I think it's very clear to everyone not tuning into to the mass-media narrative that the true goal of all the governments and agencies involved is not "preventing the next terror threat" but a power-play for the control of information.
Not only is there no pertinent evidence to demonstrate that surveillance has ever paid off; There is much more so, extremely pertinent evidence that demonstrates the past 30 years of foreign policy have directly contributed to past and current day terrorist threats: Financing the Taliban and Bin-laden to fight the soviets in the 80's, invading and destabilizing Iraq, financing Syrian rebels (in part ISIS supporters and/or sympthathizers) while destabilizing Syria, etc, etc..- Yet somehow none of this is part of the main-stream narrative and a couple months later Obama will be asking congress for more funds to fight Assad and the NSA will be asking for broader surveillance powers.
I'm very sorry for the people that have lost their family members and loved ones in the course of these things but the answer is not and cannot be "more drone strikes" and "everyone forfeit your privacy".
30 years is a pretty short time horizon to look at. Western meddling as a driver of chaos and authoritarianism in the Middle East stretches back at least a century or two.
If Europeans hadn’t drawn completely arbitrary national borders all over the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, if Palestine had been left to its Arab inhabitants instead of displacing them in favor of European Jews, if the British and Americans hadn’t put so much emphasis on securing the Suez Canal via support for friendly dictatorships nearby, if the US hadn’t toppled the Iranian democracy under Mosaddegh in 1953 to reinstall the Shah, if Western European, Russian, and American guns hadn’t been handed out on all sides like candy, etc., the region would certainly be far different from now.
But it’s impossible to guess exactly what the effects of some counterfactual foreign policy over the past century would be.
> But it’s impossible to guess exactly what the effects of some counterfactual foreign policy over the past century would be.
It's true we can only speculate as to what the results of a different foreign policy might have been - but after years of disastrous foreign policies with all of the same destructive elements - Maybe it's time to build some schools and hospitals instead of bombing another city, sending more guns or eroding more human rights?
Arbitrary borders doesn't explain it all. Africa has just as many arbitrary borders and lots of wars and insurrection happened and continue to happen, but except for north Africa, sub-Saharan Africa doesn't suffer the same kind of chaos and terrorism except for where isil AQ, etc have operatives. So, Africa seems to indicate that terrorism requires a foreign religious aspect in order to take root.
Arbitrary borders + tribal politics describes pretty much all of it. I mean, we talk about Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq like they are countries, but they're really more like negative space.
Africa absolutely suffers the same kind of chaos and terrorism -- we just don't hear about it because it's less densely populated and the people there have darker skin. But Boko Haram is still a huge problem in Nigeria and Islamic fundamentalism in Somalia is a way bigger problem than you would think given the total lack of news coverage (the US launches almost as many drone strikes on eastern Africa as it does in the middle east).
Much of sub-saharan Africa is still under de-facto apartheid. Wealthy (often white) land owners are in bed with corrupt government officials who, while black, are more than happy to continue the status quo as long as they get paid. It's very hard to have a cohesive ideology behind your insurgency when there are for-profit death squads operating in the area. But you're right; there is also no great unifying force for the people in the area like there is in the middle east and north Africa.
Bokoharam and alshahab are extensions of the problems in north Africa, they are not indigenous to subsaharan Africa. You don't see the dame problems in Mozambique or Angola or Botswana. These places have had their problems but they don't export them and don't fancy taking the rest of the world down with them.
Oh, I understand that, I thought it was understood it was about taking these causes abroad to lands unrelated using previous historical injustice as a cause to wreak havoc on unrelated innocents. Say after the us civil war the south went down to Mexico and set off bombs and declared war till all were dixified or dead.
West Africa is full of fighting and has been for thousands of years. The transition to democracy (and stability) is made more difficult by the arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans. For example, Ghana has 71 languages and three major cultural divisions. It should probably be at least 3 countries (including parts of neighboring Ivory Coast and Togo). The square borders do not match where the people live. For example, the Adele people live on the border between Ghana and Togo. They enjoy half the political representation they deserve in both countries.
