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posted by azrael on Thursday June 26 2014, @02:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the wood-for-the-trees dept.

Events in Iraq seem to have taken US by surprise, despite the fact that the NSA is totally unencumbered, both legally and politically, in the intelligence it can gather there. Even if the seeming surprise is an illusion, even if the NSA anticipated the fall of cities to Islamic militants, knowing didn't stop it. That isn't a knock on the NSA. It's a statement about the limits of signals intelligence. The NSA didn't stop the underwear bomber or the Times Square bomber or the shoe bomber either. That's not a knock on the NSA. They can't know everything. And if they could, that would be a lot more dangerous than terrorism.

An analysis of 225 terrorism cases inside the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has concluded that the bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency "has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism".

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by gznork26 on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:08PM

    by gznork26 (1159) on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:08PM (#60362) Homepage Journal

    Preventing what are framed as 'acts of terrorism' was never the reason for the NSA's massive collection of data. The purpose of having intelligence about a person, organization, corporation or government is for its use in controlling what they do. The threat of revealing that information to others is enough to influence what the target does. It is the tactic of bullying, in that the objective is not to have to lift a finger to exert control.

    We have reached a point now in which people are beginning to accept that the political, social, economic, and military events that are presented as news may not be what they are purported to be, because at least some of them have been stage-managed. This is also a tactic of control. But there are still events that have been imbedded so deeply in the foundation of people's beliefs about the reasons why things are happening as they are that they are essentially immune from suspicion. That is a monumentally important success for those who are manipulating these events, and through them, the actions of people, organizations, corporations and governments.

    If you have begun to see the fingerprints of manipulation in some of these events, it is important to ask yourself which other events are you willfully blind about examining. This is nothing new.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Daiv on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:47PM

      by Daiv (3940) on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:47PM (#60378)

      You give too much credit.

      I've learned in my years that people tend to ride the illusion they are intelligent as far as they can. There seems to be this unspoken premise that the NSA is headed by some rather intelligent, strategic people. I'm certain it's absolutely not the the case. I'm absolutely convinced that anything the NSA has accomplished has been by sheer luck. Their brute force information gathering tells me they don't have any tact or strategy. They seem to be led by morons that have zero awareness of anything outside their immediate field of view and have no regard for anything outside their own desires.

      In some ways, this makes them more dangerous, and at the very least, more scary to me.

      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:14PM

        by Angry Jesus (182) on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:14PM (#60386)

        I tend to agree with you. I do not believe that anyone is sincerely trying to undermine democracy/freedom/etc. That sort of villainy simply doesn't exist outside of the occasional mental patient. What does exist is poor scoping -- everybody has their own agenda guided by their biases and it is very hard for people to rise above that to grasp a larger perspective and that's why concentration of power into into certain groups with narrow perspectives (be it governmental, religious, corporate, whatever) is dangerous to society.

        Take the recent SCOTUS ruling about cell phone searches by the police. The police are already complaining that it makes their job harder. [latimes.com] They aren't actively against democracy and freedom, they just care about their own jobs and don't really think about the larger impact of their actions. It is easy to see what is right in front of your face, long-term effects aren't black-and-white, don't have easy to identify cause and effects relationships and so they get ignored or disputed by those more concerned with what is right in front of their faces.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Geezer on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:26PM

        by Geezer (511) on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:26PM (#60392)

        Quite right. It is well to remember that while the great police states of history may have been led by evil geniuses, their enforcer underlings tended to be mere amoral sycophants of middling mental capacity and questionable sanity. Himmler, Yagoda, and Beria spring to mind, to say nothing of Clapper.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @05:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @05:28PM (#60435)

      "political, social, economic, and military events that are presented as news may not be what they are purported to be"

      duh..

      Have you ever read a news article where you have direct personal knowledge of
      what REALLY happened? Then think about how many OTHER stories there are that
      are distortions of reality, or were just fantasies of some PR department. It
      is totally dependent on the reporter's source of information and the spin they
      intend to put on the story.

      There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this week about the exciting
      marketing breakthrough of getting people to eat sugar-laden cereals at times
      other than breakfast. WTF? Someone seriously thought this is a GOOD idea?

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by gringer on Thursday June 26 2014, @08:20PM

      by gringer (962) on Thursday June 26 2014, @08:20PM (#60542)

      Preventing what are framed as 'acts of terrorism' was never the reason for the NSA's massive collection of data.

      Paul Buchanan agrees with you [youtube.com]. Here's a bit of a transcript from that location in the video:

      Terrorism is a fig leaf placed on the intelligence business to justify what they do. Terrorism is not the bulk of what intelligence agencies do. The bulk of what they do (to include the GCSB) is traditional state-to-state espionage, Increasingly cyber in manifestation. But 90% of what intelligence agencies do, in this country and elsewhere, is spy on other states (perhaps spy on commercial entities connected to a state). But terrorism is the buzzword that western intelligence agencies use to justify all sorts of sins.

