Der Spiegel breaks news on NSA's spying capability - encompasses entire world

[MarkXIX]

Yes exactly this.

It's like saying well the USA military is so powerful it could destroy all it's citizens with nukes!!! Big problem right? Well no, it's controlled and overseen.

The NSA is so powerful that it can spy on everyone (analogous to nuking world with military), but that's their purpose. It obviously has to be controlled and monitored to protect citizens of this nation.

This is it right here. Imagine for a second that this entire process is managed by your current elected officials and the smartest IT guy you know and multiply that ten or a hundred fold.

That thought keeps me awake at night and I've now encrypted and two factor authenticated just about all facets of my digital life. Even then I'm still not entirely sure any of it matters because I no longer trust any vendor or corporation to act in MY best interest and NOT take money from the government to exploit me.

 

[Jeff7]

Presumably, the NSA's actions are a product of laws that have been on the books since at least as far back as the original Patriot Act. If people think the NSA has been given too much scope, then Congress should be lobbied to change the relevant laws.

And then find some way of enforcing the laws. The NSA doesn't appear to care a whole lot about following laws.
"Damn, it's illegal to spy on US citizens. But, we can arrange for spy organizations in other countries to spy on US citizens, and then give us their data."


I also can't help but wonder what "interesting" things they know now about members of Congress, which could work to their advantage.
"It'd sure be a shame for <information> to find its way to the public. In an election year, no less. Anyway, about our budget for next year..."

This is it right here. Imagine for a second that this entire process is managed by your current elected officials and the smartest IT guy you know and multiply that ten or a hundred fold.

That thought keeps me awake at night and I've now encrypted and two factor authenticated just about all facets of my digital life. Even then I'm still not entirely sure any of it matters because I no longer trust any vendor or corporation to act in MY best interest and NOT take money from the government to exploit me.

I get the idea that none of that matters, if they do indeed have the ability to strip away any encryption that's in the way. If they just have to insert their master key, it doesn't matter how many layers of encryption or authentication are there. They've got access.
Or if the system encrypts server-side, they can just obtain direct access to the unencrypted data.

I'm not even sure Orwell could have seen the levels of intrusion that are being exposed now. We're going to find out how far down the rabbit hole they've gone. What it comes down to is a government that is paranoid and fearful. They can always fall back on plausible deniability too, so getting rid of it is going to be difficult.

Yeah.....1984 had things like vacuum tubes for capsules containing papers, and fires for destroying it.
Now let's say we've got electronic thinking machines that can remember process a great deal of the information exchanged in the entire country, and over a lot of the planet, with its reach extending extending right into homes and businesses, watching and recording.

For your own protection.



But, I guess we're not all the way to 1984, otherwise a post like that ^^^ would make me disappear in the night.






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[werepossum]

I have no problem with the NSA's ability to do all those things -- that's their job. I have a problem with the lack of oversight and lack of limits on how/when/where they use those capabilities, and whether they use them on US citizens for anything other than counter-terrorist activities.

Good for the NSA that they've done a good job figuring out how to compromise everything. Bad for the NSA that they've compromised our own security in the process (backdoors, inferior encryption etc), and bad for all of us that there isn't any effective oversight or limit on their activities.

Well said. Problem is, this is totally the executive branch. Neither party is interested in curtailing the power when they are wielding it, and neither party can curtail the power when the opposition are wielding it.

If your budget is billions of our tax dollars and you have almost nothing to show for it, is it time to re-consider the model? The President's Commission on the NSA suggested that some cost/benefit analysis should be done. The only recent terrorist attack in the USA at the Boston Marathon was nowhere on the NSA's radar. IMHO, they are doing little that is effective. Judge Leon found the NSA could not point to one case where the NSA's work had been the prime solution.

But, those issues bypass the enormous Fourth Amendment violations we now see. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the police may not put a GPS device on a car, in a 5-4 decision. When the NSA issues finally hit the Supreme Court I think you will see Scalia move into the Libertarian/Progressive camp, but what will Sotomayer and Ginsberg do? Sotomayer worked in the Justice Department, so I would think she might be sympathetic to the government's case. Those cases should probably produce a landmark ruling that guide democracy, or the Stasi State, for years. Just as Citizen's United is the worst decision since the Dredd Scott Case, a badly thought out Supreme Court ruling might be the legal and practical end to privacy as we have historically known it. Grab your popcorn, the show will begin soon. (Ok, it might take a year, but preparation is .9 of the law. )

Excellent points. Sun Tzu said "He who defends everything defends nothing." We're seeing this maxim's corollary - "He who examines everything examines nothing." By extending its reach to cover every American and a big chunk of non-Americans, the NSA ensures it cannot devote sufficient resources to what it really needs to see - assuming it can even notice it. This is not a new problem - in World War II we intercepted and generated so much intel that much of it either never got examined or was examined too late for it to be relevant - but the NSA seems to have perfected it.

Even worse, the easiest way for the NSA to get results is to create them. Go on Islamic (or right wing patriot) web sites, find the craziest people, nurture the crazy, attempt to prod them into taking action, offer to sell or give them the means to carry out violence, then arrest them and loudly proclaim that you've stopped a terrorist plot. Thus even when the NSA is producing results, it may well be missing the actual plots and only busting plots in which it is a co-conspirator.

 

[DisgruntledVirus]

We seriously need an "electronic bill of rights"... the bill of rights was great in the pre-electronic age. However we are trying to interpret it under an electronic world. The game has changed. The world is very different today, and we should have a bill of electronic rights. It doesn't seem that the current bill of rights is interpreted by judges and the government to mean the same thing in an electronic world.