Post #386,010
1/31/14 2:31:44 AM
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More Snowden fallout: now it's climate one-upmanship
http://www.salon.com...un_climate_talks/
New from Snowden: The NSA was spying on U.N. climate talks
Leaked documents reveal that the U.S. government monitored communications to gain an advantage in negotiations
LINDSAY ABRAMS
[. . .]
[. . .]
Nothing exceeds like excess. Simply this group of trained-psychopaths want? nay Intend to,
some-HOW?? make a record of every syllable uttered by the 7+ billions of homo-saps.
Just for Murica's first-evah 100% TOTAL SECURITY ... in all things that might interrupt our Daily $Dream-state.
I no verbs. You can't even lampoon this stuff. Can We Get Some Psychiatric Help Before It's TOO LATE?
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Post #386,014
1/31/14 7:50:14 AM
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Um, they're supposed to do that.
They've been tasked with knowing what the other side knows and wants in, e.g., treaty negotiations.
http://www2.gwu.edu/...NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/
The July 2013 ISCAP release protected many NSA secrets, such as its role in arms control verification and most of the discussion dealing with sensitive communications intelligence (COMINT). Nevertheless, the ISCAP declassified some new and surprising information:
* An August 1961 intercept provided advance warning information of the East German decision to close the intra-Berlin borders, the action that led to the Berlin Wall.
* Weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, the NSA detected that the Soviets put military forces on higher alert and stood down their strategic bomber fleet. Apparently Moscow was worried that the United States had discovered the missile deployments.
* NSA wiretaps on Panama's president Omar Torrijos during the 1970s may have given U.S. diplomats an advantage in the negotiations that produced the Panama Canal Treaty.
Of course, they should follow the law, and Congress should know what they have authorized (and stop things they haven't), but one shouldn't be shocked, shocked that the NSA works very hard to find out what foreign governments know and want.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #386,049
1/31/14 11:29:53 PM
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All perfectly rational suppositions. Except:
The Massive Delusion behind [what should be a 'Definition of Limits'--on grounds of Sanity.]
ie Collecting fucking-EVERYTHING.. proving, merely/ONLY that: technologically it IS POSSIBLE..
beggars any definition of that word, rational.
'Open-ended' is no Directive at All: it leaves available to the imaginations of a very-few to simply and perpetually conflate the idea of CAN
with (any cockamamie personal predilection) --to" Get It All"
--whether personal fortune, 24/7 endless-sex or: 7 billion chattering mouth-noises.
Jeez, just HOW Off-the-Wall MUST this get? before some Adult says, Go To Your Room, children!
(I no words for how silly==Insane-silly this-all simply FEELS: on the bald-face of the epitome of Excess.)
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Post #386,062
2/1/14 10:23:27 AM
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Dunno.
Collecting fucking-EVERYTHING.. proving, merely/ONLY that: technologically it IS POSSIBLE..
beggars any definition of that word, rational.
DataMining isn't going to go away.
Remember (one of) the criticism after 9/11 that the US had all kinds of information about the 19 hijackers but couldn't connect the dots? Finding ways to connect the dots became a priority. It wasn't just a power-grab - there was a genuine need to be able to do intelligence and analysis faster and smarter while staying within the law.
Remember Total Information Awareness? http://en.wikipedia....rmation_Awareness
The program was suspended in late 2003 by the United States Congress after media reports criticized the government for attempting to establish "Total Information Awareness" over all citizens.[9][10][11]
Although the program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made. According to a 2012 New York Times article, the legacy of Total Information Awareness is "quietly thriving" at the National Security Agency (NSA).[12]
[...]
Early developments[edit]
The earliest version of TIA employed a software called Groove, which was developed in 2000 by the American software industry entrepreneur and inventor of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie. The software developed by Ozzie makes it possible for analysts at many different government agencies to share intelligence data instantly, and it links specialized programs that are designed to look for patterns of suspicious behavior.[13]
Congressional restrictions[edit]
On 24 January 2003, the United States Senate voted to limit the TIA program by restricting its ability to gather information from electronic mails and the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies.[14] Several months later, with increasing public outrage, Congress agreed to to terminate the program and cease its funding.[15]
In May 2003, Total Information Awareness was renamed as Terrorist Information Awareness.[16]
Tools like these aren't going to go away. Databases aren't going to get smaller. The genie is out of the bottle. Congress can step in and explicitly tell the NSA "don't do that" at any time.
