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U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

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Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#31

Post by Koremat6666 »

president wrote: post #14

I'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.

All of this eventually boils down to skin in the game. What price does government and its minions pay for the surveillance ? If it is too low then those powers will be abused, if it is too high then they will be less willing to use it.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#32

Post by dheera »

Most terrorists in the US happen to be white (and really just because it's the majority race), but the media and government fail to use the term "terrorist" if they are white. That in turn results in them being busy racially profiling against colored people and foreign nationals and overlooking a lot of culprits.

Also, nobody is born a terrorist. They're overly fixated on catching terrorists instead of preventing terrorism altogether. Domestic crime, including terrorism, is the result of a broken education system. If you want to fix domestic terrorism, fix education, fix mental health, fix life in general for US citizens, and a lot of problems will quite literally magically disappear.

- Number of gun deaths in the US in 2019: 15381

- Number of mass shooting incidents in the US in 2019: 434

- Number of deaths actually reported as being due to "terrorists" in the US in 2019: 0

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#33

Post by papito »

president wrote: post #14

I'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.

NSA is combing through voice phone data, and that's totally useless. As depicted in Jack Ryan (communication via an online game), the bad actors will find rather elegant ways to bypass at.

I can embed standard EXIF metadata into an image and send it to someone's facebook wall. You think NSA is looking at that?

It's not that hard.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#34

Post by [deleted] »

zzzcpan wrote: post #25
president wrote: post #14

I'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.

You can't catch "terrorists" with surveillance and even generally bad actors, except for some naive desperate people doing stupid things. What you can do with surveillance is catch dissidents, create some chilling effect on dissent and overall use it as a tool to suppress dissent. It's basically a power supporting tool, nothing more.

[deleted]

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#36

Post by kerkeslager »

president wrote: post #14

I'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.

For the most part, surveillance is irrelevant to catching terrorists or other bad actors. The track record of catching terrorists using surveillance is pitiful.

The reason is simple: terrorists and bad actors assume they're being surveiled, and take countermeasures, and those countermeasures are far more effective than the surveillance. Anyone with moderate technical knowledge can use GPG and Tor. It's not rocket surgery.

The people caught by surveillance are for the most part uneducated young men of color who are driven into low-level drug dealing by poverty, and anyone who thinks that putting these people in jail is an effective measure against drug addiction is willfully ignoring the evidence.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#37

Post by ethanbond »

burnaway wrote: post #9
datashow wrote: post #7

> "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.

Under the section "Surveillance Failures Brought to Light"

Surveillance sometimes fails != surveillance never works... obviously.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#38

Post by ethanbond »

dfxm12 wrote: post #18
jorblumesea wrote: post #12

How 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 the…

> Most of the Islamist incidents are thwarted plots, indicating a significant investment of law enforcement resources. Most of the others are successful acts in which attackers damaged property or inflicted human casualties.

Seems to say that surveillance does work, but that we're perhaps surveilling the wrong people/in the wrong proportions. It could be consequence of homegrown terrorism being, errr, homegrown, which therefore entails the much more legally tricky surveillance of American citizens. Islamic terrorism tends to be funded/trained/orchestrated abroad, where collaborators don't enjoy the same freedoms from surveillance.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#39

Post by ftvy »

datashow wrote: post #7

> "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.

There isn't any, but that doesn't mean I appreciate the USA PATRIOT Act or other likewise extra-Constitutional, domestic surveillance BS.

Re: U.S. surveillance laws have proven ineffective at countering terrorism

#40

Post by OnlineGladiator »

mpiedrav wrote: post #27
Razengan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? It doesn't even occur to you to address the issues that create "terrorists?"

Reasons behind the kind of terrorism for which mass surveillance is enforced (e.g., Muslim fundamentalists against American interests) have deep historical roots, too messy to be addressed. Britain and France had geopolitical and business interests in the Middle East since the 18-19th century. America since the 20th, when oil suddenly had all the spotlight. Fundamentalists are convinced that "the West" is the Devil o…

You're conveniently ignoring the fact that the US has historically ruined entire countries for multiple generations just to benefit itself. Maybe if we'd stop carpet bombing other countries we'd have fewer people that hate us.

Most of the problems in the Middle East, at least with regards to them hating the US, are because the US did something to directly make them hate the US. Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan - at least in their current iterations - are all problems the US created. This is barely even beginning to describe the list of atrocities the US has committed against other countries.

The US has terrorists because the US creates terrorists, sometimes from us terrorizing other countries that are too insignificant for the world to take notice.

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, look into the history of US drone strikes just for a very recent example of the US leveraging its military superiority to decimate other countries. What's interesting is it gets worse regardless of the president.

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