> Between 2014 and 2017, 13 Islamist terrorist attacks took place in Europe after which 24 offenders were convicted. All 24 of them - one hundred per cent - were already known to the authorities prior to the attack and had been classified as violent. Right below: > What we do need is better trained and better equipped police officers so that they can identify potential threats faster. If the violent offenders are alr…
There are also cases where the FBI will radicalize and entrap people like the Liberty City Seven. A great fictionalized movie about these situations is The Days Shall Come (2019).
It has been argued that PRISM was more about corporate espionage under the ruberic of counter-terrorism than anything else. In the book The Shadow Factory, James Bamford points out the ridiculously low prices that were available for overseas traffic to be routed into the US and then back to a neighboring country, sometimes even a different region of the same country... anything to get overseas telecoms to route traff…
'Whatever makes the rich richer is what they're doing' is probably a decent first order approximation, and under that logic corporate espionage does seem very likely.
> PRISM is a phenomenal waste of trust and money. Only if you believe its stated purpose is its real purpose. I suspect it's actually a huge success if you measure it against its real purpose.
I'm not asking in an accusatory manor, I'm generally curious. What do you think it's real purpose is?
Increased power for the people that control it.
(With a bonus side effect of lots of government dollars funneled to certain Contractors.)
You'd think if it had stopped any attacks, the program's proponents would be shouting it from the rooftops. But no- nothing. Not even attempts to lie ("oh, we stopped several attacks, but we can't tell you anything about them...") PRISM is a phenomenal waste of trust and money.
I would think the opposite: If the program was greatly effective, I would want a blog post just like this to capture the bad guys' attention. That way they might tend to be less careful and make it easier on me.
You can't prove that would-be terrorists weren't dissuaded by the knowledge that PRISM existed. What is the point of terrorizing a country that is already terrorizing its own citizens through unwarranted prying mass surveillance?
> You can't prove that would-be terrorists weren't dissuaded by the knowledge that PRISM existed.
This is the tiger repelling rock theory of anti-terrorism. I have a rock that repels tigers. There haven't been any tiger attacks when I'm around, so it must work.
I prevented one terrorist attack by myself. Nobody knows that, because attack was prevented.
The government prevents thousands of terrorist attacks every year by being tolerable enough that the number of people filling rental trucks full of explosives is zero.
I referenced PRISM in a comment to a recent Apple article on HN a couple of days ago. It triggered HN and Apple fans and the comment ultimately got shadow-banned by moderators.[1] Anyway, it’s astonishing that so many people willfully continue to use products/services offered by the core companies that are members of PRISM surveillance. Members provide access to ALL user data/information to NSA et al. Here are some t…
It triggered HN and Apple fans and the comment ultimately got shadow-banned by moderators.
No, the moderators appear to have done no such thing. But with that opening sentence, and closing with the equivalent of "wake up, sheeple!", I can see why it got downvoted to a light gray.
While I'm absolutely opposed to PRISM and similar programs, I think it's a little disingenuous to suggest that the only potential value was from stopping terrorist attacks. Look at this leaked powerpoint slide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism-week-in-life-straig... If you want to argue against PRISM-like programs, it would behoove you to tackle their actual purpose. We shouldn't just argue that PRISM isn't g…
That's a good point. While we don't know the details, it's entirely possible that it didn't stop any terrorist attacks because the intel gathered allowed the USA to remove the conditions that would have allowed an attack to be planned in the first place. Ideally, that's how it would happen, just like it's better for an organizations IT department to proactively prevent networking problems than trying to mitigate issu…
I think the larger point is that the goal of vast majority of intelligence gathering programs - and judging by the slides this seems to include PRISM as well - has nothing to do with stopping terrorist attacks, which is a tiny subset of what intelligence agencies do. Judging their utility by counting the number of terrorist attacks they've prevented is mostly a meaningless exercise.