Our protections are in having the right people overseeing the programs, and the right people writing and enforcing the laws and procedures. We need both.
On the underlying problem - how to fight (suicide) bomber terrorism in the US (and that is the bottom line that has driven all of this since the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, it seems to me) - is increasingly rare but potentially catastrophic. It may be too rare for even a state-of-the-art TIA program to solve. Should cost-benefit analysis be applied to this problem? Should we just accept that risk and shut down these datamining programs? Yes, we accept many more likely risks of catastrophe (guns at home, MRSA in hospitals, poorly inspected foods, unvaccinated children, drunk drivers, etc.) without much thought. (But, in fairness, those problems aren't the same as instantly causing thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage.) Should (suicide) bombing be in the same category? Objectively - maybe yes. The bombing risk is too small and too easily minimized without multi-billion dollar programs. Good police work by good people is more likely to keep us safe than some one-in-a-trillion connection in a network mesh. "Security theatre" at airports including patting down grandma isn't stopping suicide bombers. But that's a hard case to make, especially when people running the program claim it has been effective in at least some cases ...
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #386,064
2/1/14 10:30:30 AM
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Data wasn't the problem
As you said, they had all kinds of information but couldn't connect the dots. All the NSA is doing is creating more dots. The promise of data mining is to spot trends, but that leads to Minority Report at worst, highly-targeted profiling at best.
They presented a memo to Bush warning of the plans to attack. It was ignored among the avalanche of other warnings.
--
Drew
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Post #386,067
2/1/14 1:34:59 PM
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Dunno.
Yes, more data will make the problem worse if they don't know how to distill it. If you believe the reports, they only actually query the metadata a few hundred/few thousand times a year. They should be able to connect dots in that case.
They presented a memo to Bush warning of the plans to attack. It was ignored among the avalanche of other warnings.
Apparently the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing paper - "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" - was declassified and released in 2004. It's here - http://www2.gwu.edu/..._laden_file02.pdf (2 page .pdf). There isn't a lot of meat there. Richard Clarke's hair may have been on fire about it, but it doesn't come across in the memo. Even if he had taken it seriously, what were they wanting Bush to do?
Yes, Bush was incompetent, but the people working on the problem weren't able to connect the dots and get the appropriate information up the chain to whoever prepared the memo.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #386,051
1/31/14 11:39:48 PM
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My dear Scott
Your unassailable faith in the good intentions of our Deep State betters gives me the strength to keep pounding my forehead against the closest wall. Honest, it does.
cordially,
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Post #386,058
2/1/14 3:05:39 AM
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Strawman
Who's "shocked, shocked"?
1. The NSA lies to Congress. Fact, they've been caught in the act.
2. The NSA spies on US citizens. See (1), that's what they were lying about.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Yeah.
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Post #386,060
2/1/14 9:39:33 AM
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Guardian readers, perhaps?
Nobody posting here is shocked, shocked, but many commenting on the Snowden document dump in the mass media seem to be...
I don't want to get into a parsing battle with you, ;-), but the meaning of words do matter.
1) AFAIK, if you're referring to the Clapper answer to Wyden's question, Wyden hasn't accused Clapper of lying to him. Or were you referring to something else?
http://www.washingto...99ff459_blog.html
SEN. RON WYDEN (D-Ore.): ÂThis is for you, Director Clapper, again on the surveillance front. And I hope we can do this in just a yes or no answer because I know Senator Feinstein wants to move on. Last summer, the NSA director was at a conference, and he was asked a question about the NSA surveillance of Americans. He replied, and I quote here, ÂThe story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false.Â
ÂThe reason IÂm asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I donÂt really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?Â
Director of National Intelligence JAMES CLAPPER: ÂNo, sir.Â
SEN. WYDEN: ÂIt does not?Â
DIR. CLAPPER: ÂNot wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.Â
SEN. WYDEN: ÂThank you. IÂll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer.Â
[...]
