This is unvarnished nonsense. AQ is a creature of its own making, except for those who live in a world of moonbeams, and deny the obvious reality of pronouncements such as AQ’s own, taking credit for serial terrorist atrocities culminating in 9/11. The situation is created by the radical Islamist faction of the world, demented by the very existence of the state of Israel and the presence of non-Muslim defense forces on Holy Saudi Arabian soil, even though those were there by invitation of the Saudi government with the assent of the Wahhabi religious authority of the country.
Informed citizens are now aware of the scale and scope of the surveillance, and it is the present time frame which is addressed by OP. If they had made a decision against surveillance their elected officials would be hearing about it in no uncertain terms, and it is of course silly to single out the frustrations of only one of those officials as being of any significance. You do know, don’t you, that there are 100 senators and 435 congressman, and if enough of them thought the problem was big enough to spend time on then by golly there would be a lot more than one of them getting a lot more than 15 minutes a year to say something about it.
More moonbeams from the paranoiac left wing.
I speak as a straight-ticket, Blue-Sate, Yellow-Dog Democrat, and it seems obvious that most Democrats to the right of the Mother Jones faction are at one with me and with most Republicans.This rare example of principled bipartisanship does not hurt my feelings a bit. It might hurt AQ’s feelings, but not mine.
More moonbeams and nothing but moonbeams. It must take a dim source to produce such dim light.
Street gangs and junkes are not a threat to our existence. AQ and its demonic brethren are a threat, meaning if they ever get a hold of a nuclear WMB and another aircraft they will try to use them against us. Far-fetched? It would be stupid to count on it given the ongoing proliferation of nuclear weapon capability, and the ongoing propensity of aircraft for getting commandeered.
Even a nuclear weapon is not an existential threat in Al Qaida’s hands. They could kill a lot of people if they got it to the right place, sure, but they lack the capacity to follow through.
The highlighted section is an understatement so gross that it falsifies itself.
Suppose they had detonated a nuclear WMD over the WTC on 9/11…? Huh, dude???
Sure, one such attack would not have been “existential”. We would have survived it. But the cost in blood and treasure would have been so great that there would not now be any complaints about any NSA surveillance, even from the Mother Jones editorial board, I don’t think.
I would just as soon make a nuclear 9/11 as unlikely as possible, and that means the NSA won’t get a peep out of me for all these bugs of theirs. Most of my countrymen and their elected reps apparently feel the same way. Good.
You seem rather convicted in supporting this hypothetical situation which nobody in the government’s ever purported to be true.
What makes you so certain al-Qaeda, or anyone, has actually acquired a nuclear weapon? And if they have one, why haven’t they detonated it yet?
The U.S. Intelligence community could gain a lot of converts by presenting “proof” that a nuclear terrorist attack is legitimately plausible (as opposed to hypothetical, which no one doubts) or, even better, if a Legitimate Attack had actually been prevented in the past. But neither Snowden nor Manning have ever leaked any hard-copy evidence of something akin to that – if true, don’t you think they would have?
In any case, the current drama on Capitol Hill appears to be merely a domestic dispute – the C.I.A. stole info from a Senator’s computer, for frick’s sake – so there’s gonna be a public squabble, peppered with meaningless soundbites, but in the end, nothing major will change.
I did not say or imply that AQ or anyone had actually acquired a nuclear device. However, with rogue states and organizations like North Korea and ISE available to act as potential distributors the potential is too close for comfort to suit me. And nuclear WMD aren’t the only worry, ricin and suicide bombing are worth avoiding too. Then there’s plain old fashioned sniping- remember how metro DC was half-paralyzed by one team of two in 2002?
I want to cut the odds in our favor to the maximum possible degree, and that means I am willing to give up a considerable amount of theoretical privacy. I say “theoretical” because counterterror ops are unlikely to spend more than a few seconds on people like me in our lifetimes, if they spend any time at all. And if they were to spend more on me personally the only thing that would bother me about it would be that they were wasting valuable resources and time.
So by your logic we are obliged to wait until so many nuclear WMD have gone off that only one more would put us out of existence. By my logic we are entitled to take whatever steps are needed to keep it from ever getting remotely close to that point. If we can round up the bombers, the snipers and the ricin attackers in the same net so much the better.
Well, it’s hardly any secret that rogue states such as NK/Iran desire to acquire a nuclear weapon, if they haven’t already procured one. And there’s always the spectre of a nuke being sold, stolen, or lost from a first-world nation’s current arsenal, esp. Russia & the former Soviet states, or even (who everyone seems to forget) India or Pakistan.
However, all these scenarios are completely hypothetical, as far as J.Q. Public knows. But the current administration has been exceptionally upfront regarding terrorism issues, from Najibullah Zazi’s plot to the assassination of OBL (a far cry from the years of GWB & Co. who played off the public’s fears with vague, non-specific threats to distract everyone from war profiteering in Iraq…but I digress.) My point is, don’t you think this privacy debate would gain sympathy in favor of the NSA, et al, were they to reveal the truth about a genuine WMD plot (past, present, or near future) and the mere fact that they’ve never publicized this kind of information is evidence, albeit circumstantial, that there’s never been a problem? Why keep secret something that could play in their favor?
