"Two reasons why people do stuff - one that sounds good and the real reason." - JP Morgan
U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
11–20 of 135 posts
Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
#12How can you prove that clandestine operations do or do not help? If it goes well, no one will ever know. If it fails, it's either covered up or is a huge scandal. It seems contrary to the entire idea of cover intelligence to claim success or failure.
Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
#13> "U.S. surveillance laws failed to counter terrorism" > "The patchwork of U.S. surveillance laws has proven ineffective at countering terrorism" Where is the proof? I can not find it in the article.
Intel work is like IT; if you're doing it right, nobody knows you're doing anything at all.
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Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
#14I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.
Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
#15About EO 12333:
> They stipulate that any evidence of an American committing a crime that is found incidentally in the course of foreign intelligence operations must be shared with the Justice Department. Furthermore, they permit analysts to use metadata (logs revealing who contacted whom and when they did so) to investigate unknown associates of targeted suspects.
And I thought FISA section 702 was bad. I don't think long-time surveillance laws fighter Senator Ron Wyden has ever mentioned in public that EO 12333 was also capable of backdoor searches on Americans, just that FISA 702 would enable that. But it sounds to me like both of them enable backdoor searches on Americans and fishing expeditions.
Seriously, how is the NSA dragnet finding crimes Americans are committing and then alerting law enforcement about it not a fishing expedition? Isn't that supposed to be unconstitutional?
Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
#16I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.
Yes, the point of the article is that there are very few if any checks and balances.
If you support anything but paying lip service to checks and balances then you would support restricting US government's surveillance powers and requiring a warrant in many more instances than it is required today (almost never when it comes to the NSA, and now the FBI and other agencies can warrantless look at your data before going to court, too, thanks to the latest FISA extension).
Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
#17How can you prove that clandestine operations do or do not help? If it goes well, no one will ever know. If it fails, it's either covered up or is a huge scandal. It seems contrary to the entire idea of cover intelligence to claim success or failure.
When the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says they aren't really effective
Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
#18How can you prove that clandestine operations do or do not help? If it goes well, no one will ever know. If it fails, it's either covered up or is a huge scandal. It seems contrary to the entire idea of cover intelligence to claim success or failure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
This article links to a report that gives a number for terror incidents and how many were foiled.
You can see a map here: https://www.typeinvestigations.org/domesticterror/ which talks about the incident, and in the case of foiled incidents, links to something like court proceedings. This doesn't necessarily show clandestine operations led to foiling them vs regular police work, though...
Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
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Ugh. It's a fine article, but I worry the VPN industry's constant mis-selling of services under the banner of privacy will eventually taint the message.
Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism
#20I'm not sure what the alternative is. Without some form of surveillance, you're never going to catch terrorists or other bad actors. You do, however, need to make sure there are strong checks and balances in place to ensure that people don't use it for nefarious purposes or for personal gain.
It can be done, the intelligence agencies just need to find new ways to identify terrorists or prevent terrorists from causing harm.