Comments

1
that is beautifully stated. i hope your post reaches the widest possible audience (both receptive and otherwise) thank you for it.
2
I don't mean to sound like an ass, but David Simon has argued his points to the n-th degree. I don't agree with his conclusions, but it is bullshit to argue that he hasn't argued his points logically. If you really want to criticize David Simon's points on the NSA you will need to read through the last two months of posts as well as his responses in his blog. This will probably take you about 10-15 hours to do. As I said, I don't agree with him on his conclusion, but I'll be damned if I will say that he hasn't argued his points honestly and thoroughly.

Seriously, don't take one post out of context to understand the dozens that he has discussed. I have great respect for David Simon, and my respect only increased based on how he has responded to his critics in such an honest and intellectually honest manner that I was taken aback. He is NOT an ideologue.
3
Btw, if you read through my posts, you will see that I have been extremely critical of the NSA. My defense of David Simon is only because he argues honestly, not because I think he is right. As I said, I disagree with his conclusions, but I VERY MUCH respect the way that he argues his points.
4
Are we giving equal time to civil rights again?

Usually people who express willingness to retain rights despite the fact its scary or the children or whichever, are villianized and chastised for it.

That said, good piece.
5
@delirian

Agreed, overall. Hence why I quoted David Simon and not, say, Michelle Bachman. David was overheated and condescending in the post I quoted.

Even there, he acknowledges the fatal flaws in his argument--the weakness of the oversight by the secretive FISA court.
6
And we've had to give Top Secret clearance to over one million people, most of them private contractors, in order to carry out this massive surveillance. The whole reason these whistleblower leak fiascoes from Manning and Snowden and others happened is the overblown size of the con we're running. We had to let too many unreliable drones in on it, and nobody can guess when next one of the drones will blow it all open.

If the NSA were small, and focused, it would be reliable and its activities would still be a mystery. But it's grown so large it's no longer effective as a secret intelligence agency. Which helps explain why they couldn't stop all those attacks.

So we're left with neither privacy nor security. But still a staggering bill to pay.
7
Great post.

I'd love to know how much it's costing us to store every email that has been sent. And of course we can't just archive it since it needs to be indexed and searchable. Can't throw out Viagra ads if you're looking for steganography.
8
Great, thought provoking post. @2, thanks for leveling the field.
9
"And for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks."

He is confusing the reaction with the prevention.
Once something happens, the cops and government can react by collecting evidence and making connections to find the guilty people.
But collecting that before something happens does not mean that the government can prevent an attack from happening.
10
I think you should fairly note that David Simon made that post eight weeks ago.
11
I still have heard very little about the scenario of abuse of this insane power. For example an administration, or power elite within/behind the NSA (probably what's really running this country) could use this power to spy on, blackmail, attack, destroy its political opponents. Or any potentially subversive people/organizations. It can be used to gain massive wealth, when you think about corporate espionage. This is the ultimate tool for power. And with it our government is just saying 'trust us'. Thankfully this country is not a dictatorship right now, because the government sure has enough power to make that happen and be untouchable, with this technology.

Another point I think is worth considering is as Bill Maher says, that this surveillance power is the kind of power we need to prevent, say, a nuclear terrorist attack. Something like a suitcase nuke would be absolutely, insanely horrific and would really turn shit upside down. World war, martial law, who the hell knows. And this technology has trickled down since the 50's, enough to be cause for alarm

It's all fucked, and pretty intense, I'm a little bit torn about it, between these 2 points. If we didn't have this technology someone else would beat us to it. But it seems to me like we're really not civilized enough to have this power, nukes or such massive surveillance. But I guess we're past the point of no return with these things in any case.
12
@11 oh you don't have to stretch it that far.

If what Snowdan claims is true, that he, a pretty much low level sub contractor not a government employee, had access to a system that allowed him to read any email he wanted so long as he could somehow target it. With no oversight other then, "you don't have the authority to do it but here are the keys just don't do it but we've got no check on you.

Hey Wall Street, hey Banks, hey Corporate America your insider trader game has just had it's doors blown off by the Government and turned over to a bunch of 20 something computer nerds. Are you fucking paying attention?
13
The NSA and their myriad contractors have access to all the private data of the the very judges that are supposed to restrain them.
14
God damn it Golob, why did you have to pick seismology.