I'm sure the fact that the Middle East sits on the world's largest deposits of cheap-to-extract high-EROEI and therefore maximally profitable oil has absolutely nothing to do with it. :)
The amount of oil in the ground in places like Canada might indeed rival the Middle East, but it's lower-EROEI more expensive oil. The amount of money in the ground is higher in the Middle East than anywhere else. Sub-Saharan Africa does have quite a bit of resource wealth but it doesn't have anywhere near as fat and juicy a prize as the ME does.
So how does that explain Yemen, or the troubles in the Philippines? Are they overflowing with rich resources? Contrast Mindanao with the rest of the PH.
My impression is that at least some of those are satellite conflicts driven by propaganda and actual groups from the Middle East like ISIS. Control of the Middle East and its oil wealth seems like the overall objective behind the various proxy armies and constant "regime change" in the region.
I'm not sure why this is such a terribly controversial idea. You have trillions of dollars in assets sitting in the ground under a politically unstable region, so why is it so bizarre to suggest that people are fighting over it? There are people who will shoot you for your wallet, so what will they do for access to world-remaking levels of wealth?
Why not? Saudi money (not the Saudi government, but they are indirectly responsible) enables and sustains political Islam worldwide. Muslims in South East Asia have been practicising a pretty laid back version of Islam for centuries: No pork, no veils and mingling of opposite gender over a few bottles of booze may be looked down upon, but never a cardinal sin. All of this is changing for the worse because ME has been aggressively exporting their Medina theology for the last two or three decades[0].
"true goal of all the governments and agencies is...a power-play for the control of information."
You sir, are very close to the truth. The reality is that it isn't about control of the information per se, but what can be accomplished with said information. In this case, the "information" we are referring to is the massive amount of metadata we generate, not to mention the content thereof, and I would posit that the true goal is the control of the people, through ownership of the information. The distinction is a small but important one. It is about control, not security, and anybody saying otherwise is generally ill-informed or ignorant.
From an intelligence side of things, it used to take so much effort to do dirty tricks on people. You had to black bag their place of residence, you had to tail them for days, weeks, sometimes months.
These days, you just PRISM/ECHELON your way into their data, pull all the dirt you need out, and approach them with your demands as you will.
This is only one of the most palpable dangers of the surveillance age, in that the intel agencies and potential moles/infiltrators can potentially have vast amounts of power over institutions they shouldn't, for example, congress. It's essentially setting us up for a coup d'etat of the oligarchy. (people need to remember that the OSS/CIA came straight out of London/WallStreet! I think people should also be made aware of the often at odds nature of the different intel agencies. I think military intelligence is rightly suspicious of the Company.)
I spent a long time trying to understand this machine because I was an action arm of it at one time (and perhaps if called upon, may one day again be), and my conclusions are not hopeful, pretty, and often are considered conspiracy theory. What I have said above only scratches the surface.
>What I have said above only scratches the surface.
keep going.
be aware the analytical & technically savy are also considered threats to the establishment: "NSA: Linux Journal is an "extremist forum" and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance"
Well, that leaves it pretty open, but heres a quick rundown:
We found out about continuity of government during Iran contra, but were misled into thinking it went away. The people mostly responsible for it were the same neocons who manipulated GW Bush (eg: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer) The best writing about this is from former diplomat Peter Dale Scott. I think it's possible that CoG is in effect and the Constitution has been secretly superseded by secret law. (Originally designed for nuclear attack, it was later expanded to be overly broad so as to potentially apply to almost any "national emergency". By the way, we have officially been in a state of "national emergency" since 2001, with renewal every year by all presidents since.
Beyond that, resource wars are incoming, which includes a reduction of the power of the petrodollar, which is the core reason behind expansion into the Middle East, Africa and the Russian border (Georgia 08, Ukraine).
Add to that the fact that since 2010 Citizens United, corruption of our electoral process is almost unilateral, that we are haemorrhaging jobs to overseas (which will increase once the TPP TTIP inevitably passes), and even if the horribly destructive so called "free-trade" systems don't do it, we are on the verge of an automation age which will remove many jobs from the market, and the oligarchy are increasingly done extracting wealth from third world countries and have turned inward and are now eating their own people so to say.
