Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1957 Editor's Choice: 19
-
A couple of comments...
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]1) It is easier to blackmail the press than the Congress. It is just as effective, if the press runs what you want it to run, an out of line representative or senator is toast. This was done to control the Monica Lewinski scandal, the Washington Post ran stories against the administration in part because they were told that if they didn't the Washington Times would run stories saying they were colluding with the White House.
2) I don't think that TIA became "basketball". It became the Advanced Research and Development Activity Office (at least in this country).
3) CALEA says warrants "or other lawful authorization" and doesn't define the latter. Does anyone know what this means?
4) http://www.newsfollowup.com/dom_spy_agncy.htm gives a long list of the agencies and laws and government programs for domestic surveillance.
For years now, whenever stuff like this came to light, invariably someone would start talking about slippery slopes. I know there are others on this site who appreciate energy landscapes and know that it is possible to be in places where everywhere you turn you are on a different slope, and all of them are slippery (I'm tempted to make an analogy to the nowhere differentiable surfaces that exist just before...chaos). Here are some of the slopes we have traveled down:
One Percent Doctrine: At the top, we need to consider a scenario even if it has only a one percent chance of happening. At the bottom, a fact is true even if it has only a one percent chance of being true.
Ticking Time Bomb: At the top, extraordinary measures are needed if someone knows how to stop a ticking time bomb that will kill a million people. At the bottom, extraordinary rendition and torture are necessary, the Geneva Conventions are "quaint".
The FISA Wall: At the top, law enforcement needs just a little help from intelligence to put a truly bad person away. At the bottom, we can't distinguish between intelligence gathering and criminal investigations, the FBI starts to spy, the NSA gathers information on Americans.
The Powell Doctrine: At the top, the military is gun shy if there isn't the use of overwhelming force, an exit plan, and a clear justification. At the bottom, we start pre-emptive wars on bad intelligence, disregarding the warnings from the military because we believe them to be "chicken".
Congressional Oversight: At the top, the President's hands are tied by the need to make sure any covert operation could withstand congressional scrutiny. At the bottom, an off-the-shelf operation unit outside the oversight of Congress.
Electronic Spying: At the top, the laws are outdated due to information that knows no international borders. At the bottom, if our laws will not permit surveillance, find a country that will: the extraordinary rendition of the search warrant.
The list goes on and on, but this surveillance thing is not going to be a genie that can be put back in the bottle without a lot of work. Any warrant laws the Congress writes can be subverted by finding a friendly, or even an ignorant, government and taking the operation offshore. They did it with the black prisons, they did it with Guantanamo and Bagram, they did it with TIA and RAHS. Or they turn to private enterprise like Narus STA ("You want your company's IP to be secure, don't you?"). Nobody even notices anymore that if the Supreme Court shuts them down on something, and they just take infinite time to "study the problem in order to bring our programs under compliance."
Glenn is right to ask if we know which program we are talking about. There are probably tens of them, it would cost the surveillors nothing to ritually shut one down whenever the outcry got too loud. People like Comey are, unfortunately, sticking fingers in a dike that looks like Swiss cheese. More than half the crashing dot.com wannabes whose businesses were in any way related to information transaction, search, natural language processing, or pattern recognition reformulated themselves as security businesses, practically on September 12, 2001.
...And it's damn near illegal to pass a law that puts a single company out of business in this country, regardless of who controls the Congress.
-
@bamage
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Not to mock one of my favorite movies, but ten to twenty million dead is out of date language. That would read 10 to 20 megathanes nowadays. We don't talk/photograph/count dead people anymore.
-
I'm a him
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The name is French for wavelet.
-
@bdop4
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://tinyurl.com/38ver9
Cheers.
-
Holly, I agree...but
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I haven't heard of any other governmental entity that has data gathering capabilities that come close to what the feds have. Over time they might be able to "outsource" electronic spying in a way analogous to extraordinary renditions... but not all of it overnight.
I agree.
But these technologies are built by contractors, and they are pieces of equipment. The Supreme Court would not let the Bush people claim that Guantanamo Bay, a U.S. land lease from Cuba with an American military base on it, was not U.S. soil, and so U.S. law has jurisdiction over it.
But if a British contractor, together with some data integrators like some of our international defense contractors or search companies, set up software to surveil Americans on the internet from servers in another country owned by that country's government, that just happens to generate the same link analyses, word frequency surges, and contact frequency changes that the feds wanted to see, and results just happened to go from Singapore intelligence to U.S. intelligence, do you think the Supreme Court will say that it has jurisdiction over Singapore and Cognitive Edge? The intelligence community doesn't need to prove that information given to them by a foreign entity was obtained "legally", whatever that means in the country they got it in.