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The NSA: An Inside View

lorensr.me

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Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#161

Post by typon »

shitlord wrote: post #147
csandreasen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why should anyone trust in anything coming from the NSA when you are systematically lying again and again? That's a bold claim - do you have any evidence that lorendsr, who is by his own admission no longer employed by the NSA, has been systematically lying again and again? Or that historically, part of his strategy is to try to influence society or specific groups? Or are you claiming that part of the NSA's employme…

> Or are you claiming that part of the NSA's employment process is the removal of independent thought and plugging into the collective hive mind? That is most likely the reason. Even reddit doesn't jerk this hard. The OP's submission is a valuable one, even if you disagree with his views.

Of course it's valuable - as evidence of the brainwashing NSA employees must go through to justify their actions to themselves and their families.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#162

Post by mpyne »

revelation wrote: post #46
jonknee wrote: post #37

Interesting to get a look at what it's like to be inside the bubble. It's compartmentalized enough that the individual actors can justify their actions by the assumed competence and benevolence of the others. > I didn't test it, but I'm sure there was automated analysis that prevented or flagged use of US selectors. The mental leap here is subtle, but substantial. Since I have been told I can't use US selectors , I a…

Well, following his explanations, you can fail the polygraph and just do it again. The cost of failure is zero, so really just keep trying. (I personally loved the bizarre mix between cyber war, nukes and North Korea. He seems to have the mindset of a paranoid Stalin, always wary of others when he's the one terrorizing.)

> Well, following his explanations, you can fail the polygraph and just do it again.

He didn't say you had an arbitrary number of opportunities to pass, simply that the screening (of which polygraph was one of many he mentioned) is such that it's not as if NSA analysts are able to simply wander their way into the NSA so that they can then spy on the people.

That doesn't mean people can't make it through all the screenings (just ask Snowden), simply that it's one of many safeguards that are put in place to make it so difficult to land an NSA job for nefarious reasons that the many other layers of oversight and controls should be adequate to prevent gross abuses.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#163

Post by rst »

czr80 wrote: post #129
rst wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's particularly interesting is that some of the recent disclosures don't seem to be visible inside the bubble. Take this assertion, for instance: "The NSA copy of my emails won't be viewed by police or FBI investigating me about marijuana use, for instance. Law enforcement might get a search warrant and retrieve a copy from Google, but not from the NSA." In fact, it's been known for months that the DEA receives i…

This is an interesting article, thanks for sharing. Your summary does not quite reflect the article though. You say "In fact, it's been known for months that the DEA receives intercepts from the NSA in such volume that they have an office devoted to handling them (the DEA's "Special Operations Division")", which to me created the impression that the NSA was funneling large amounts of information about US citizens to…

Thanks for the close reading. I guess it depends what you think "no domestic intercepts" excludes, and how much you believe that everyone in the NSA follows the rules. Even if most of them do, a few have the tools to become a very big problem --- and the rest of the organization wouldn't necessarily know, since in an organization like the NSA, people aren't supposed to know what's happening in the office down the hall.

To start with the scope of what's available: it almost certainly includes data on US persons "incidentally" acquired in taps on an authorized target. I'm not aware of anything on DEA procedures there specifically, but as for the general rules, see here: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/11/08/the-intelligence-commun...

Of course, even if NSA analysts know that they have DEA "customers" (as they apparently call the recipients of their intelligence), it might be a breach of the rules to select overseas targets which would be likely to have domestic contacts of interest to the DEA. But given that knowingly breaking the rules in pursuit of an authorized goal seems to count in NSA audits as mere "lack of due diligence", and not classed as "abuse", I'm not sure how much comfort to take from that.

Analysis of NSA audit data from Marcy Wheeler here: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/16/lack-of-due-diligence-t...

... with further notes on the audit process, and narrow definitions of "abuse" here: http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/20/if-nsa-commits-database...

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#164

Post by lorendsr »

femto wrote: post #150
lorendsr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense taken. I was not asked to write this, nor guided in its contents by the government.

> nor guided in its contents by the government. Are you sure about this? The government tells you what is classified and what isn't. If you have ever been privy to any classified material, you will have made the decision to self-censor that information, to keep the essay unclassified. In other words, you will have removed information that the government told you it didn't want published. Granted the control wasn't ov…

I just mean that I wasn't told what to write by a USG PR person. The only thing I heard from the NSA about it was that I didn't have to redact anything.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#165

Post by moocowduckquack »

alan_cx wrote: post #117

"I am an American patriot." If anything scares me, its that. I know what he has written straight afterwards, but it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Its all very well the author trying to define the word to suit their own purpose, but Im afraid its not that easy to get others to accept it. Try using your own definition of the word "Nig r", and see how that flies. "Patriotism to me simply means t…

“Patriotism, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.”

I'm with Ambrose Bierce on this one.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#166

Post by josephlord »

It is interesting as a view into the naive and uninformed [1] view of those inside.

I suspect the screening selects for compliance and maybe against questioning authority plus the people applying May self select in that way.

Note that this was approved by the agency and therefore may have been through a filter process that removes other reports with more critical views before publication. (I am not suggesting that this author is anything other than genuine but if it was a critical view could it have been published).

