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Comment by justcommenting | Hacker News Reader

It's disappointing to see someone who is usually so thoughtful on these issues implying that the mass surveillance of the ~7 billion people on this planet who are not Americans was inappropriate to disclose.

Perhaps you meant something different, but that's not how your comment reads.

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Yes, disclosing that was inappropriate. What else do you want to know?

I'm not demanding that you agree with me, but I would push back on the idea that my argument is unreasonable.

I have conservative friends and I have an-cap friends and friends at many points in between. The an-caps oppose all espionage by any state anywhere; the conservatives think disclosure of any spying by the USG is treason. Not everyone agrees about this stuff.

This thread is rooted in a comment that expresses surprise that there are Americans that oppose what Snowden did. Well, there are a lot of Americans who oppose it, for a bunch of different reasons. So: be less surprised.

the conservatives think disclosure of any spying by the USG is treason

Neoconservatives, anyway. Conservatives as classical liberals, as well as paleocons, would largely align with the anti-surveillance side.

Neoconservatives are conservatives who believe in a muscular foreign policy focused on the middle east centered on support for Israel. Tea Party conservatives aren't neoconservatives, nor are libertarians.

I want to know why you (at least implicitly, given your comment's wording) think it was appropriate to disclose mass surveillance of Americans but inappropriate to disclose mass surveillance of others.

I didn't mean to imply that you had the "wrong" political view or even one that I disagreed with. It just struck me as internally inconsistent given the (apparently wrong) assumptions I'd made about your perspective from other comments on the topic over the past few years.

And of course I'm not surprised that there are lots of Americans who oppose what Snowden did, but as someone who tends to pay attention to your comments, I was surprised by one of the reasons you seemed to.

No modern industrialized nation prohibits foreign intelligence collection. Most prohibit domestic collection, to some extent. Evidence of domestic collection is in the public interest. Evidence of foreign collection isn't.

These threads tend to get batty very quickly. Let me lay this out a bit:

* I think NSA (and, to a much greater extent, GCHQ) are culpable for a huge amount of misconduct, much of it revealed by Snowden.

* I'm glad the Snowden documents that illuminated clear misconduct, such as GCHQ cable tapping of Google in the UK, or US collection of cell phone metadata, were published.

* I do not generally believe that people in the NSA randomly listen to foreign communications for kicks, nor do I believe for a second that they do things like surveil presidential candidates, despite what Snowden has implied. Not because people in the NSA are good or righteous or principled, but simply because nobody has the time to do that

* I believe NSA foreign collection generally happens for reasons that most people in the US support - tracking terrorist networks and counterproliferation.

* I believe the balance of NSA foreign collections operations happen for reasons that I don't like, but that are pro-forma "legitimate" and part of the competition that occurs between all countries. For instance: to the extent that NSA is monitoring the state depts/foreign offices of other countries: I'm not a fan of that, but I'm not outraged by it.

* I believe NSA cuts a whole lot of corners in pursuing those goals, especially post-9/11.

* I do have a problem with corner-cutting, and I would have a problem with evidence that the NSA was listening to, say, German telephone communications for sport, or, like France, monitoring foreign commercial communications to tip off domestic industry, leaks illustrating that would be in the public interest.

Given this rough sketch of my worldview, it does not seem reasonable to me for the public to have a line-item veto over all the foreign SIGINT conducted by the USG. That notion seems equivalent to simply not doing SIGINT at all, which to me does not seem realistic or productive.

Just wanted to say thanks for the thoughtful reply and taking time to sketch out your views comprehensively.

Your comment left the why part of my question a little ambiguous, but I'm assuming from your response that it's a combination of because everyone else is doing it, the US sort of has to in order to remain competitive because everyone else is doing it, because it's not prohibited, and because it's not in the public interest (assuming you mean US public's interest here).

I wanted to apologize for mincing your words a bit upthread - this comment makes more clear the distinctions you draw around misconduct, "legitimate" / de facto practices, and what's in the public interest.

Thanks again!

As for the "why" - presumably it would be in the public interest for the government to spy upon notorious public enemies like terrorists or potentially hostile governments? Is there a good argument otherwise?

> I believe NSA foreign collection generally happens for reasons that most people in the US support - tracking terrorist networks and counterproliferation.

> I would have a problem with evidence that the NSA was [...] monitoring foreign commercial communications to tip off domestic industry

Then this might interest you:

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/05/us-governments-plans-use...

Well, to be fair, most Americans are unlikely to care about foreign surveillance (although I can hear Team America World Police playing in the background right about now...).

The issues that upset Americans is going to be the domestic surveillance programs.

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