How am I supposed to know about the "multiple layers" within the NSA?
Intelligence oversight is a multilayered function in every member of the Intelligence Community. So, if you want, you could read the publicly available material which tells you so. Every supervisor is responsible for oversight of those that he manages, and is professionally and legally responsible for any failure to do so. For example, we once had a guy who did an illegal flight path for a UAV to find out if his wife was cheating on him (she was). His subordinate was legally required (or he would have been complicit and equally guilty) to report the possibility of an oversight violation, his boss was legally required to launch an invesetigation. Upon seeing the flight path, and he sent the guy up for charges and prosecution, and the guy lost all rank, went to jail, and the wife got the house.
Should I not be worried when a whistleblower says that all the restrictions are on a policy level, with zero technical enforcement?
Sure you should be. Until we learn (as we have) that said whistleblower is an idiot who apparently has little direct experience with the program he's pretending to be an expert on.
In fact, I'd say that the apparent lack of discrimination in what the NSA collects is evidence, in and of itself, that oversight is not working very well.
Then you would say wrongly, because the scope of collection that the NSA has engaged in was laid out before and blessed off by the leadership within the NSA, the Director of National Intelligence, two different Presidential administrations, both branches of Congress, and the Judiciary. There literally is not a branch of government that could have been brought in to provide oversight over this project that was not.
The scope of this program is astounding.
perhaps. All this information was already collected anyway, so perhaps I'm just less surprised that it's been made available for counter-terror purposes.
Again: Congress apparently only hears what the NSA wants to tell them. The FISA court operates in secret, and from the outside barely seems to be doing more than rubber-stamping requests. And again, combined with the scope of the programs, it's really not inspiring confidence in the idea of "oversight."
Oh. So your problem is less that this program is structured without oversight (which would be wrong) and more with the fact that you don't trust your elected representatives to function as such.
Again, I don't need access to their databases. What's required are broad outlines, better oversight, and perhaps a bit of restraint when it comes to spying on, well, the entire planet.
See, when you say that, you do so in a way that makes it seem like you have not done much work defining what you are actually talking about; but I'm ready to be convinced. Tell us what you want in terms of "broad outlines" and "better oversight". How about this? The NSA conducts signals intelligence. If it emits, the NSA will try to capture it and find out what it means. Unless it's a US person doing the emitting in which case those emissions are protected without a warrant and oversight from the other two branches of government (what Constitutional folks call "checks and balances").
Right. So anyone who isn't in the US has no rights whatsoever.
sure they do. All men created equal with inalienable rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc. But as far as being collected on? Yes, the Intelligence Community is allowed to collect on foreign entities, subject to treaty considerations. Within the Intelligence Community, some members such as the FBI, the DEA, and the Treasury Department are allowed to collect on both foreign and domestic entities.
Yeah, I can't see anyone getting upset over that, or coming back to bite the US at some future date....
Who the hell did you
think we collect on? Aliens? Orca Whales?
It's a single branch of government, yes. It's all operating under direction of the President.
oh I bet he wishes that were true.
In actuality, Presidents have at best low to mediocre control over the Executive Branch. They can issue Executive Orders, which have the force of law for all Executive Members, but the Executive Branch of government is better understood as a collection of competing fiefdoms with differing worldviews, priorities, and institutional incentives. It's actually quite difficult for a President to really say that everything is happening "under him" - the ability of myriad faceless bureaucrats to impede or halt his agenda is a pretty widely commented on phenomenon within studies of political science.
And ultimately, the program is run in secret, reviewed in secret, evaluated in secret.
Naturally. It's a
secret program designed to do
secret things in
secret. There are a couple of words for making it "not secret". Those words are "Spillage", "Espionage" and "Treason", and all of them are punishable by law.
How would we know if there is any independent agency within the Executive branch that's checking on them? What motive would another Executive agency have to cross the NSA, by questioning their actions?
:lol: money, influence, and power, dude. Inter-agency rivalry is constant, and has often served as an impediment to the IC.
Wow. Impressive oversight. I'm sure it's effective. I feel much better now.
:shrug: both houses of Congress maintained oversight over and blessed this program. If the general membership turned out to be too lazy to show up to the briefings the NSA provided them, then your problem is not with the NSA, its with your congress.
No, dude, I get the concept. I'm also well aware of how abusive domestic spying was in the not-so-distant past.
Apparently you do not, as you seem to assume that the former is a synonym for the latter.
Not to mention there are a few notable instances of people getting their hands on classified data, and *cough* releasing it to journalists, without the NSA noticing in time to stop it.
yeah, isn't it interested how this agency that you are so sure is reading everything isn't even willing to abuse it's power for self defense?