On Tuesday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) issued a tough statement, saying Director of National Intelligence James Clapper did not give a Âstraight answer to his question. Wyden added that the day before the hearing, he gave ClapperÂs office advance notice that he would be asking this particular question and that Âafter the hearing was over, my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer.Â
2) The NSA does not "spy" on US persons. They did in the past, as we know and as my link above indicates, but their activities were reigned in by the Church Committee reforms. Having a huge database of metadata that can only be accessed under tightly controlled circumstances is not "spying on US citizens". I'm sorry, but it isn't. It certainly has the potential for abuse, and maybe it should be ended, but I'm not willing to take it as evidence that some "deep state" (Hi Rand!) is destroying our Constitutional rights.
Again, I find the outrage about this NSA stuff to be a distraction from the real pressing issues we all face. Of course, the rules and procedures governing the NSA need to be amended now to give people confidence that they are not abusing their power. They can't properly function without that confidence from Congress and the people and the representatives of foreign partners. But I haven't lost that confidence, so I'm not the audience...
Wyden and some others filed an amicus brief in a US District Court case (First Unitarian Church vs. National Security Agency). You can read it here - http://www.scribd.co...in-NSA-Court-Case The argument, as I skim it, is that the bulk collection program is over-broad, not effective, and the critical information could be gathered other ways (and all of that may be true), not that the NSA has lied or that the NSA has in fact broken the law.
(IANAL, but it seems to me that the Senators are asking the court to take their view on the intent of the law over the Administration's. I don't know how much weight it will hold given all of the previous court cases on this stuff. I believe that courts usually don't want to get involved in "political" battles of interpretation between the Executive and Congress - i.e. the Congress could change the law without the courts getting involved.)
If Wyden's view is correct, then he should get support to change the law. Battling it out in court seems to me to be the wrong way for Congress to attack the problem.
Eisenhower's speech was a good one. He should have kept "Congressional" in that section - http://www.consortiu...2011/011611b.html It's a shame it took until the Church Committee to finally reign in many of the abuses.
Eternal vigilance - http://www.monticell...eternal-vigilance - Yes! But le'ts be clear-headed as well.
We'll see what happens.
My $0.02. FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
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Post #386,077
2/1/14 10:11:12 PM
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All these procedural skirmishes only underlay the larger
'overview-scale' Problem, the Generic math one:
Many/most? exponentials do not promise or present a reliable inflection point enroute to ever-^upwards^.
As we are amidst the burgeoning of unprecedented instant-techno advances in many fields, some by orders-of-magnitude!
so is it necessary for any Watchdogs to reliably note dV/dt and try to stay level with the daily 'improvements'.
Nobody in government (or.. the rest of us) can rely on former time-frames/past experiences of 'progressive oversight',
for checking how initial safeguards worked-to-date, where these did not; where to fine-tune etc.
--with some expectation that we shall have time to revise before much damage occurs, of irreversible scale.
I think that's where we Are.
Just as you can never retrieve anything, once on the Intarweb; so cannot you undo the--almost-certain--proliferation of ..'Oh, just a few'??
mondo-dbases being duplicated/secreted. Amongst the accelerating multitudes.
You still want to wait-and-see. We need only look at the 'end'-date of our (ongoing) Civil War --> 1964! when the first Civil Rights Acts-with-teeth ... finally came about,
largely if not Only, via the psychological zeitgeist of honoring an assassinated President.
(I watched the Reactionaries' ritual-objections fade-down as nearly all the meeja demonstrated both the Power and the Will ... to excoriate fringe nay-sayers.)
We Will See, of course. (We'd best both be actively Watching for the duration, though, eh?
I'm just not waiting for a fait accompli to confirm any of the easy extrapolations from today.)
Rampant clinical-insanity has never before approached today's levels. You tell Me what that 'means'??
[Rhetorical question]--there are no experts in the unprecedented. BHO is, however an Expert at reliably exuding calmness, in the face of.. umm, [What'cha Got?]
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