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On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked:
In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.
I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.
[...]
There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.
Brennan's complete remarks are available in video via C-SPAN.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by mendax on Wednesday November 18 2015, @06:14PM
Well, does it? The French don't have quite the same civil libertarian restraints applied to them as the intelligence community here has, and as a result they have a much greater surveillance state than we do, and even that failed to detect this plot. Of course, the intelligence community can blame strong encryption but that won't change anything. The encryption genie is out of the bottle and nothing is going to stuff it back in... short of learning how to factor the product of two large prime numbers fast which, apparently, the NSA has yet to figure out. And even then there are other methods, e.g., steganography.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday November 18 2015, @06:17PM
The French don't have quite the same civil libertarian restraints applied to them as the intelligence community here has
Violating the constitution and people's liberties en masse by collecting data on their communications is showing restraint?
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:26PM
The difference is that the French can do it legally. The NSA probably is breaking the law; the courts haven't determined that yet.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday November 18 2015, @10:41PM
The NSA's unconstitutional unethical democracy-destroying mass surveillance definitely is unconstitutional.