark, you're totally wrong. What the German people were saying was, "As long as it's not me they're coming for…" There is zero equivalence to what I said.

I heard about the monitoring plan back during the Bush administration and while I was not happy with it, I was mollified by the constraints it was to operate under. To me that part is well thought out and okay. My concern then and now is the possibility (probability?) of leaks around the edges. That much power is seductive and almost irresistible. Bearing that in mind, I will attempt to address your question/assertion. How to guarantee the data will not be misused is another topic altogether.

First I think it important to realize that absolute safety is at best an illusion. We have never had absolute safety in this country and never will. How many died in the civil war? …how many presidents have been assassinated? …how many massacred in schools, post offices, office buildings? …how many shot down in drive by shootings? Few, if any, of these would have been prevented by the electronic surveillance system.

I wont say it is impossible to achieve a relatively safe environment in a free society, but historically that has primarily happened in small homogeneous societies and never in large heterogeneous populations such as we have in the United States. The Pax Romana created the appearance of a peaceful order in a large heterogenous society, but that was at the point of a sword and dissent resulted in imprisonment, slavery, or death. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Stalin in the Soviet Union, and others have proved this technique still works — at least for a time. In all these cases the appearance of peace was at the cost of oppression for the bulk of society.

The best, maybe the only way of reducing foreign terrorist threats we face today is to address the policy issues that fuels the terrorists anger. The favoring of the rights of one group of people over another such as the rights of the Jews over the Palestinian Muslims and Christians. (I am not propounding the abandonment of the Israeli Jews rather equal treatment of the Israelis and Palestinians.)

Al Qaeda was initially formed in opposition to a dictatorial Egyptian regime that was being propped up by the United States as a barrier to protect the borders of Israel and of course "the friend of my enemy is my enemy". Certainly the hands off approach we have taken toward the current changes taking place in Egypt are IMO a step in the right direction.

The litany goes on an on but in the end much of the threat to this country from the Muslim extremists is a reaction to our support of various groups and regimes to protect our "friends" (and retain access to middle eastern sweet crude). The damage is already done and over generations the various groups have withdrawn into their philosophical bunkers, perhaps, just perhaps, if the U.S. was seen as consistently moving to a more balanced middle east policy we might reduce the production of more antagonists and move toward a safer position. However we must remember it took generations to get to this point and it will inevitably take even more generations to undo.

Of course that still leaves our own home grown terrorists like the bomber of the Morrow office building in Oklahoma City, the kids shooting up a school in Colorado, the out of control neighborhood patrol who sees a teenager in a hoodie as a violent threat, etc.

Anyone who believes humans can create a completely secure society is IMHO delusional. Risk is part of life and part of the cost of freedom.

While I think I understand what you're trying to say, I couldn't disagree more with that sentence. First, I fail to see anything inherently offensive about tacit's remark. It was intended to point to the potentially extreme consequences of certain electoral/political choices, rather than to berate or blame someone personally. In that sense, the choice was appropriate imo.

And what you claim the German people said at the time they actually never did. What they did do was to allow certain measures to be taken via the ballot box, only to rationalize them after the fact with words like those you quote, words stolen from those who perished by those same measures. Perhaps the least judgmentally you can frame this is as 'Zeitgeist met Realpolitik'.

I think this is less likely than the absolute safety you say is impossible. (I think they both are, actually, but what I was hoping for was a way to minimize as much as possible the danger.) People are too enamored of their victimhood and will refuse to set aside the wrongs done to them.

A couple of years ago, I read Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock" which dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as of 1993. Sadly, nothing had changed even the tiniest since then. No reason for it to change even now.

I took tacit's remark differently, and for that I apologize. However, Hitler wasn't some rosy-eyed optimistic kind of "Morning in Germany" candidate when he assumed power. People made a conscious decision to ignore the bits that should have offended them and instead focused on what would benefit them directly.

On the other hand, terrorism wasn't threatening the Germans the way Al Queda (and all of their offshoots) are threatening a number of countries. I don't see this as an equivalent situation.

