Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevehawk | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com