I don't doubt that storing everything helps find threats but the price is far too high, whatever difference it makes.

[1] he hadn't heard of parallel construction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910972 (he may have deep particular knowledge in some areas but his understanding of the overall agency appears poor.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#167

Post by ytadesse »

csandreasen wrote: post #131

I see a lot of negativity in this thread, but I think a lot of folks should stop for just a moment and consider the opportunity that's presenting itself: a former employee of the NSA is posting online about his experience and is an active member of HN. He doesn't appear to be in a position where his continued employment with the government would be an issue (he's apparently got his own business), so he doesn't have t…

Huh? An intelligence officer is exactly the type of person who wouldn't "appear to be in a position where his continued employment with the government would be an issue" while actually still being a government employee. Who's to say that he isn't still working with the NSA?

I'm far from a routine skeptic but c'mon ... This post sounds like a PR message.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#168

Post by jgg »

Right, Loren, so:

* even though Congress was lied to/mislead about the scope of the NSA's programs, by none other than the Director of National Intelligence [1]

* despite the fact that the NSA hastily rushed to justify an invasion of Syria with misleading data [2]

* despite the fact that the NSA helped produce evidence to justify the false invasion of Iraq [3]

* despite the fact that the NSA helps to subvert crypto software and backdoor services, which makes people and businesses less safe against electronic warfare (despite the fact that al-Qaeda is at least aware of the need for building their own crypto, even if what we've seen so far is possibly crippled by stupidity) [4] [5]

* even though the NSA were unable to catch the Boston bombers (even though the ФСБ warned the US multiple times about the brothers, they were tied to Chechnya, had jihadi content on their social media profiles and were already tied by association to a homicide) [6] [7] [8] [9]

* despite the testaments from former Intel folks that mass data collection doesn't work and that Gen. Keith Alexander is incompetent [10]

* despite Alexander being unable to come up with problems the NSA's mass surveillance has solved without lying [11]

* despite the fact that Alexander is a monumental douche who used taxpayer money to have a Hollywood set designer make his office into a re-creation of the Starship Enterprise [10]

...we should be "reassured to know how capable and thorough your cyber spy agency and military command are." We should rest assured that our electronic communications being scooped up and stored couldn't ever possibly be used for nefarious purposes against a citizen of the US, that it isn't a gross violation of a person's right to privacy and dignity and that even the majority of the NSA are kind-hearted people looking out for America's best interests in the big, scary world full of North Korea's and Muslim radicals and that my virgin, uninitiated mind just doesn't understand. This isn't all just a big, dumb, out-of-control bureaucratic freak-out or an attempt to instate a Stasi-esque intelligence regime.

Fuck you and your condescension, Loren. You are a coward and a liar, unless there is some grand plot the NSA has helped unravel, Clancy-style, that you just can't tell us about (I will apologize and retract my statements when it comes to light).

sources:

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/james-clapper_n_374... [2] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin [3] http://www.thenation.com/blog/174744/remember-when-nsa-surve... [4] http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/05/nsa-subverts-most-encryptio... [5] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/mujahideen_se... [6] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/russian-off... [7] http://www.thenation.com/article/174026/there-chechen-connec... [8] http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/20/us/brother-religious-language/ [9] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/23/nation/la-na-nn-bost... [10] http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/08/the_cowboy_... [11] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/15/1247400/-NSA-Direct...

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#169

Post by pera »

csandreasen wrote: post #143
pera wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? why should anyone trust in anything coming from the NSA when you are systematically lying again and again? why should we listen to anything you say when historically, part of your strategy is to try to influence the PoV of society || specifics groups? Specifically: how are you so sure about what the NSA is doing? in your article you say that the NSA does not do SI on US citizens without a warrant, but how can…

why should anyone trust in anything coming from the NSA when you are systematically lying again and again? That's a bold claim - do you have any evidence that lorendsr, who is by his own admission no longer employed by the NSA, has been systematically lying again and again? Or that historically, part of his strategy is to try to influence society or specific groups? Or are you claiming that part of the NSA's employme…

> That's a bold claim - do you have any evidence that lorendsr

I meant "you" the NSA, not lorendsr... I don't know him.

But yeah, sorry if my distrust of people who say they worked for a government agency that has as its main PR policy lying and manipulating public opinion sounds harsh... I'm just a bit angry because I'm not a US citizen and I know that my use of pgp,otr,tor,i2p,self-signed certs is enough to make some powerful organization start registering every single move I do on the Internet.

Re: The NSA: An Inside View

#170

Post by eliteraspberrie »

sedev wrote: post #55

This reads like it was penned by someone who's never heard of the Stanford Prison experiment or Milgram's research. When I read "I have a very high opinion of my former coworkers ... NSA employees are the law-abiding type ... You take a long automated psych test that flags troubling personality traits," I take away "the NSA is full of the kind of person who won't look at the big picture, who will follow orders withou…

I take away "the NSA is full of the kind of person who won't look at the big picture, who will follow orders without exercising critical thinking, and who can be counted upon to be a Good German."

That is exactly right. Employees of intelligence agencies are selected primarily for loyalty, not critical thinking. Most people find that hard to believe, especially those inside who tend to have a very high opinion of themselves. In intelligence, recruiting independent minds is a mistake.

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