Perhaps surprisingly to some, the political choices made today aren't all that different from those made then. And don't forget that the most extreme and appalling Nazi ideas had yet to be disclosed when Germany elected them to power in the early 30s, and that included the decision to circumvent the German constitution, which was the basis of the Nazis' ultimate power grab in 1933.

As to the lack of terrorism of the Al-Qaeda variety in Germany at the time, you're right. But that kind of terrorism wasn't even necessary to make the German population incomparably much worse off than we are now, 9/11 and all. See the Weimar Republic to scratch that particular surface.

By the time the Nazis became a political force to be reckoned with, the choices were stark, and civic strength had been sapped by decades of widespread misery of which the Great Depression was only the latest installment. There wasn't so much a fear of being affected by it all, there was the certainty of long experience of worse to come that fed a fading of hope. 'We' experienced nothing like that, even if we lost loved ones in the fight against terrorism and lost our jobs since the crash of 2008. But we seem even more eager to throw away our freedoms to defend against a lesser threat, while sticking our heads ever deeper in the sand to 'avoid' the consequences.

You aren't going to replace corporate welfare with surveillance, because surveillance *is* corporate welfare! Spending tens of billions of dollars to fight a "threat" that kills, on average, fewer than three people on American soil per year is corporate welfare.

If the Federal government spent $80 billion per year on private consultants and businesses designed to prevent, say, accidental electrocution in people's homes, that would probably be seen as a huge waste. And even more so if it, for example, required every homeowner to submit to the Federal government detailed plans of their houses and statistics on what they did while they were at home. But that would save more than one thousand TIMES more human lives.



There are 40,000 people inside the NSA, and untold tens of thousands of private contractors, who have access to the database compiled by PRISM. And that isn't including the tens of thousands of people who in theory shouldn't have access but do. (Snowden was a junior employee with limited security clearance. He wasn't "supposed" to have access to the information he leaked, but he did.)

Seriously thinking that people won't abuse this, no matter what penalties are in place, is naive.

Seriously thinking that a secretive organization with entrenched political power would actually apply penalties is as naive as thinking the Roman Catholic church would publicly warn people about pedophile priests.



First, it isn't a "few" renegade cops. It's a pervasive problem in every police unit in every Western country that gathers this kind of surveillance.

Second, it has yet to be demonstrated that it is a police tool with any value.



You're confusing two different things: surveillance of Internet traffic and surveillance of phone records.

Also, you might be "pretty sure" that when cell phones are seized, the numbers attached to them are monitored, but do you actually have any knowledge of how terrorists conduct their business or how anti-terrorism works? Or do you just think that because it sounds plausible to you?

Terrorists don't dial up their buddies on T-Mobile. In remote parts of the world, they use satellite phones. Satellite phones in Yemen don't pass through Verizon's data center. Those calls aren't being tagged.

And what do you imagine is happening? Do you have this idea that Mr. Terrorist in Yemen is calling Betty and Sue Sleeper Agents in Norfolk on their home line? (Do people still have home lines?) If someone in Yemen calls an untraceable pay-as-you-go cell phone in Norfolk, how, exactly, is the NSA tagging my phone calls supposed to figure out who the supposed terrorist is talking to? What is it exactly that you believe is going on here?



1. None of the things you just named is judicial oversight. They are legislative oversight. We in the US have judicial oversight of legislative powers to create a check against excess or unwarranted government intrusion.

2. The groups you name do not have direct oversight over the NSA, nor do they authorize, provide warrants for, evaluate probable cause on, or otherwise monitor individual acts of surveillance. The purpose of judicial oversight as enshrined in the Fourth Amendment is to ensure that every single act of surveillance is properly warranted and supported by probable cause.

3. The NSA is forbidden by law to perform surveillance on or gather information about American citizens on American soil, but that is exactly what they are doing.



I want every single individual act of surveillance to be authorized by a warrant, signed by a judge and supported by probable cause. That's what the Fourth Amendment requires.

