The NSA: An Inside View

It doesn't even have to be on the level of COINTELPRO. See here:

> The history of the FBI Lab hasn't been without controversy. Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, who joined the FBI in 1982 and served as a Supervisory Special Agent at the Lab from 1986 to 1998, blew the whistle on scientific misconduct at the Lab. In a subsequent investigation, it was found that evidence had been falsified, altered, or suppressed, or that FBI agents had testified falsely, in as many as 10,000 cases, resulting in many false convictions. More than a decade later, cases were still being overturned because of this massive fraud.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Laboratory#Controversy

He only describes his view from inside the system NSA. But it is the outside which really worries me. Governments and legal boundaries can change. DHS and TSA were such changes. And both agencies have a big impact on the lifes of citizens and visitors.

OP admitted, that NSA already gathers data of US citizens. But the current legal boundary prevents analysts to just add a "selector", except when it is allowed by a (secret) court. So the data is already there with the technology to query or filter it, which is a bad thing in itself. But it is a tiny change in the law, that would make it legally right to include US citizens' data into the query.

Looking back at DHS, TSA and the overall militarization of the security forces, it is not hard to imagine that NSA is an easy pick for a reactive government responding to the next terrorist threat.

BTW. When have government institutions ever been dissolved? Isn't that a lot harder than creating new ones or changing the rules in favor of more control?

I spent four years in (2 years longer than the OP), but worked on a substantially broader swath of intelligence areas and in much more policy-oriented positions, and I can tell you that the vitriol that's been displayed on HackerNews is incredibly tiresome to see, because you are all missing a very key point about how the NSA conducts business (which I've pointed out in previous posts).

The key point is this: the NSA does not create policy for its operations. Those are written into law through executive, legislative, and judicial processes, and the three should theoretically balance each other out, which the public currently deems as not doing a sufficient job of balancing. The NSA acts as an instrument -- the employees (to include the director) are directed through a system of reporting and feedback, and determine how best to act in order to obtain more positive feedback from customers of the reports.

This isn't some theoretical system I'm talking about -- it's a database of reporting with attached feedback. The feedback shows who consumed the report, whether or not the party found it useful, any enclosed comments about the report, and how high up the report went. If my report made it into the president's daily brief and more information about the reporting subject is desired, that will show up in the feedback, and thus I have my "direction".

How does this translate into real world operations? Here is a theoretical conversation between Mr. Policy and Mr. NSA:

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Mr. NSA: Here is some information I found about country X, which might indicate that they're conducting operation Y.

Mr. Policy: I would like to learn more about operation Y, and country X's intentions to expand it.

Mr. NSA: I don't currently have the capability to expound upon operation Y, unless you grant me the authority to access datastore Z.

Mr. Policy: We took a vote, and you have access to datastore Z on a thirty day trial basis, but then must shut down operations if nothing of value is found.

Mr. NSA: Here is the information you requested about operation Y and country X's intentions.

Mr. Policy: This information was not useful in directing policy, therefore datastore Z is to no longer be accessed.

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From this, I think you can extrapolate my point. Do you blame the scalpel for being too sharp, or the surgeon for handling it incorrectly?

> Do you blame the scalpel for being too sharp, or the surgeon for handling it incorrectly?

None of the above, if anything I'd blame people for being mere tools.

The key thing that worries me about it is even if no-one reads all those emails that are stored, what if they are mined for data and used to make predictions?

Last.fm can guess the type of music I like about 25% of the time, Google can guess the type of information I'm interested in around 70% of the time (figure based upon potentially ambiguous web searches I do). Neither of those services have very much metadata from me about their respective subject areas.

If the NSA/GCHQ/5 eyes are hoovering up all this metadata about pretty much everything I do online, that's a ton of information to start mining for patterns - whilst legitimately say that no employees are reading it.

What sort of predictions can they make? What's the accuracy of it? When do they start acting on the predictions thrown up by the system? And who polices that?