With the surveillance engine already in place, the inevitable unrest will be put down harshly (for national security of course), and the internet will be balkanised and the real world model of law will be applied to the internet... you know, the one were everything is illegal and everyone commits at least three felonies a day, so then you can arbitrarily enforce the law in order to stifle dissent.
All three branches of the government are compromised, and the fourth estate is in the gutter, along with the education system.
So basically we are returning to some strange form of neo-fuedalism, but this time it will be high-tech and global.
So I am of two minds with regards to foreign intervention by the US.
On one hand, I'm horrified at the things the US does. We kill innocents, we send our own citizens to die for really very little reason, and we spend an epic fuck ton of money with very little to show in terms of tactical results. We stick our nose in situations that don't involve us just because we can, and I'm tired of the US always being the world's police force.
On the other hand, global power politics aren't about playing nice. As far as hegemonist world powers throughout history go, the US is relatively benevolent (wiretaps and extrajudicial renditions are nothing compared to the genocides perpetrated by nearly every preceding global power). In the absence of a dominant global power, you would have multiple equally-matched regional powers vying for supremacy -- a situation that would almost certainly end in war and the emergence of a new, potentially less benevolent global power. A lot of innocent people likely die in this scenario too.
The world is undoubtedly a safer place because the US does horrible things to bad people (and yes, at times to good people too). The fact that there is a single superpower that can and will defeat anyone, anywhere deters a lot of large-scale bad behavior -- the last 70 years since WWII have been some of the most peaceful in human history. Casualty counts from armed conflict measure in the thousands to tens of thousands; not the hundreds of thousands or millions that you'd see in a major war.
But that still doesn't make what the US does in regards to surveillance right. Can there be world peace without a dominant military power to keep everyone in check? I don't know, but we should at least try to find out.
Indeed, the elephant in the room is Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Both have a significant interest in the removal of the Ba'athist government from Syria, and they have both expended significant resources in achieving this goal (officially or otherwise).
Resources which Isil has benefited from handsomely, and in fact the only reason Turkey and the KSA are currently engaging Isil directly is because of the domestic threat posed by homegrown Isil cells. While the West is equally guilty of this abject laziness and callousness, Turkey and the KSA have contributed far more to the global jihadi movement than any other organization since Isil announced independence in June 2014.
From my understanding Turkey had a basically "hear no evil, see no evil" policy for anti-Assad rebels and arms-shipments across their border and the US encouraged this(!).
As for Saudi Arabia, their government is just about as bad as Assad on human rights - which of course doesn't prevent the US and US politicians from being very cozy with them as long as it serves their geo-political agenda.
Honestly, regarding Saudi Arabia, I think their strategy is to buy as much equipment as possible so that the West has no choice but to prop up the House of Saud.
Why do they have no choice? Well, if the House of Saud falls then the weapons would reach the hands of jihadist terrorists before you can say "9/11," and the Royal Saudi Army has a very large stockpile of all of the best hardware you can buy with petrodollars.
An airforce able to rival the Marines does not "fall into the hands of terrorists". Saudi Arabia wants to be a regional power and wants to back that up with force. Oh and suppress domestic unrest.
Wikileaks shows that the US and allies have been financing and working towards instability in Syria since 2007. Maybe working with Russia to temper Assad would have been a better solution, or perhaps some other avenue. But overthrowing Assad has been an epic disaster and more surveillance isn't the answer.
Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan were at some point in their current governments, little more than puppet governments of the US. A corrupt puppet of a US+Turkey+Saudi/Russian+Chinese+Iranian coalition that at least offered stability would be far preferable to the murderous chaos that exists now.
Possibly so, though if you believe this, presumably the powers that be would not be above fabricating such evidence.
Bear in mind that the data used in this article are from arrest records. In fact, many of the arrests supposedly resulting from online activity could just as easily have occurred because of reports by concerned citizens. Would you put it past the authorities to seize a suspected terrorist identified through dragnet surveillance without creating a record of arrest? I think it is not inconceivable.
If you are opposed to mass surveillance, I think the best argument is that its social costs surpass the benefit of reducing terrorism. But perhaps this is not such a palatable argument after two well-publicized tragedies.