I want the NSA barred from performing surveillance of American citizens on American soil, because that's what the law requires.



Have you also read enough history and lived long enough to have a sense of the real pain caused by excessive government surveillance?



That wasn't actually my remark. I have a policy of not comparing things to the Nazis.



Actually, it was. Hitler used the fear of terrorism as part of his bid for power. After WWI, terrorism was a huge problem in Germany; we tend to think that terrorism is something new, but it's not. Hitler declared a "war on terror" to help push through a number of new laws, including laws that coordinated central oversight of local police units, limiting free speech and habeas corpus, suspending freedom of assembly, and loosening restrictions on wiretapping. These laws had a six-year "sunset clause" attached to them--if at the end of six years the terrorist threat had been eliminated, he assured people, then the new government powers would be rescinded.

Let's look at it a bit differently, though.

Some folks sincerely believe that the end of protecting people's lives from terror is worth the means of increased State and police power. But we don't think about the costs associated with increasing that power. Did you know that, statistically speaking, you are more likely to die by being accidentally shot by a police officer than you are to die by terrorist action?

As a matter of fact, terrorism's been pretty much a constant since the Roman Empire, as a book titled "Lessons in Terrorism" by Caleb Carr makes depressingly clear.

Perhaps my tolerance is higher than yours. I don't mind NSA keeping a list of my phone calls as a necessary part of thwarting a group of people who depend on the same communications system to plan their attacks. It's just not in the same league as cops kicking in a front door in the middle of the night or Governor Jim Rhodes ordering a tank to roll through Ohio State University in the wake of Kent State. Now, those are abuses of power.

Would you approve of the police passing new laws to ban private ownership of dogs? Hundreds of times more people die from dog bites every year than from terrorism attacks in the US.

And like I said, you're assuming the NSA monitoring your phone calls actually reduces terrorism. I say it doesn't.

How can you equate the damage done by a "fait accompli" with that done by a fledgling "fait" that would love to become "accompli," and could, if it's not actively rooted out and stomped (although not necessarily by the methods under discussion in this thread)?

I also love the meme that if something can't be 100% fixed, it shouldn't be fixed at all.

I'm not sure I understand the question.

There are people in this thread who believe it is OK to give up freedom in order to feel safer and save human lives.

More human lives are lost to dog bites than terrorism. Why not put every dog owner under surveillance, or ban dogs?

More human lives are lost (by five orders of magnitude!) to firearms than to terrorists. Why not put every gun owner under surveillance, or ban guns?

The answer is that what we are scared of has nothing to do with what is likely to kill us. We are not, as a nation, frightened of dogs or guns, even though they kill people, we are, as a nation, absolutely wetting-our-pants, having-hysterics, bawling-in-then ight-like-children frightened of terrorists, even though there are few of them, they rarely kill anyone, and we have fought them just fine without sacrificing our liberties.

I don't quite know why it is, but when it comes to terrorism, this nation has lost its mind. We go into such hysterics of panic over terrorism that we are willing to do anything--anything, including torture, destruction of our own freedom, expensive wars that bankrupt the countrym anything--to make ourselves believe we can be safe.

I don't understand the meme that we have to be 100% safe. We can't be. Nothing is 100% safe. Not owning a dog, not riding a car, not climbing a ladder, nothing. With everything else, we understand that and move on, like grown adults. But with terrorism? With terrorism we act like crying children, eager to give up everything we value in order to make the fear go away.

I seriously don't get it. We can actually fight terrorism without sacrificing our liberty or the law.

Food for thought:

From The Atlantic: The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty to Fight Terror.

From Salon: Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book! The new warrior cop is out of control.

From the Richmond Times Dispatch: Commit any felonies lately?

I seriously believe that in 20 or 30 years' time, we will look back at this period in US history with disgust and contempt, the way we look back on the McCarthy red scare or the WWII Japanese concentration camps. We will see it as a time when hysteria triumphed over sense, and when we became, temporarily, a nation of frightened little ninnies blindly throwing away everything we believe in because we got scared.