      --
      Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by AnonTechie on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:15PM

    by AnonTechie (2275) on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:15PM (#60365) Journal

    NUCLEAR ANXIETY: THE BLUNDERS; U.S. Blundered On Intelligence, Officials Admit.

    The United States' inability to foresee or forestall India's nuclear tests, despite ample warnings, was a failure of both the Central Intelligence Agency and American foreign policymakers, Government officials said today. After the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee called it ''the intelligence failure of the decade,'' the Director of Central Intelligence, George J. Tenet, asked retired Adm. David E. Jeremiah, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to lead a 10-day investigation into the intelligence community's failure to detect preparations at the test site in the Indian desert. The site has been under periodic surveillance by photo reconnaissance and electronic eavesdropping satellites, which recorded increasing activity. But the images and activities they recorded in recent days were not interpreted clearly or quickly by the C.I.A., officials said.

    That oversight constituted ''a colossal failure on the part of our intelligence agencies,'' said the chairman, Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama. ''Something went wrong. Somebody failed to do their job. To let this slip up on our policy makers, the President, the Secretary of State, without a chance to intervene in some way diplomatically with India was a huge intelligence failure. If we had an inkling that they were going to detonate one or more nuclear weapons, perhaps we could have intervened. We certainly would have tried.''

    http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/13/world/nuclear-anxiety-the-blunders-us-blundered-on-intelligence-officials-admit.html [nytimes.com]

    --
    Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:37PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:37PM (#60373) Journal

      I'm becoming convinced that the main purpose of the NSA, CIA, and others is to frighten and control the American people, not to protect them or defeat external threats to the United States. They certainly are not good at their supposed jobs.

      Time for a change, friends. NSA delenda est.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by present_arms on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:30PM

    by present_arms (4392) on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:30PM (#60369) Homepage Journal

    Tell me something I didn't know. For all the information they harvest they still don't know jack shit about jack shit

    --
    http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:33PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday June 26 2014, @03:33PM (#60371) Journal

    Robert David Steele, from the earlier article, "The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1%," quoted General Tony Zinni:

    Indeed General Tony Zinni, when he was commander in chief of the US Central Command as it was at war, is on record as saying that he received, 'at best,' a meagre 4% of what he needed to know from secret sources and methods."

    So the CIA, NSA, and all the other secret agencies, despite their enormous cost, deliver little of value. And they have themselves now grown into the existential threat to our freedom.

    That's the takeaway for me this last year.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Thursday June 26 2014, @05:06PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 26 2014, @05:06PM (#60425)

      /me puts on tinfoil hat.
      Unless they wanted a divided Iraq.

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @06:05PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 26 2014, @06:05PM (#60452)

      Wow! Someone actually understood in this thread that the CIA not the NSA is responsible for interpreting intelligence. Just for that, I'm leaving your water unfluoridated for the next 48 hours.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday June 26 2014, @06:21PM

      by sjames (2882) on Thursday June 26 2014, @06:21PM (#60466) Journal

      Yes. They are pretty much all downside these days. None of their pseudo-justifications for their intrusiveness have panned out.

  • (Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:07PM

    by Kilo110 (2853) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 26 2014, @04:07PM (#60383)

    Clearly the NSA just needs more authority and a larger budget. Then we'll be safe. I pinky promise.

    /s

  • (Score: 1) by ksarka on Thursday June 26 2014, @06:20PM

    by ksarka (2789) on Thursday June 26 2014, @06:20PM (#60464)

    What I would like to know is how many "terrorism" acts they had actually prevented. If the rate of failure to do that is anywhere below 0.1% - they might actually have a good go.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 27 2014, @01:59AM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 27 2014, @01:59AM (#60688) Journal

      The thing is, you couldn't just count incidents, even if you knew them. You also need to weigh their significance. However, that data is also not available. They expect you to just trust them, when they have an impressive number of lies in their record. Not too many people have been shown to have lied to congress. (Well, actually there have been too many. And that the head of a secretive government agency should not only be caught lying to congress, but be unpunished...)

      I can imagine potential incidents that would justify their existence. The problem is, based on their known past record I'd expect them to bungle stopping the incident. And that means they don't justify their existence. They are "so bad" at preventing incidents, that I can't even decide whether it's that they are inept, or that they intentionally allow the incidents to go through to justify a bigger budget and more power. In either case, however, I don't believe that they should be allowed to continue to exist.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @07:10AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @07:10AM (#60760)

      > What I would like to know is how many "terrorism" acts they had actually prevented.

      At most one on US soil.

      That's according to NSA deputy director John Inglis's testimony before congress. [theguardian.com]