No I don't. There I grant the opposition their belief as a stipulation for the purpose of making a more salient point: terrorism is not so destructive as people tend to think, and regulating the flow of information is more destructive than people tend to think. Thus we avoid the challenge of quantifying mass surveillance's efficacy in reducing terrorism.
>the true goal of all the governments and agencies involved is not "preventing the next terror threat" but a power-play for the control of information.
This is a laughable statement but typically upvoted on HN. Politicians have to appear to have done everything possible to prevent these attacks. They are not dictators, if the public feels they were soft on terror they are gone, no pentaverate necessary.
> Financing the Taliban and Bin-laden to fight the soviets in the 80's
Can anyone make guesses how Afghanistan would have turned out if the Soviets had been let to freely occupy Afghanistan? Would the country have turned into another North Korea, or perhaps something like Afghanistan's northern neighbors, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, are today?
Or would the secular socialistic and religious elements have gone into civil war anyway, even without the US supporting the religious side?
Honestly? Afghanistan's a really difficult region to unify politically; it's only happened a handful of times in history. On top of that, the global trend in the last ~100 years has been towards nationalism and away from consolidated, sprawling empires. Due to the geography and ethnic composition of Afghanistan, it's highly unlikely that the Soviets would have been able to do exercise much control over it in the long-run with any semblance of stability[0]. So I'd be very skeptical of the idea that it would have turned into anything resembling North Korea.
In all honesty, it would probably look relatively similar to what it does today. In that alternate universe, it wouldn't necessarily be the Taliban itself that came to power, but the group that occupied that role would be similar in ideology and effect to the Taliban that exists in this universe.
[0] ignoring the pending collapse of the USSR, of course, but since this is all speculation anyway, we can take some liberties.
> it would probably look relatively similar to what it does today.
So, speculatively, even without the US supporting the mujahideen in the 80s, the Soviets would have eventually left, Taliban or something similar would have kind-of-won the civil war, and Afghanistan would be about the same chaos as it is now. So why is US blamed for "destabilizing Afghanistan" and "unintended consequences", if the area would probably be similarly unstable even in this alternate timeline? And if bin Laden and such are anti-American in our universe, even after having received American support in the 80s, they surely would be anti-American in the alternate timeline, too?
So if the US meddling didn't change anything for the worse, why all the blame?
> why is US blamed for "destabilizing Afghanistan" and "unintended consequences", if the area would probably be similarly unstable even in this alternate timeline? if the US meddling didn't change anything for the worse, why all the blame?
Well, first, I didn't say that the US "didn't change anything for the worse". I just said that it wouldn't have resulted in a more stable regime, ceteris paribus. Stability is not the only axis on which to evaluate whether the result would have been better or worse[0].
And we're just talking about the US's actions. The US and the USSR are both responsible for the current situation; the "blame" doesn't have to be assigned unilaterally to one single entity.
[0] I'm also deliberately not defining "stability", because that's already an incredibly hefty topic when discussing middle eastern history and politics.
We're talking about a country that's been used essentially as a pawn by the major imperial powers of each era for the last 200+ years. (This situation is not unique to Afghanistan - which is why many other countries have similar problems - but Afghanistan's geography compounds the effect).
The British, Russians, US, Ottomans, Mughals, Safavids - all of them have spent significant time and effort (not to mention military power) trying to secure the region for "their" side. All of them struggled with it, to the point where it's debatable whether any of them ever succeeded.
This situation continues on today - so no, I don't think Afghanistan can ever be politically stable as long as it continues to hold this role in global geopolitics[0]. Perhaps circumstances will change and we'll start to see a more stable regime emerge there, but it's kind of hard to force that when one of the major causes for instability in the last two centuries has been external influence in the first place.
EDIT: Unrelated to the answer, but I find the use of the word 'balkanized' particularly amusing given the etymology (it refers to the fragmentation of parts of the former Ottoman empire into many states that compete with each other for regional influence). Afghanistan is not part of the Balkan peninsula, but it did have its own fascinating power struggle with the Ottoman empire, and the breakup of the Ottoman empire in the early 20th century was a major turning point that influenced the current state of Afghanistan today.
