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Comment by ohitsdom | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually optimistic, but I have zero hope when it comes to the government self-policing their own surveillance programs. I think the government will interpret this ruling to a very strict practical application, and it will take separate challenges to similar programs in court to stop them.

And that's just for the programs we know about...

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There does not seem to be any incentive for government to self-police or act within the scope and bounds of the constitution. It seems if we are going to have any sort of chance at pre 9/11 level of freedoms there needs to be more push back from citizens and non-profits. This reminds me of the American Civil Liberties Union slogan. 'Because Freedom Can't Protect Itself.' I am cautiously optimistic and giving monthly to those who are on the front lines of this protracted struggle.

Picture Congress grilling someone in hearings, and then demanding they be fired.

A few dozen times.

Then there's an attack, and the President gets to lecture us about weakening security. Then everybody hangs their heads and lets the agencies do whatever they want again.

I personally believe our representatives in Congress are terrified of being the one blamed for weakening our security.

This, of course, makes the assumption that such monitoring actually does make our security stronger. But there's a lot of reason to doubt this.

Most recently, the shooting at Garland, TX. It seems the FBI knew about this ahead of time, and did a spectacularly bad job of warning the local authorities. But the attack was averted anyway, and according to the police chief there...

What does this all mean? Not much says Police Chief Bates, "Please note that the contents of that email would not have prevented the shooting nor would it have changed the law enforcement response in any fashion."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/05/11/406025002/tex...

No, it makes the assumption that the public can be convinced that monitoring makes our security stronger.

There's an enormous world of difference between those two things.

Picture the attack being something agencies knew for months but decided to let happen to teach people a lesson and revamp their operations...

(Yeah, that would never happen...)

That's to be expected. The NSA/CIA/FBI/etc all have to meet expectations that are pretty much unreasonable. We basically tell them "You're not allowed to know everything but you have to prevent everything". And when they don't prevent things we haul them before the public and whip them. Of course they'll do everything they can to work around the law.

This might be a reasonable argument if there was any direct evidence that all of the billions spent on "collecting it all" had lead to the actual discovery of any plots that would not have been found by other means. But, as with "enhanced interrogation", I am not aware of any credible evidence to that effect, despite the incredible incentive for the government to manufacture some. We knew about the 9/11 attackers before their attack, but failed to put that information to good use.

Trying to know everything does not work. Targeted, traditional police investigation works. Money diverted from the latter to the former is wasted and reduces safety.

I don't believe their mandate is to prevent everything. Yet it seems many of my countrymen will sacrifice anything so that they can have the illusion that it is true. Thus empowering many of our civil servants to greatly overstep the bounds of their mandates and duties.

>"You're not allowed to know everything but you have to prevent everything"

These programs have been in place since at least the Clinton years, yet that didn't stop, say, 9/11. Nor did it stop the recent Boston bombers. Cases we do see stopped are often by lone nutters "buying" terror materials from law enforcement agents posing as terrorits. Kudos for catching these guys, but they are completely unsophisticated enemies. The sophisticated ones don't go on AOL chat asking for plastic explosives.

There are probably practical limits with SIGINT domestically. I think the argument that stopping crime is just like detecting a hacker on your network is fairly weak sauce. Our prevention outcomes will probably be the same if we started cutting these programs.

> "You're not allowed to know everything but you have to prevent everything".

The thing is, security agencies (not just in the USA) have failed, repeatedly, to act on information they did have. Part of if may have been due to inter-agency rivalries, part of it may have been the agencies drowning in data and being unable to draw any useful intelligence from it. But with this in mind, the demand to let them gather more and more data seems unlikely to solve any of these problems, even if one does not care much about privacy.

Even with the dragnet surveillance in place, the only thing they've prevented are their contrived "plots" that they orchestrated.

And the reality is, effectiveness is complete irrelevant: the search is unconstitutional, even if it demonstrably saved lives.

Americans are just too willing to throw their freedoms at the boogie man.

Precisely--this result only occurred here because of the combination of (1) an activity that is clearly* outside the express statutory authorization, (2) a whistleblower that provided indisputable evidence of the activity, and (3) an independent judiciary that (sometimes) doesn't kowtow to invocations of national security and state secrets doctrine.

Most of the other programs are missing these conditions and won't see effective challenges.

* yes, clearly. As others note above, the drafters of the statute have gone on record saying it was not intended to authorize bulk collection.

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