Lest you've misread my comments and think I'm fear-filled, I assure you I'm not in the least fearful. I just would prefer that other people not have to go through the pain of losing someone they care about in a terrorist attack. Lumping surveillance with torture is insulting.

I would prefer that other people not have to go through the pain of losing someone they care about in a dog attack, which is a lot more likely. Should we put dog owners under surveillance? It will save more lives!

You still have not answered:

1. How surveillance saves lives. It didn't in the Boston bombing, and they were under active surveillance at the time AND the DHS and FBI had been tipped off that they might be planning an attack.

2. How the logic you use for terrorism does not also apply to dog attacks.

It sounds like what you're really saying is "I am ready to be placed under surveillance to make me feel like that might offer some imaginary protection."

Why? In both cases, we're talking about our government having embraced policies which distinctly contradict the values we have historically elected it to protect.

To be insulted because some folks feel strongly that the two are deeply connected is a bit like being insulted if some folks lump segregation with lynching: sure, only one of the two results in violent death, but they're both expressions of racism.

You're addressing a threat in its infancy as if it's full-grown...ignoring its potential.

You seem to think terrorism is merely a passing inconvenience, perhaps even one that's already peaked, and I certainly hope you're right, but I think it's likely to be around for a long time...quite likely get worse, perhaps even far worse, and although I hate intrusions into my freedom, I can't offer up any realistic suggestions for dealing with it otherwise.

Further, I think you're underestimating terrorism's impact: It's easy, even accurate, to say "Statistically, it's not going to happen to you," but unlike other threats, its effects are pervasive...when it happens to any American it happens to many Americans.

And I don't agree with your equating the anti-terrorism effort with the Japanese internment and the McCarthy witch-hunt; neither was a reaction to a demonstrated threat, while the current effort is, at the very least, a reaction to a demonstrated capacity for mindless carnage.

(Your 2nd and 3rd linked articles were very scary reading; the intrusions they document minimize the one at issue here.)

PS: Speaking as the father of a daughter who has worn the scars of a dog-bite on her face for 39 years, since she was 3.

One could equally well apply those exact words to the views of those who discount concerns about the amount of freedom sacrificed by tolerating warrantless domestic surveillance.

Quite the reverse. I think that terrorism is here to stay. We have, for a long time, considered ourselves immune from it; terrorism is what happens to other people in other places.

Now, all of a sudden, it's real, and we're scared #$!&.

We're so scared, in fact, that we have lost our collective minds. Now that we know terrorism is real, now that we've felt it hit us, we've gone crazy.

The United States of America has a two-century tradition of dealing with serious problems with courage and pride. We handled two World Wars stoically and with determination.

But now? Now we're acting like a bunch of frightened children. Now we are so scared, we are willing to sacrifice everything we've ever believed in to whoever promises to "protect" us. And that's sad, and sick.



That's the problem. That's the issue I keep trying to get the pro-surveillance folks to come to grips with.

Surveillance.

Does.

Not.

Make.

Us.

Safer.

Surveillance does not make us safer. It does not stop terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers were un an FBI watch list at the time of the attack. The Boston bombers were under ACTIVE surveillance at the time of their attack.

Common sense says that if we listen to what everyone says, we can stop people from plotting to do bad things. That's incredibly emotionally reassuring. It comforts us.

But common sense is also what tells us the world is flat.

We need evidence-based measures, not platitudes and things that sound good. We need to try things, then step back and assess rationally, not emotionally, whether or not they work. We don't need people who are running surveillance to say "oh, yes, it totally works, but I refuse to tell you why or how."

We see, time after time after time after time, two things:

1. Massive surveillance leads to abuse. Always. Always. No exceptions, no matter how strong the laws against abuse are. There is no nation anywhere in the world, whether it's a democracy or a dictatorship, that has implemented sweeping surveillance without it being abused.

