Additional FISA Documents Declassified
odni.gov
odni.gov
The information released today includes a number
of internal NSA documents, training slides and
internal guidance, which demonstrate the care
with which NSA’s foreign intelligence collection
pursuant to Section 501 is run, managed, and overseen.
If enough people felt this way, things could be a lot better. I can forgive someone who believed the rhetoric the first time, even though a lot of us didn't. It's a lesson we all have to learn, and if the lesson is learned, the mistakes aren't so bad.
Unfortunately, a majority of voters didn't think this was enough to prevent them from re-electing him in 2012, nor I fear, from electing another person just like him in 2016.
The root of the problem is that the majority of voters like this stuff. Americans are, by and large, terrified of terrorists (imagine that) and want their government doing everything imaginable to stop it. Never mind that terrorism is less dangerous than e. coli or sharks, it's an important issue to a lot of people. That is what we need to change, not a few politicians. Convince the public, and the rest will follow. Not that I have any clue how to even start.
Start with Hollywood. Perceptions can be changed through entertainment. It has worked well to promote equal rights. Bit by bit, entertainment can acclimate us to new ideas.
White House Down is an interesting example of a starting point:
[spoiler alert]
You can feel "terrorized" that the NSA might use its powers for great evil, but to the average voter that probably seems less likely than one or a series of high casualty attacks by foreign nationals.
I don't want to get into an argument about how we're all deeply harmed whenever laws are violated, and especially when the powerful can violate them at will. Sure. But the mortality rate argument is a loser: The public and policy makers will never make these kinds of serious decisions based only on a death toll. If they did, we'd have banned passenger cars decades ago.
That's not to say that I don't think it's serious. But food safety is much more fundamental.
No, decisions will not be made based purely on death toll. But we must demand some sort of rational basis, and when it comes to terrorism, there is none.
Whether its value is a good tradeoff vs. the resulting privacy concerns is a good debate to have, but surely the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events? The Marathon bombings alone caused more havoc than a typical e. coli outbreak, even if everyone had stood up, shrugged, and gone about the rest of their Monday afternoon business without a care for their attackers.
I think most citizens would like it to do both when the tradeoffs required make sense.
And no, I don't think terrorist attacks would generally cause lots of havoc if people could be convinced not to be terrorized.
I don't understand how you expect a bomb going off in a large crowd to fail to cause havoc, no matter how sanguine people are about it.
If something like the Boston bombing were happening once a month, people would rightfully be pretty agitated. Yes, more people are killed and maimed daily by automobiles, but people are not being irrational when they fail to be "terrorized" and demand the government ban automobiles. They understand perfectly well that banning automobiles would have a cost greater than the benefit. They support NHTSA's role in making automobiles safer, because that tradeoff makes sense. Another tradeoff that makes sense to a lot of people is letting the NSA run data analysis on phone call databases to try to identify attackers both before and after the fact. The cost to them seems minimal vs. preventing or capturing the perpetrators of even one attack.
If I understand you correctly, you're basically saying that people have decided, based on the information available and the priorities they have, that the government's reaction to terrorism is what they want. They think the tradeoffs in terms of civil liberties and government spending are worthwhile. And I agree, they DO think that!
But that does not translate into "the government has a responsibility to try to prevent mass casualty events". If the people decided that policy for terrorism should be more like policy for cars than policy for threatening foreign powers, then the government should follow suit. There's no implicit responsibility to treat some causes of death differently.
As I said way up in my original comment, the problem here is the people themselves. We must convince the public to take a more rational approach to terrorism, one in which the effort expended in countering it compared to the potential threat it poses is more in line with the ratio dedicated to other threats.
One part where we disagree is where you say that people would "rightfully be pretty agitated" with one Boston bombing a month. Would people be "rightfully agitated" if a similar number of deaths and injuries was happening in Boston every month, but spread out across the entire month? Because I'm pretty sure that's the case, but most people don't get agitated, and we tend to think that those who do get agitated at the daily grind of death and mayhem that makes up life are a bit insane.
That was pretty much the public explanation given when the order for declassification was issued (it was framed as an effort to reassure the public about the programs in the wake of the leaks), so that shouldn't be too surprising.
James Clapper and Co are not qualified to determine what the US people need to know here. A mutually trusted third party or parties should be going through the documents and figuring out what should be released.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/victory-government-rel...
I didn't realize that our intelligence services were using Tumblr as an official communications channel now.
from the about us column. You could probably credit Obama's social media team, or maybe the man himself. Interesting.
Obama himself is a speaker, a talker, a rephraser. And a very articulate one. His intelligence (or lack thereof) has never truly been revealed because he never does the thinking.
In all seriousness, how would we realistically ever find out which criminal cases were hinged upon parallel construction of evidence? The whole point is to conceal from judges and prosecutors (not to mention defendants) the true nature of the evidence-gathering techniques used. This completely flies in the face of due process of law, and I doubt anyone in government would willing own up to specific examples.
They were able to breach the security perimeter of a nuclear facility and erect some home-made banners promoting pacifism. What happened to the contractor that was supposed to be securing the site? Nothing.
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7
They're being charged as terrorists under the full power of the law.
Comment [a1]: Graphic of 2 terrorists sending email to each other, show email indicating threat and containing a number without country code