101–110 of 145 posts
>Of course I'm not going to give details on the meeting, except to say that it was candid and interesting. Why wouldn't he?
A group of congresspeople agree to have a candid conversation with you behind closed doors, and you publicize the details of what was said. Good luck getting another conversation with anyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing you must understand is that I do not actually consider a society with any investment in state secrecy to be actually functioning. Actually, a society ruled by secrets is little more than a mafia, playing charades. But I see you are limiting your viewpoint to 'what is real' and not to 'what could be done differently about the situation'. That's okay with me, to 'keep it real'. But I have no desire to live in…
What about government commercial negotiation information, surely the government can (should!) keep that secret at least until the negotiations are over, otherwise every single purchase made will have them ripped off due to information asymmetry. Troop locations are another one. If you know exactly where everything is it gives you a huge advantage, and to a lesser extent where they've been. Surely there are some secre…
Turn the light on the whole thing; make all procurement open to the public, simply put a 24/7 webcam on anyone who is functioning in a government role, and let it work. Open communication is the only thing that has truly propelled the species forward .. and yes I acknowledge it is 'a radical position' with fatal flaws, but alas ones viewpoint doesn't always have to be .. Right .. now, when discussing the nature of our abundant universe..
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Robert Gates put it eloquently: the US is in its own wars of choice, and not in any war that is forced upon it. So, what do you think about the secrets that would conceal the real reasons of the war that requests to be secret?
bosma was asking: "Are there any things that should be kept secret during the course of war?". The obvious answer that he's fishing for is "Yes. Stuff that's critical to OPSEC.". [0] This is a silly question to ask. AFAICT, Congress hasn't ever been briefed on the day-to-day of wartime activities. They are often lied to about our motivations for declaring war. That's obviously a very bad thing to do. [0] The funny th…
But they're also not normally briefed on the high-level view of intelligence sources and methods, to ensure that those sources and methods remain available. During WWII it's not like the Navy briefed Congress that they could read much of the Japanese Navy's messages.
And even with that precaution the U.S. Navy came perilously close to tipping off Japan. A journalist embedded with Naval forces somehow gained information that the U.S. Navy had known Japan's fleet composition at Midway before the battle, and that was published in the Chicago Tribune. If Japan had been paying attention she would have realized that her ciphers were very possibly being read and taken countermeasures that would have destroyed the usefulness of that intelligence source.
To be clear, I think Congress has the right to have access to whatever information is needed to effectively oversee the NSA. But I don't see how that would imply all 535, every 2 years, being read-in to full TS and SAPs and given all details. That would make more sense for the specific subcommittee charged with overseeing intelligence, but unfortunately (for privacy advocates), that's the very same panel of people most supportive of NSA.
On his blog Schneier comments that this meeting was kept small on purpose. I wanted to see who was present at this meeting so I looked up some of their information. Not hard to find, but here you go. I plan on emailing each of them and thanking them for consulting someone the tech industry considers a Security SME. Rep. Logfren (Democratic) http://lofgren.house.gov/biography/ Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
(If you use Facebook) I recommend following Rep. Amash as he explains every one of his votes in a status update. It's a great way to stay informed, and he actually approaches his decisions with sensible reasoning you'll enjoy (regardless of your political leanings).
So often when I email my reps about their decisions I get canned response that don't answer the question, but Justin really does explain it.
Currently, the Intelligence Committees have special access to top secret information. Every member of Congress should have this.
With 535 of them not including staff, they really shouldn't. And clearance isn't enough, you also have to have a need to know. We just need a system of oversight that works well.
We're talking about people we trust to spend trillions of our dollars, decide if we fight a war, and make decisions that affect the entire country and world. It's some kind of Tom Clancy dream to think that their should legitimately be a higher level of clearance than elected congress and senate.
Oversight without congress? What do you mean, just some executive appointees? Maybe a private contractor bound to secrecy? Can they just be fired if the oversight is not liked?
It makes sense that you need TS/SSBI and the correct SAP read-in to be inside a given SCIF belonging to a SAP; otherwise one might leave a recording device or otherwise damage the integrity of the SCIF. Plus, the SCIF would need to be cleared of all sensitive materials before you entered. Clearing a SCIF, letting someone inside, then recertifying it would probably be the correct choice; It could be done, of course, b…
I'm not sure if you understand. Bruce knows the top secret information because he read it in the leaks. The government officials can lose their security clearance for admitting to discussing top secret things with him.
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Ok, here's an experiment for you. Why don't you broadcast every single detail of your life, every minute of it, even the parts you don't want others to see? If you don't, you must be hiding something and be committing crimes against humanity. This is how your argument reads.
You've cut out an important bit: I am not governing anyone, nor do I hold the right to murder other human beings without repercussion.
Schneier links to a Wikipedia article about Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs) and explains that he wanted to speak to the members of Congress in such a facility, but could not do so because he is denied access to such facilities as someone without the appropriate security clearances. And that puzzled me, and prompted me to read the Wikipedia article after reading Schneier's blog post submitted he…
There are. Schneier has it wrong unfortunately (or at least, was misinformed). You can enter a room approved for classified information without a clearance, you just must be escorted by someone who does have one. I've been in such a room myself without a clearance. I imagine what you were told about a special hearing room for one of the congressional intelligence oversight committees was true then and is still true now.
There is an unfortunate amount of misinformation flying around and it really detracts from what might otherwise be a productive discussion. I hope Schneier takes a but more time to double check his assertions in his next post.
"...Congress has such a difficult time getting information out of the NSA that they have to ask me." THIS PEOPLE! THIS is why the Snowden revelations are such a big deal! We have a rogue branch government with arguably little to no oversight!
Let's think about the end game. Suppose the Klayman lawsuit [1] goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and they too find the NSA's metadata collection is a 4th Amendment violation. The NSA is ordered to shut this and similar programs down. They comply. They say "we've complied." But how do we know? How do we know they didn't just spin up new collection programs, out of sight even from the overseers, or perhaps even with the tacit approval of the overseers? How would we find out?
Whistleblowers like Snowden. That's the only protection I see for us here. If the government promises they've complied, but in fact they haven't, they've just doubled down on the damage another revelation to the contrary would create. And doubled the moral imperative that a principled person would feel to leak it.
Oversight = Whistleblowers.
[1] http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/national-security-agen...