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NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

theintercept.com

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Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#121

Post by gizmo385 »

merpnderp wrote: post #86
dopamean wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm normally not in the business of defending government agencies but wasn't that interview done in an open forum? Perhaps he would have been more honest if the information wasn't going to be immediately reported on in the media.

He was testifying in front of Congress. Perjury is what he did. He later waffled about not being able to answer truthfully because of the surveillance being classified - yet he answered.

I'm legitimately curious here: Is it possible that he submitted additional testimony after the fact to the committee that he was testifying before? Or discussed the issue in a closed setting where classified material could be discussed?

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#122

Post by gizmo385 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #49
altcognito wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? They do a lot more than collecting information on private individuals. If you spent just 15 minutes researching those things honestly, you would find they have a VERY important job to do.

Problem is one part of their mission (protecting US infrastructure) often conflicts with another (foreign intelligence gathering). If you patch a Cisco edge router, both friends and enemies benefit. Honestly the NSA should be broken up into two organisations, one geared towards defense and another offense. Or just merge the foreign intelligence gathering parts into the CIA.

> two organisations, one geared towards defense and another offense

Oftentimes, the best defense is a good offense. Or vice versa. You can't realistically separate one from the other.

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#123

Post by roywiggins »

dsjoerg wrote: post #54
volkk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of a catch 22 there, right? You expect integrity, but without honesty/openness, how do you hold them to it?

You elect representatives and executives who are given security clearances and the right to great transparency and openness. When or if those elected officials are found to have abused the public trust, you punish them, their associates and their successors at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. It's not a great process but I don't see a better way for a democracy to have an internationally competitive…

Another option is, in addition to trustworthy elected officials, you can have some sort of independent oversight that isn't partisan and is independent of whoever is in charge of the executive. The UK has something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Reviewer_of_Terror...

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#124

Post by moftz »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #119
jackhack wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much blackmail material he was shown just before he dramatically reversed his opinion. I am very cynical. But then a long chain of recorded history rewards my point of view.

I wonder how many PR bots the NSA has on sites like Hacker News.

They are a government agency with a nearly endless supply of money granted to them by Congress every year without fail. They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees.

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#125

Post by cmurf »

merpnderp wrote: post #84
dsjoerg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You elect representatives and executives who are given security clearances and the right to great transparency and openness. When or if those elected officials are found to have abused the public trust, you punish them, their associates and their successors at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. It's not a great process but I don't see a better way for a democracy to have an internationally competitive…

James Clapper lies to senate intelligence committee and is outed only days later. On March 13th the statue of limitations runs out on prosecuting this crime. This data is misused and no one is punished, even for the overtly blatant crimes.

This is specious, and exposes deep naiveté about the law as well as protocol at hearings. The director was put into the position of either lying to Congress or disclosing state secrets. Insofar as the law is concerned, exposing state secrets is a far worse offense. That's just the way it works, and if you don't like it, this particular instance isn't the moment to get into a pissing contest about what public policies you don't like, and all the dumb secrets the government keeps from us, but insists we keep on paying for. You should have been more proactive a long time before this, because this moment was being set up over a decade before it happened in public.

Clapper lying is an inevitable outcome of a hyper-survellience state, which is an inevitable outcome of a servile and paranoid society. The senator should not have asked the question in an open session if the idea was to get an honest answer. If you're a senator on the intel committee, you ask this sort of question in an open session if you're trying to make a public case that we have too many secrets.

And that's exactly what that whole sequence exposes, but per usual, someone from the ignorant mass wants to hang a single person out to dry for the decisions society has made.

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#126

Post by olfactory »

chimen wrote: post #88
iambateman wrote: post #50

I, as a taxpayer, pay the NSA to be effective in defending national interests, to act with integrity, and to submit themselves to the oversight of my representatives in Congress. I have no expectation that they will be honest or open with me. Being closed is integral to their work. However they damn well better submit to oversight and respect my constitutional rights as a citizen.

How do you know they are acting with integrity without them being honest or open? It looks like a free ticket to do whatever they like and play the "trust us to be defending national interests" card whenever they see fit.

This is correct. Honesty would entail being honest with congress or with those who have been authorized to have appropriate clearance. So removing it as a core value reveals that the agency views its mission as having situations where it would reasonably veer away from such honesty.

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#127

Post by nkrisc »

pweissbrod wrote: post #9

> In response to questions from The Intercept on Tuesday, the NSA played down the alterations. Thomas Groves, a spokesperson for the agency, said: “It’s nothing more than a website update, that’s all it is.” ^^ Updating the wordage on the website was a task placed on the queue of a website administrator which was requested by the manager as a takeaway from an internal meeting reviewing core values. This explanation i…

That's like an assassin claiming what they did was no more than move their trigger finger.

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#128

Post by yters »

jstanley wrote: post #110
yters wrote: post #96

A lot of complaints against three letter agencies, who have elected officials with oversight and only hire from American citizens. Few complaints against Microgoogfacebook to whom we give all our most private electronic correspondence, have no oversight, and hire many foreign nationals who have little stake in whether the companies abuse the info they've been given. This strikes me as a bit odd.

Well this thread is about the NSA. If you go to a thread about abuses by Microgoogfacebook I'm sure you'll find lots of complaints about them and relatively few about the NSA (other than the extent to which they are harming people by co-operating with the NSA).

More broadly I mostly see articles like this posted regarding NSA, not tech giants. The latter have a better PR machine.

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#129

Post by not_kurt_godel »

moftz wrote: post #124
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many PR bots the NSA has on sites like Hacker News.

They are a government agency with a nearly endless supply of money granted to them by Congress every year without fail . They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees.

> They don't need to do PR for anyone except to gain more employees.

Which is exactly why I implied they would be primarily doing PR on sites with high concentrations of people with the skillsets they need...such as Hacker News. This would help them both directly - individuals seeing good PR and thinking "hey, I could work there" - and indirectly by way of combating the general negative perceptions of the NSA in the tech community since the Snowden leaks.

Re: NSA Deletes “Honesty” and “Openness” from Core Values

#130

Post by auntienomen »

acct1771 wrote: post #32
throwaway76025 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any objective source for your claims? If your basis is the attitude for such agencies here on hacker news, it’s understandable why you might believe those to be true, but they aren’t.

Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, etc

Snowden & Wikileads have revealed themselves as operations run by the NSA's rightful targets.
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