[0] I'm not sure any country really could be, for what it's worth, but we're talking about Afghanistan.
That is because "Preventing terrorist attacks" is used only to SELL the program to the populace.
Its real goal is to make it so that the status-quo is not disturbed.
These programs will be used and are being used to monitor and arrest domestic radicals, support foreign espionage for American economic interests, etc much more than any terrorist prevention:
2) Target foreign govts & corporations for economic gain
3) Target Radicals in foreign countries that oppose US interests (some of these could very well be terrorists also)
4) Actual terrorists
So if we keep using the wrong metric to measure success then obviously "Mass surveillance" has failed.
The Director of the CIA wasted no time blaming Snowden for the Paris attacks [1] - dismissing all concerns as "hand-wringing". I am now waiting for the "Our current spying is not enough, we need even more spying powers" congress actions to surface.
Cynically exploiting the fear and concern after an attack is the real game here - the "efficacy" of the measures proposed is irrelevant, as no one will be able to hold them accountable.
In Wake of Paris, FCC Seeks Power to Monitor, Shutter Websites
"Citing possible links between terror-related websites and online communications and Friday’s attacks on Paris, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested Tuesday Congress give the agency more authority to use ‘big data’ to monitor and act on potential threats."
I don't like surveillance, but at the same time, I wonder: How much of this lack of record can be attributed to parallel construction, where law enforcement uses the surveillance results to "luckily" know where to look, and "by chance" figure out how to foil the terrorists?
I can imagine that the intelligence agencies may not be thrilled about broadcasting their capabilities.
My nightmare scenario is that surveillance actually is helping, but the extent is a closely guarded secret, which means that we'll never get rid of it, and we'll never know why, or have a chance to, as a society, have a conversation about the tradeoff between surveillance and counterterrorism.
Guess what the limiting factor of effective surveillance of Islamic terrorists is?
And I state that the CIA and NSA have known this since the early 1970s...
Ready? Its the amount of trained foreign language people that the CIA, NSA, and FBI have that happen to be skilled in largely Arabic based languages.
Now for the wrinkle how do we get those numbers increased?
Guess? The exact opposite of what republican law makers want to do that is have a fully functioning immigration system.
NSA could tomorrow sweep all communication world-wide but without concrete steps to increase foreign language people to translate any of it is such a HUGE BONDOGGLE that defies description..
^ comparing this to finding needles in haystacks is a a severe understatement.
The scale of internet is mind-boggling. The amount of data flowing through it is massive. Considering most of that which is relevant is wrapped in HTTPS and even the best financed SIGINT agency will have a tough time doing mass surveillance dragnet with any cost-effective results.
Add foreign languages into the mix and it's even more expensive.
Flooding the country with Arab speaking immigrants with the goal that some will filter up to the TLA agencies to help with surveillance on their former countrymen is ludicrous. If you want the numbers of Arabic speakers increased, you teach the language or hire existing talent. In any case, machine translation is pretty good these days -- even if Google doesn't perform that well on Arabic. Encryption is a much bigger barrier than language.
Not to defend mass surveillance, but why would there be any public record of this? Wouldn't you expect most major thwarted attacks to be kept classified?
The Executive branch has a habit of classified information getting "leaked" if it makes them look good and is about a program that is already an open-secret anyway.
They would then reveal to the planners of the attempted attack that it was the NSA that discovered it, not the CIA or FBI, etc.
And hardly anyone here would believe them anyways, because the goal posts would just be moved to "Why doesn't the NSA show us proof of the plots they stopped instead of just telling us how many they stopped?".
You'd expect the exact methods they used to detect and catch the planners to be kept secret or only vaguely talked about. They could crow heavily about any substantial plots stopped though and trot out evidence found after the cell/whatever was rounded up without really exposing how they found the cell.
I don't know the right answer as to how to defend against terrorism, etc. But this argument makes no sense. "They" (whoever they are) don't need a reason to play, they already have one. Choosing "not to play" is just allowing whoever they are to do whatever they want.
Currently they think they have a reason to play. If we stop playing, they aren't going to for some length of time, perhaps measured in generations. Given that "playing" means "attacking us trying to kill as many people as possible", I do not want to be in the situation where they are playing offense and we aren't playing defense.