It certainly doesn't appear that the FISA courts or Congress are finding out about miscreants, nor is the general public hearing about it.
what miscreants? do you have evidence that anyone in the NSA has exceeded their statutory authority an violated intelligence oversight? if so, you should immediately report it to the nearest inspector general with a top secret security clearance, so that these individuals can be prosecuted.
then we have come to an impasse. the intelligence community is a vital part of national security, responsible for saving thousands and thousands of American lives and furthering American interests across the globe. It, like a military, is a necessary part of survival in the international arena, which is why every single major state has one.
IMO it is healthy to regularly review what the intelligence community does, and what we want them to do.
Agreed - and that is why we do so through the mechanism of the intelligence oversight committees.
But at least with the CIA, the military, Treasury and so forth, we actually have an inkling of what they do, and can discuss whether their actions are appropriate.
:doh The NSA is run by the DOD. It
is part of the military intelligence community. That's why its' head is a General Officer.
You have no more knowledge of what these embers of the IC are doing than the NSA. The protections afforded to information of the same classification levels are pretty much uniform.
They also don't reap every single phone call, every email, every VOIP call and so forth. I.e. the scale of what the NSA might be doing definitely sets this into new territory.
:lol: Again, the NSA falls under the DOD.
Do you think maybe you should educate yourself about the IC
before you decide to go Enemy Of The State on it?
I certainly shouldn't have to uncritically accept whatever policies the intelligence community thinks are "good for me," because they say so.
That is correct.
Wow. Would you like some hyperbole with your melodrama?
You're going to have to use that bit of triteness on someone who hasn't buried people due to intelligence failures. We don't live in Kant's world of universal freedom loving republics where everyone respects the rights of man. We live in the real world, full of mean, dirty, dangerous, and brutal actors who actively seek us harm.
Not to mention that we currently have no way to know if the program is actually doing anything beneficial. We basically have to take it on their word that it's thwarted all these terrorist threats. See how these kinds of things don't build a lot of confidence?
Publicizing intelligence collection efforts destroys those efforts. Destroying collection programs means that policy makers make less informed decisions, meaning that they make worse decisions and are unable to adequately responding to rising threats. Having policy makers that make less informed decisions and are unable to adequately respond to rising threats means that the interests and safety of the people of the United States is jeapordized, and the government has failed in its' constitutionally mandated task of providing for the common defense.
However, all classified information comes with a "declassify date", at which point it gets made publicly available upon review to ensure that there wouldn't be any kind of catastrophic effect on our friends (for example, if someone who spied for us in the Soviet Union is still living in Russia 30 years later, we won't publicize his name if we think it means that Putin would have him arrested, tortured, and killed).
It's a good way to demonstrate the reality - all this stuff? It was already being collected and stored. For decades.
If knowledge of this data collection renders it useless, then why do we still use phone records, fingerprints, DNA, and other well-known forms of evidence to build cases against criminals?
Because (thankfully) criminals are A) stupid B) often bank on a failure to adequately collect which is a pretty good bet because it often occurs and C) criminals actually generally avoid these publicly known collection methods.
As an example, however, after 9/11 when it was just Special Forces running around on Horseback, we were tracking Osama bin Laden pretty well by his phone. He didn't know at the time that we had the ability to geolocate his phone, and so he was using it to relay commands to his forces in Afghanistan. We were about to nab him. That's when some idiot congresscritter went on live fricking national television and announced that he was confident we would get Osama bin Laden pretty soon because we were able to track the location of phones.
You already know the end of that story. He immediately dumped his phone, developed a phobia about electronic emitters, and it was another decade plus before we got him.
Public knowledge of collection capabilities encourages opponents of the United States of America to
avoid those collection capabilities - that's why other states and even non-state actors also avoid our IMINT satellites. Everyone knows when they are overhead.
Capabilities sources and methods are among the most highly guarded of our secrets, because they are the secrets that allow us to actually
function in intelligence.
If the system is so effective, then why didn't it catch the Tsarnaev brothers?
Think about that for a minute. If the system is so pervasive and ubiquitous, why
didn't it catch the Tsarnaev brothers?
Again, I'm not saying I need to know every single detail. I'm saying that this program is unprecedented in size and scope, and maybe if we had proper oversight, we would a) have a little more input on it, b) a little more knowledge of it, and c) the opportunity to decide if it's really worth it.
Proper oversight was already being exercised over this program, and you have not exactly filled anyone with confidence that you have any grasp on the level of granularity that you even want, much less the cost/benefit associated with providing it to the public.
