I wish somebody would ask whether computer-transcribed conversations are considered to have been "listened to".
Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#22This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…
Are you saying that the U.S. has more than ~300 people overseas actively working on terror plots at any given time?
You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked. The major reason for why the program exists is to detect and break-up one-off major terrorist plots so even if the NSA was detecting all worldwide terror plans against the U.S. the number of people they were tracking would never be very high.
This is what all the people saying that the risk of dying from terrorism is so completely low have been reminding us, remember?
Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#23If you look at the growth of the no-fly list, 300 sounds like an implausibly low number considering the likelihood of adding-to-the-list whoever is on the receiving end of each call. No Fly List Statistics: In mid-December 2001, two lists were created: the "No Fly List" of 594 people to be denied air transport, and the "Selectee" list of 365 people who were to be more carefully searched at airports. By December 2002,…
I don't know, maybe something happened around the 2008-2009 timeframe to cause the executive agency to start changing the policies regarding the usefulness of lists with millions of names on it... can't quite put my finger on what that change might have been though.
Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#24Where is the title stated in the linked article?
Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#25This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…
I think a large part of the picture is being lost in the title of this submission.
It's not that the NSA's entire mission has boiled down to monitoring 300 phone numbers worldwide.
What is being stated is that "[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA". (http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021199412_nsatechd...)
Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#26I am reminded for an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart changes his grade from 'F' to an 'A+'.
Homer: [incredulously] A-plus?!? You don't think much of me, do you boy?
Bart: [almost proudly] No sir!
Homer: You know a D turns into a B so easily. You just got greedy.
Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#27This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…
I think a large part of the picture is being lost in the title of this submission. It's not that the NSA's entire mission has boiled down to monitoring 300 phone numbers worldwide. What is being stated is that "[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA". ( http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021199412_nsatechd... )
I guess my point was that if they only use it 300 times, is it really worth having the program around given the combo of costs both in privacy and dollars?
Of course there is more at play here, but they should be selling how many terrorist attacks they avoided, now how many people they snooped.
Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#28Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#29I am reminded for an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart changes his grade from 'F' to an 'A+'. Homer: [incredulously] A-plus?!? You don't think much of me, do you boy? Bart: [almost proudly] No sir! Homer: You know a D turns into a B so easily. You just got greedy. 300 phone numbers is a such low number it is completely unbelievable. I would expect a intelligence agency would be better at telling convincing lies,…
>>300 is a surprisingly round number.
"[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA"
>>For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million
You think that there are at least 15,000 terrorists/foreign targets of interest that would have any reason to call a US number?
Re: Obama does not feel Americans' privacy violated
#30This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake. Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous…
But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio.
Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP in 2011.
As an example in NYC alone 430,000 jobs and 2.8 billion in wages were lost in the 3 months after 9/11. Which in turn results in a big drop in the tax collected.
Then finally there is the after effects. No 9/11 and there would have been no costly invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan which has cost trillions of dollars and an obscene number of lives. Major terrorist acts always demand a response by the public.
So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems like something that will always be "worth the money".