Your broader point is correct, but that's a terrible comparison. Seismologists today arguably are collecting less data than they were 50 years ago, before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (nothing available to geologists today can light up the structure of the earth's crust and upper mantle quite like an underground nuclear test and a global network of seismometers sensitive enough to detect one).

A better comparison— far better— would be with weather prediction. Weather prediction has improved enormously, and one half of that improvement is due to the massive increase in data collection. The other half is due to increasingly precise numerical modelling (which nobody even pretends we've got a toehold on, when it comes to political violence) buttressed by Moore's law.

And it's precisely in the area of predicting catastrophic events that weather prediction still falls far short, though it has improved somewhat. And it's here, too, that you need external knowledge— like how well a dyke will stand up to a storm surge.
15
@12

I'm pretty sure the people engaged in large-scale insider trading these days aren't emailing and texting each other about it.

Also, the bank-to-bank financial transaction networks are standalone, and predate the World Wide Web by decades— only consumers interact with banks over the Internet. I'm sure you could adapt some existing network-flow malware detection systems to sniff out insider trading on those intrabank networks, but I've no idea whether or not the Feds have managed to acquire the permissions to install network monitors in those systems (or the balls to set them up without asking).
16
It's about time we attack the bloated intelligence industry as superfluous mass of waste. The goddamn CIA has never been right about anything important, ever and, the NSA has never been able to stop a terrorist with the spooky resources/methods they've been given.

Intelligence agencies (the police and military for that matter) are very good at telling you why you should always give them more power and money and that's about all they are good at. It's crap. People aren't flying more planes into towers because they don't want to, not because they might get caught before they do it.
17
@14, I don't think a dyke would hold up to a storm surge very well at all. A dike might, though.
18
There is no treaty in force banning underground nuclear tests. The U.S. allegedly has the expertise and computing power to not need that and is encouraging the end of all nuclear explosion testing. Largely to discourage new nuclear powers that would need testing. To that end, we haven't been physically testing for something like 20 years.

There is a limited test ban treaty (mandating only underground tests) and an unratified full test ban treaty but an unratified treaty isnt really a treaty.

19
It's not that I don't agree with the sentiments expressed here; I do. But I'd like to point out that the same "ordinary people can take care of this" argument -- i.e., that we don't need the gov't meddling in our lives to be safe -- could be and often is used by conservative Republicans to starve social programs and derail important regulatory safeguards. Just sayin'. It cuts both ways.
20
We outsource our intelligence work. To people who could have all sorts of reasons for hiding their vulnerabilities or intentions. And maybe nothing to lose. But the real enemy in all this is the technology. We have created computers that learn. That means finding crimes or suspecting crimes that have nothing to do with terrorism and are more about every second of our day.
21
Why doesn't the US just stop being a total dick with our foreign policy, and remove the reasons terrorists to attack us?

Terrorists don't occur in a vacuum, you know.

How many Iraqis are dead because of us?
Over 100,000 and counting.
22
Tamerlan Tsarnaev was *not* a teenager.
23
I'd hate to say it but in the next large-scale terrorist attack, millions of Americans will be crying "why didn't your protect us?" People talk about the maturity about their fellow Americans, but it's a fickle population that changes its tune the moment something bad happens. You know as well as I do that the public would blame Obama for any terror attack on his watch.
24
#4: Well, civil rights white people care about anyway. Disenfranchising blacks doesn't get quite as much airplay.
25
The last time we had a major terror attack, the American people were part of the problem. The reason we're here right now, with two failed wars and the Patriot Act is because of Americans crying about security and vengeance. People like talking tough about their values right now, but if the NSA knew about something and didn't say anything, the American people would be demanding their heads. That isn't to say your argument is wrong necessarily. It's just hilariously naive about the American people.
26
@11- "...this surveillance power is the kind of power we need to prevent, say, a nuclear terrorist attack"

That is a completely baseless claim. Golob's point, based in historical evidence, is that this kind of power does not work to stop terrorists.

Please wait...

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