If the West stops playing, it's not like Turkey, China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will stop too. And there's no reason to believe the war would become less bloody with even more refugees.
If that's so then why has there not been aa "Large Terror Attack" in the US since 9/11? Pulling off another such successful attack has been a stated major goal of Al Queda and not ISIS. Clearly something is preventing it and making it more difficult then doing it in Europe, which have suffered several attacks, with what happened in Paris being the most severe.
Terrorists are by and large muppets, they operate on inadequate budgets, they plan badly, they execute inconsistently.
The only reason they succeed is becomes on infrequent occasions law enforcement is even more incompetent.
The 9/11 attacks had many, many red flag warnings before they went down that were largely ignored. What's so unusual about people training to fly planes, but not take off or land, right?
The same patterns will be found here in hindsight.
Deep, pervasive surveillance will only flood already saturated information channels. What they need is less information of a higher quality, not more noise in the system.
It's important to recognize that they also wanted to attack the US for at least a decade PRIOR to 9/11. So what was preventing them from doing it then?
(I'm going to repeat a comment that got buried in another discussion:)
The government and businesses have built a state of surveillance far beyond anything dreamt of a couple of decades ago, with massive continuing investment.
Yet the tool of surveillance was unable to stop this attack. Now they want more surveillance, but maybe it's the wrong tool for this job.
Surveillance seems to have reached that place on the technology adoption curve where people get a little over-enthusiastic and blindly think it solves every problem, and they haven't yet realized it's a tool which, like all tools, is good for for things but not for others.
(That ignores the massive cost to individuals and to our societies of surveillance.)
Your last quip seems minor but I personally think it's a huge driver for all this. "Security" is a huge pork barrel for a large number of contractors and equipment vendors. A lot of it is basically snake oil but that doesn't matter. Getting money out of the government piñata is the goal, not actual security.
If a government passes something, it doesn't just magically become fully operational, regardless of what type of program it is. It takes a little more than a couple months.
The passport of a "suicide bomber" escaped the bomb blast and landed into the hands of autorities (conviniently) -- but now Serbian police have proven it to be a fraudulent passport...so how did it get there?
The legislation was largely to authorize practices that the surveillance community was already engaged in but which were on questionable legal ground because the existing legal framework had not been updated since 1991. They also expanded the ability of the French surveillance community to outsource some of their needs to 3rd parties; eg, require ISPs to store communications rather than the Government intercepting them and storing them.
France was absolutely not starting from scratch on Surveillance at the beginning of May. The bill dropped the need for things like "get a warrant before monitoring all traffic to/from an IP in realtime"; they had that ability long before.
Edit: I would absolutely love someone to explain why this post is being downvoted
Your seatbelt can't blackmail you, nor pull "LOVEINT" like maliciousness against you (i.e., it has no real negatives). Extensive surveillance, mass or not, is rife with the possibility for abuse.
The chances that my seatbelt kills me are probably higher than me dying or being harmed by mass surveillance. And I'm married to an Afghan.
Then again I'd probably guess that my seat-belt is significantly more effective at saving my life.
Plus most of the ability for abuse exists even without a system in place. If the government wants to discredit me they can make up evidence and get a warrant. Or they can just do warrantless wiretapping.
The ability to spy on all citizens exist whether it's used or not. That goes triple for metadata that companies keep anyway. As long as Google is spying, that information is ripe for being taken by government.
There is still a risk that a non-rouge part of government could use mass surveillance for shitty purposes. Like hunting down jews, homosexuals, civil rights activists, etc. But the whole government would have to break bad. And they could reinstate a mass surveillance apparatus in a couple months anyway.
I'm not really convinced that using the NSA to spy on suspected terrorists, spies, and drug cartels is really an significant risk to our freedom and safety in general.
Systems designed to prevent black swan events need to be evaluated against a higher standard than "there haven't been any since we started". That's not success, it's exactly what we would have expected anyways.
That probably depends on what you define as mass surveillance.
But even today 99.9% of Americans aren't really surveilled in the conventional sense. FISA courts only issue ~3,000 wiretapping, data download requests a year.