2. Massive surveillance does not stop terrorism. It doesn't, and people who think it does aren't paying attention. The Boston bombers were under active surveillance at the time of their attack.



Oh, believe me, I'm not.

Terrorists want to make us afraid. And they succeed. In a very real sense, the war on terror is already over. We lost.

We aren't afraid of car crashes, but we are afraid of terrorists, because terrorists have manipulated our psyche. It's done. We lost. We're sacrificing our own values because we are such a terrified nation of ninnies now. We are so scared, we will do anything to make the fear go away.

Frightened people do not make good choices.



The threat is irrelevant. What matters is the fear. The McCarthy witch hunts, the Japanese internment camps, and the NSA surveillance have one thing in common: they happened when the nation went out of its mind with fear.

Frightened people do not make good choices.

I'm not sure how you connect surveillance with dog bites but I would agree that, in this curious example, surveillance is inappropriate. As a person who has owned dogs continuously for fifty years, I can state that any dog owners I've known never had secret phone calls or emails with plans to have their dogs bite anyone.

However, the dog bite issue is being addressed in many jurisdictions with legislation up to and including bans on certain breeds.


Okay...two things here, ban guns and surveillance. We all know that a general ban is just not going to happen, but definitely there are people for whom gun ownership should not be allowed. It has nothing to do with terrorism, but because some are not stable enough to be allowed a weapon.

Should some gun owners be under surveillance? Absolutely. The bulk of them are in the various paramilitary groups sprinkled around the country.




Please.....the only hysteria is this kind of ranting. I think the people of Boston, in their extraordinary response to the marathon bombing, spoke loudly and clearly to terrorists about whether they're instilling fear.


I think the people of Boston and Oklahoma City would disagree with that. Terrorists are terrorists, whether homegrown or imported.


And I don't understand why you mention it. No one in this thread has made that suggestion.


Interesting....and even frightening....but hardly germane.


Hopefully we will look back at this time as the disgraceful period when some citizens looked upon the actions of traitors as heroism.

Now, there's a "Catch 22" for you!

I totally agree...

...oh, sorry, you meant Snowden is a "traitor"?

Well, there's another similarity with McCarthyism and Japanese internment camps, then. People howling with blind, childish terror during both of those embarrassing debacles were quick to throw around the word "traitor" too.

I have a question, though.

How come the heads of government agencies that break the law and violate the Constitution aren't considered traitors? Didn't they take oaths to obey the law and enforce the Constitution?

Yes. When a person reveals their country's secrets to foreign powers while seeking refuge from them, they have betrayed their country and fellow citizens. Surely you're not suggesting he's a hero.


Where are you hanging out that you should be seeing all these people "howling with blind childish terror"? I don't see any where I am in Canada and, this past weekend when I visited the U.S., I didn't see any there. All I see are a lot of regular people going about their regular daily activities.


I don't know. Did some of them provide foreign nations with U.S. government secrets, or did they simply not carry out their functions very well? It's seems to me there's a bit of space between treason and poor job performance.

He didn't reveal his country's secrets to foreign powers; he revealed his country's illegal practices to his country's citizens. Bit of a difference.




They. Broke. The. Law.

The law forbids the NSA from gathering data on US citizens on US soil, full stop. It is a Federal crime for the NSA, its employees, or its contractors to do so.

I do not understand why this is difficult to understand.

I will say it again, because nobody seems to register it.

It is a Federal crime for the NSA, its employees, or its contractors to gather surveillance on US citizens on US soil.

A US citizen who reveals to the US public that a government agency is engaging in widespread criminal activity is not a traitor.

I do not understand the point you are making. Are you saying you believe the NSA should be permitted to violate Federal law with impunity? Is that really what you believe?

- NSA’s XKeyscore program has nearly limitless access to all Internet activity.
Metadata, schmetadata: just enter their email or IP address on this digital request form, and anybody's data is (y)ours too...

- Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld.
Just call it 'business data', and it's (y)ours.

And where were those safeguards again?