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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I still haven't gotten my head around the valorization of Bill Binney, who does not appear to have been an opponent of dragnet surveillance, as he's so often portrayed, but rather of inefficient and poorly managed dragnet surveillance. ThinThread, the system he designed and left NSA over when they didn't pursue it, still left it up to NSA to determine which data to make available, and still presumed NSA would collect the same raw data.

Maybe someone more familiar with ThinThread can make a case for how that system would be acceptable to us where Trailblazer (its competing design, in the narrative one tends to read here) wasn't.

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See [1] (from 1:14:43). The difference was Binney's system (ThinThread) being designed to quickly filter out most data and retain only a relatively small amount of targeted data. The result being the target had to be specified before the data could be collected. The other system (Trailblazer) was designed to capture and retain as much data as possible, and allow targeting to occur against this enormous buffer after the data had been captured.

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/29c3-5338-en-enemies_of_the_state_h26...

This is likely the most telling premise of all Intel collection ever.

One should only operate on the premise that this is defacto

Whatever system there is in place doesn't seem to do much to address:

+ lone wolfs such as Uvalde, Las Vegas, Nashville, Waukesha...

+ Cross border drug operations

+ Transnational incidents like Nord Stream, spy balloons, COVID.

+ Military operations in Ukraine, Russia, Afghanistan

We are asked to relinquish so many freedoms and spend so much money on what, exactly?

The 'we can't tell you because it'll jeopardize all those important things we can't tell you about' argument simply doesn't hold water. There are too many intelligence fumbles to assume that there is intelligence.

Now if there was a mechanism in place to ensure that no one would rock the military political industrial complex... well that lines up with a lot of observable outcomes.

I agree with your post, but can you elaborate on the observable outcomes you mention?

Government agencies have developed incredible powers but they aren’t heroes. It’s like they have developed incredibly abilities to turn water into wine and raise the dead and yet what do they do with these powers? All they use them for is banal things like saving money on the company picnic wine bill and skipping brake checks on the company vans knowing that if anything bad happens they just resurrect the victims.

That's the problem with "secret" agencies: you don't know they're effective because they don't publish what they know or what they prevented.

You hear about successful lone wolves, they become national news. You don't hear about the people that were taken in for questioning after posting a threatening message on the internets, which flags up in the FBI's systems right away.

There's plenty of news of intercepted drug shipments. This is actually an example of the inverse, because you'll never hear about the ones that do get across. I'm sure there's a lot more that comes through compared to what is intercepted though, else they wouldn't try it.

Nord Stream was known in advance; US intelligence was aware of the attack and warned Ukraine not to go through with it: https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2478802-us-warned-ukraine-n...

The spy balloons were detected the second they took off from China. NORAD had eyes on them from launch.

I'm not sure why Covid is in your list.

Anyway, tl;dr, the very nature of this means you won't hear what's being prevented until maybe years later as things are declassified.

Well it is regular business for any sufficiently big drug operation to put some lure's in the form of smaller shipments to distract the police from the real action or just give them something to play with.

All fine unless you happen to be on the wrong delivery I guess

It's clear to me the system is in place to maintain: diplomatic, military, energy, and technological dominance so that the US can pick the winners and losers. Makes sense. Any of us would make the same decision, and the American people are not outraged because they directly benefit from these surveillance activities...and they don't even have to get their hands dirty.

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