I think the biggest actual capture is buffering. I suspect the NSA is buffering almost all communication in the USA (or maybe just international cable communications, but I'd bet all). But it's not actively used or analyzed unless something comes up. And after a few days it's deleted. If you end up shooting up a Eagles of Death Metal show in Paris, they can rewind your recent communications.
Whether that is mass surveillance is pretty questionable IMO. It's a sort of a "if a tree falls in the wood and nobody hears, does it make a sound" territory. It's really no different than the Post Office having your mail. They could rip it open, but their mere possession isn't surveillance.
I think where you have a better argument is the meta data mass collection. They physically got that information. It's on their servers forever. And here is where the surveillance part comes in--they actually run analysis on it. They claim they only stay within "two hops" of known suspects, but that's probably BS and you get into a "6 degree of Keven Bacon" situation where two hops probably gets nearly everyone.
So I think that meta data program is the only program I've heard about from the Snowden leaks that is actually a mass surveillance of the American people.
But there is a counter argument. It's mass surveillance of information that isn't actually private, thus, it's not a intrusion of your privacy. They are only looking at data that your telephone company has on you. In fact, baring any sort of data privacy law, that information is Verizon's and they can do what they want with it. Including hand it over to the government.
And in practice, American companies keep that sort of meta data and use it for commercial purposes all the time. Hell, google doesn't even have to triangulate towers, they just use the GPS the customer paid for to track them to within 10 feet.
The last report I saw on FISA warrants said they were for targeting criteria rather than individuals. So, one warrant is like a blank check for certain parameters and analysis across all their collection schemes. That's more significant than 3,000 warrants from a regular court for individuals or companies.
I meant to capture your sentiment in my reply. I was using "efficacy" in its absolute sense, the synonym of "effectiveness" or "worth," which I take to be its primary definition.
Communication spying of the PRISM variety [1] is exactly the kind of thing that should aid in the prevention of lone wolf style attacks. You're telling me that a modern lone wolf never uses a web search to find out "how to [buy an automatic rifle/how to rent a car anonymously/insert heinous act here]"?
If the surveillance is gathering up these searches and still has no record of stopping attacks, then two options, amongst others, are: get better filtering and analysis techniques, or my preferred option, disband the (illegal) programs.
PRISM isn't supposed to be used against US citizens in that manner. They've admitted that PRISM can be used in that manner, but that's never been a goal of the program and theoretically what little oversight there is is supposed to prevent that.
Just because it requires "selectors" before it can provide output, doesn't mean that it's not taking bulk communication as input. How can something that requires "minimization procedures" be anything besides mass surveillance?
If I'm missing what you are disputing about the "mass" part of PRISM, please explain further.
A third possibility is that such queries are detected, but maintaining secrecy is judged to be a higher priority than preventing a comparatively smaller number of deaths while revealing their capabilities.
Like most of you, I think mass surveillance is a fairly big problem.
Even so, how do we KNOW that there haven't been any major terrorist attacks thwarted? If I were the government, I would keep my thwarting as secret as possible (up until the point where the public turns against me enough to start trying to shut me down).
"the reason there haven’t been any large-scale terror attacks by ISIS in the U.S. is not because they were averted by the intelligence community, but because — with the possible exception of one that was foiled by local police — none were actually planned."
So what would happen if more attacks were planned? (Brilliant habit, reading HN right before going to bed.)
Not only is there no pertinent evidence to demonstrate that surveillance has ever paid off; There is much more so, extremely pertinent evidence that demonstrates the past 30 years of foreign policy have directly contributed to past and current day terrorist threats: Financing the Taliban and Bin-laden to fight the soviets in the 80's, invading and destabilizing Iraq, financing Syrian rebels (in part ISIS supporters and/or sympthathizers) while destabilizing Syria, etc, etc..- Yet somehow none of this is part of the main-stream narrative and a couple months later Obama will be asking congress for more funds to fight Assad and the NSA will be asking for broader surveillance powers.
I'm very sorry for the people that have lost their family members and loved ones in the course of these things but the answer is not and cannot be "more drone strikes" and "everyone forfeit your privacy".