The charter of the NSA is international signals intelligence. It is exactly their job to penetrate/eavesdrop on other people's networks.
Every other first world country has a similar agency/bureau. Perhaps not as capable.
Every other first world country has a similar agency/bureau. Perhaps not as capable.
Following the same reasoning, it would similarly be exactly military's job to kill people, with every other world country having a similar military with various capabilities... This is just semantics.
It is about questioning the very legitimacy of the exact jobs of those institutions, along with their very existence. What makes their activities so normal that we even respond, "it is their job, everybody knows that", based on definitions?
So my answer to this question of legitimacy was that, "they just legitimize it themselves, with their rhetoric on 'terrors'".
That answer would work if NSA was created after 9/11 or as part of the PATRIOT act or whatever. What was the NSA doing before? And don't you think NSA would still be doing that? My point is that NSA doesn't need terrorism to legitimize their operations. The reasons NSA came in to existence in the first place is still relevant and enough to legitimize itself.
This argument has been dispatched so thoroughly, for so many centuries that what you really did there was establish that you haven't been doing your reading. But rather than just refer you to Plato, let me address your exact situation, and we'll do it with a nice particular-general-particular teaching strategy.
The US military could lay down its arms. Likely we would need all of the peoples of the earth to lay down their arms. I assure you, no one wants peace more than a professional soldier. Lets assume it happens. But there will still be people able to rally the masses with nationalistic messages. Even if we burned every book on the making of guns, arrows, missiles, guidance systems, deleted all the information from the collective conciousness, we would still have these bad actors. And their followers would be incentivized to develop means of carrying out their nationalistic ambitions. And then there will be war. Even if it's with stones, they will make spears, arrows, crossbows, grenades, muskets, rifles, rockets, guided missiles and drones.
This generally comes down to simple engineering at a world scale: a prestressed sysem is more predictable than an unstressed system and often requires fewer resources to maintain. The threat of violence is more persuasive than violence itself.
So, onto the closing particular: the NSA. Someone will collect signals intelligence. Are you seriously asserting your government alone should abstain? Do you assert that the Germans, French, Chinese, or Pakistanis, Indians, Russians, Brazilians, or Laotians aren't clever enough to do sigint or don't have the incentives to engage in it, given the insane gradients of wealth and power across national borders?
So, yes, regulation is key. And the social outcry sends a strong signal itself. The regulations are merely an attempt to condense the social consensus to paper. The people who work at the NSA read the headlines. They read blogs. They read a lot. right? They're in sigint. They read a lot. I'm fairly certain there's are many very active debates within the NSA, at every level, about just exactly what is it that they should be doing.
Does that mean society should give them a pass? No, of course not. Holler loud. But next time, before you holler, maybe read up on Plato or Epicurus or Kant or Bertrand Russell, or somebody. And holler something new.
Bringing up names of some classical, old-fashioned philosophers as if they represent some kind of absolute "truth" never works to support an argument (see: appeal to authority). Plus, we are talking about Plato who confused actual reality with abstractions, and Kant whose ideas had have led to "instrumentation" of reason; both of whose outmoded ideas have been criticized thoroughly in recent social thought.
I would similarly suggest that you "haven't been doing your reading" on Foucault, Baudrillard, Adorno, Horkheimer, Deleuze, etc., but I am not going to do that. Still I hope that you would emphatize with my situation imagining the case that I did.
Textbooks aside, let's look at the real situation at hand with some clear, simple, direct language.
> The US military could lay down its arms.
They don't.
> I assure you, no one wants peace more than a professional soldier.
I, for one, don't believe that they do. And nobody can quite assure anyone whether they do want it or not.
> Someone will collect signals intelligence.
Why is this even necessary?
> The people who work at the NSA read the headlines.
If they really do, this makes the situation even worse because they are either too uninformed (or even stupid) to understand the ethical implications of their work, or reading the wrong headlines.
> I'm fairly certain there's are many very active debates within the NSA
But about what? To find out, just refer to Snowden documents to see what exactly they have been having debates about. By the way, how could you be so "certain" of everything?
One might or might not further counteract to my points, or comment that I am overreacting. But it doesn't really matter. The more we talk, the more get away from the actual reality of what is happening.
What is happening is, SURVEILLANCE.
Those who defend power of surveillance fear nothing more than "privacy", which they call "conspiracy".
I wish we could spend more time participating in meaningful action instead of getting lost in rhetorics.
I'd be happier if the NSA merely analyzed signals coming from foreign nations, rather than trying to penetrate the networks of said nations - even if it's North Korea.
If I were someone working for the NSA, I would not feel like a "good guy". Maybe I'm just a naive young person who hasn't lived through the brutality of a world war to know why this penetration is necessary.
I equate this to invading a foreign country. I don't feel good -- as a citizen -- waking up in this country knowing this goes on.
It is funny how Hungary is setting up a similar agency (TIBEK) currently and uses this exact same argument to get privileges other governments already enjoy.
edit: T refers to (counter)Terrorism