How nice of you to say so. Thing is, we’re living in an age where loss of privacy isn’t up for debate – it’s already gone. All we can do in the 21st Century is live with that knowledge, and understand that as you said, there’s too many big fish in the sea for a reasonably “innocent” civilian to worry about being harassed, targeted, or snooped upon – we hope.
No, by my logic you’re doing the enemy’s work for them. Your irrational fear of terrorists has done more damage to the United States than the terrorists ever could on their own.
I guess in principal it’s a little unsavory, but I guess for me unless nighttime flatulence and ass scratching suddenly become federal offenses there is nothing of interest surveiling me would provide to the NSA, so I’m not really worried about it.
I strongly suspect this is how the majority of Americans see the issue.
There is really not much that I do online that is of any interest to the NSA. I check my email, read news, engage in online discussions, and occasionally look at photographs of babies that friends or relatives have posted on social networking sites. I have no cite, but that likely describes a large portion of internet users in America. This may disappoint some of the posters in this thread, but the fact is that most people’s lives are of no consequence to national security. To think that the NSA cares enough about your life to track your google searches is fanciful thinking.*
*Edited to add that I don’t believe there has been evidence that the NSA does anything more than metadata tracking
That our enemies wish to obtain nuclear WMDs, and are in fact searching for a provider and a means of delivery I take as a priori. My point is let’s do what we can the keep the scenarios from crossing the line from hypothetical to actual, that is, from terrorists seeking possession to terrorists obtaining possession. The privacy debate is going well enough to avoid having to ask NSA and other counterterror ops to compromise themselves by giving up information about their operations. It would be best if none of that information were ever made public.
It is your complacency toward terrorism that is irrational and not my fear.
That condition is reversed in regard to all this NSA spooking around: my complacency is rational, your fear is not. You speak of “damage”? Get back with me with tales of all the innocent people who have been deprived of wealth, health, freedom, or their lives as a result of NSA domestic surveillance. That is, please limit the case to residents of the US.
Would you, or anyone else in this thread, be willing to have every room in your house (as well as every house, apartment, public building, school, church, mosque etc in the US) monitored with audio and visual surveillance 24/7? If not, why not?
If this country had such a system, then ALL crime would decrease, not just the risk of terrorism. We would have the safest country in the World! Your complacency is irrational. Why do you hate America? Think of the children!
In principle, yes. I expect some reasonable qualifications could be worked out to keep the spooks out of most rooms most of the time, though.
As a practical matter no, because we do not have the resources to monitor every room in the country 24/7 and must dedicate what we do have to the likeliest sources of danger turned up by the broader surveillance sweeps and other intel.
Sounds good to me!
This sounds like a clumsy attempt at irony so I pass on it.
Furthermore, Franklin never faced an enemy committed to the murder of all the inhabitants of entire American cities, and it is reasonable to assume he might grant our government more surveillance powers than he would have been willing to grant the 18th century government. A lot more surveillance powers.
I’m not in the security business, but as a software developer my educated guess would be:
They pull in and index (like Google) all of the content (emails, chats, etc.) for quick searches. This is stored in a bunch of big databases.
They run a few key phrases over it, like “bomb” or “fertilizer”, and run better automated tests on those results. Anything which passes (flunks?) those tests gets bumped to a human who goes back and reads through the whole conversation to determine whether it’s a genuine security concern. He probably also does some Googling to figure out who the people are and if they’d have any reason to be talking about such a thing (e.g. they work in the fertilizer business).
Conversations from a few key people are specially marked (i.e. Congress members, suspected terrorists, people with security clearance on special projects, etc.) which go through a different review process that triggers on a larger set of keywords. Again, these get bumped to humans to review if the computer flags something.
Since all this data is stored in a database, when someone comes under suspicion for something via alternate means (police investigation, someone is captured in the battlefield, etc.) all of that persons’ messages can be pulled up, and then tracked back to his friends. If obvious “codewords” are apparent in the messages, one can do Google-like searches on those terms, probably looking for spikes in usage in certain geographies or within N-depth of friendship links off the key person, etc. to identify other people and further codewords.
Now there’s also two areas where things get a bit murky between counter-terrorism and spying on US citizens:
During step #2 or #4, when a human is looking through a transcript, they might find evidence of a crime - unrelated to national security. As such, they could report this to the police, to start an investigation.
During step #2, keywords that are solely in the domain of domestic law, like “cocaine” or “underage” might also be processed, bubbling up information that would only be of any value to the FBI/police.
For the first, there’s a strong argument to be made that due effort has been made to restrict findings into information on terrorists - who as enemy combatants to the state are excempt from some of the rights of general citzenship - via information that was available on a public networking layer, and thus the information was found simply as a byproduct of this otherwise “legal” endeavor.
For the latter, I think that’s pretty clearly spying on Americans and violates the First Amendment. It’s unclear whether they are doing that.