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NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

reuters.com

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Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#341

Post by fulafel »

called_it wrote: post #299
fulafel wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure we both know that voters vote for representatives, not laws, so that question is not applicable. But in general, there has been popular support for things like "patriot act", and wars, as measured in polls.

There has also been even more support for the opposite, so that's just more sophistry.

Iraq war and patrioct act both saw more support than opposition in polls, when they happened (law passed, invasion was started).

Wars did get less popular when they went badly, so you can argue that they would have been shorter if public officials would have retreated when polls turned against them. But that's a separate discussion.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#342

Post by Tasboo »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #297
DSingularity wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they behave the way they do because this is their strategy by design. I feel that during the Cold War strategists realized that being a democracy is a vulnerability. Were the soviets actually willing to go there and exploit it by manipulating the American public? Who knows. But that’s not how military strategy is created.

i dont think these problems started during the cold war. much earlier... i think it began when the federal power began to chip away at the state power. theres no vulnerability in having a friendly northern ally, no eastwest neighbors, and a subjugation economy to the south. the vulnerability is internal, to the thinkers and activists... so lets keep them chained by debt & chasing tail & feeling scared

"When the federal power began to chip away at state power"

This has been a thing since the Constitution was ratified.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#343

Post by nasredin »

wallace_f wrote: post #249
fulafel wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is attributing too much agency to "government". Voters wanted slavery, and so public officials supported it. Voters wanted wars and a surveillance state after 9/11. Etc. (Same goes for the good things that the public sector does, of course) Yes there is inertia and self-perpetuation, like in any organisations, but not overwhelmingly much.

I am not so sure about that. Did voters ever vote on the surveillance state? Wars like Iraq, Vietnam, etc, were created by lies that would not exist without this agency. The WMD lies and Gulf of Tonkin lies have been well documented in respectable news outlets, so it is not like these are at all conspiracy theories. Yesterday was May 4th, the anniversary of when the agency in government murdered unarmed, peaceful war…

Voters wanted Iraq War when they voted Bush in 2004.

I remember those "love it or leave it" years well.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#344

Post by orf »

stickdogg wrote: post #293
dpwm wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I sincerely doubt the argument that dragnet surveillance has no effect. It almost certainly does. Whilst congress makes some pretty ludicrously predictably bad decisions, there must be some reports of the NSA's effectiveness. It's just whom it benefits that's in doubt. Let's face it: the number of homicides in general absolutely dwarf the maximum potential of terrorist attacks without NSA intervention. I would argu…

[flagged]

I'm still waiting for Obama's 3rd term when he is going to take all your guns and put these mysterious fema camps to good use.

Maybe next year, eh?

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#345

Post by orf »

4ad wrote: post #266
krapp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If a building shuts down it's fire warning systems and blocks the fire exits for a week because of some construction work, that doesn't mean that they should just be removed because obviously they are not needed. Do fire alarms have a 95% failure rate? Because the TSA does.

Going on a tangent here... I don't know the failure rate of building file alarms, but the damn ceiling alarms seem to have a failure rate of 99.99%. We don't use those in Europe, and every time I travel to the US I get frustrated beyond belief how they scream at me every time I cook or take a shower.

We use them in the UK, but they are sensitive to only smoke particles in the air and not heat.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#346

Post by aje403 »

twothamendment wrote: post #269
sahil-kang wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if that salary cap is true, but these agencies have the option of hiring well-paid contractors from private firms.

There is always someone willing to do a job, but that is one where it doesn't matter how much they want to pay me. No thanks, I don't want to know what goes on if I can't talk about it.

There is, but if that person is doing the job and enough people say to them "hey I like your resume please let me double your salary" then the company isn't going to have great retention

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#347

Post by lesss365 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #272
keketi wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. James Clapper is not in the NSA. It's true that James Clapper was not employed by the NSA at the time the question was asked. Are you suggesting that therefore he does not know the answer? If he does not know the answer then why did he answer the question? > 2. The NSA never recorded all domestic phone calls, and there is no evidence that they ever did, so neither Clapper nor the NSA lied about that. The questio…

> Are you suggesting that therefore he does not know the answer? No, I'm asserting that any statements by Clapper can't show the NSA lying about anything any more than statements by Trump can show the NSA lying about anything because neither is part of the NSA. > The question posed in the linked video clip is "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?". And the vi…

Clapper was Director of National Intelligence, head of all American intelligence agencies. He may not have been in the NSA, but he definitely had the responsibility of oversight.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#348

Post by prmths »

stickdogg wrote: post #289
DSingularity wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they behave the way they do because this is their strategy by design. I feel that during the Cold War strategists realized that being a democracy is a vulnerability. Were the soviets actually willing to go there and exploit it by manipulating the American public? Who knows. But that’s not how military strategy is created.

The Russians and Chinese manipulate the American public every day all day. Not to mention the Americans and Western Europeans with money and influence whose interests align with theirs. How do you think we ended up with president chump?

> The Russians and Chinese manipulate the American public every day all day

So does our media, government agencies, NGOs, Canada, Britain, Israel and many european nations. But lets scapegoat the russians and the chinese.

> How do you think we ended up with president chump?

Certainly not because of the chinese or europeans. The chinese and europeans wanted hillary to win.

Let me ask, did the chinese and russians get obama elected? I love how easily people are brainwashed by the media. They say something and the mindless just repeat it.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#349

Post by tsbertalan »

haZard_OS wrote: post #332
jMyles wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a differently-worded variant of "we get the government we vote for." But that conclusion has been convincingly rejected by sound political science for quite a while now. The policy preferences of the voting constituency in any given national election are not strongly correlated to policy results. This is shown convincingly in Benjamin Ginsberg's book, "Do Elections Matter?" I strongly recommend this b…

I'm interested in the concept but do you have a suggestion for a book published more recently? "Do Elections Matter?" was published almost 30 years ago.

Well, there's [1], but see also references in this Vox article, which hedges that somewhat: [2]

[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-... [2] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#350

Post by nasredin »

sterlind wrote: post #89

The NSA plays the "Kevin Bacon" game, where selectors target an individual, their friends, friends of friends (2 degrees of separation out, iirc.) I suspect they're performing a full-take of the call contents as well, just not through the PINWALE/MARINA ingestion system. It's likely commingled with bulk traffic snarfed up by beam splitters at the telcos' NOCs, and separated on-demand from the TEMPORA buffer. At this…

IIRC it's 3 Kevin Bacons (degree of seperation), so almost everybody.

See the research on Six Degrees...

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