There seems to be two NSAs in the media right now: the extremely competent one that can access your email from a desktop without any oversight or trouble and the bumbling idiots who don't know more about terrorists than reporters.
Having worked in several large (public and private) organizations, I always find it amusing when people act like it is somehow inconceivable that an organization could demonstrate both extreme competence in one set of activities and extreme incompetence in a another set of activities whose domains overlap those addressed by the first set.
>The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success and merit will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability.
It meshes perfectly with every iffy organisation in history.
They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles, while being from questionable to insanely violent with some unpleasant agenda behind those smiles. Initially deal with a mafia, and it all smiles and pasta. Behind the scenes, its a different story.
So yeah, the NSA and he government are trying to present a Church of England tea and cakes at the afternoon garden party type of image. Of course they are. Meanwhile the people questioning this setup are trying to present an image people need to be worried about. The media then just present these extremes, and the citizens are expected to pick a side. As both sides become increasingly extreme, the issues loses credibility and gets swept aside by the next big news splash. while the relatively few people who actually care eventually disperse wonder what the hell just happened. This is the exact same pattern we see on almost every issue. Where is Occupy now?
This issue's only real relevance is as another example of the broken bond between those who govern and the people. And Im not sure there ever was any such bond. Lets face is, the government is basically the formalization of the rule and maintenance of the powerful over the population. There was a balance, they did used to realism they had to keep us broadly happy, in order to keep their power in place. But I think now, they are so arrogantly confident in their manipulations that they no longer care.
Heh, its like the old saying: No matter who you vote for, the government always get in.
> They present themselves as harmless and benign, offering re-assurance and smiles
But they haven't... They've made it clear that they are a potent force that fights the evil terrorists. No part of the NSA response has been smiles and cakes. They're calling for Snowden's blood and telling America that this is serious stuff.
I've heard this argument several times and I disagree with it.
Organizations are basically groups of people; it's entirely possible that some people in an organization are more competent than others. There could be extreme differences in the level of competency. Or maybe some people are competent in some areas (e.g. the technical details of surveillance) but lack competence in other areas (e.g. common sense). This could be even the case amongst the key decision-makers of an organization.
I've always found that when large organizations start a large project or begin a radical shift (like pre- to post-9/11 NSA's surveillance program), the goal is every bit as competent and well thought out as any could be, but the implementation is always rushed and rickety.
That's probably what we have here. A very sophisticated surveillance program that siphons data from all the major networks, that also misses 99% of the communications it was designed to catch because that last 20% of implementation isn't worth the expenditure.
Has it occurred to you that the NSA's competence in signals intelligence might be used for industrial espionage, with counterterrorist surveillance being a convenient cover story?
There was a time when the CIA was intimately involved with drug traffickers as part of the Contra program. It didn't go to the top and it wasn't deliberate CIA policy, it was just a matter of the CIA building tremendous infrastructure to supply the Contras that led to airfields and weapons ending up being used by the same CIA-supported individuals for drug trafficking. They ended up producing a massive cocaine import industry.
With this level of spying infrastructure and the poor oversight of agents and admins within the NSA, corrupt usage of this technology is effectively inevitable.
I've been noticing this for a long time. Any facet of government is described in this extremely inconsistent way. Think about it, the idiots that can't be trusted to do anything right are the ones in charge of the jack-booted thugs who will ruthlessly come exterminate your family for (abortion|gun ownership|bad religion|scare topic of the second). We can't trust the government to hand out lollipops to children because they will enact UnAmerican(tm) enforcement of socialist conditions on the recipients with an iron fist, that money is better spent on law enforcement and our military heros (you know, the afore-mentioned jack-booted thugs).
Somehow the organizations that align with one's ideologies are painted as efficient do-gooders in a horribly inefficient and bumbling system, while the ones that align with opposing ideologies are capable only of a incompetence at a level usually reserved for high comedy.
I think ultimately it comes from this notion of "the" government. It is easier/lazier to assume that government is a monolithic entity rather than a large organization of people, therefore complex and not at all monolithic. Since people are used to this sort of treatment, it becomes a nice dramatic vehicle for people to tell stories and push agendas, and it is so ingrained, people rarely say "hey wait a minute..."
Just for fun, pay attention and call people out on it sometime. The anti-jackbooted thugs rants and law enforcement needs more money (from the same person) crowd is pretty common in tech - note the switches in perceived competence, and position, and call people out. The mental gymnastics of retaining the position are awesome. Seriously, if there was an olympics of cognitive dissonance, people who like US politics would win the gold every damn time.
I can relate to the phenomenon you describe (people who can't, for example, decide if they are Libertarian or not). But some populations have worked out a complete, internally consistent alternate reality. Talk radio and Glenn Beck, for example, do not contradict themselves very much.
The jack-booted thugs are "the government", the ones being ordered around by Godless Communist Obama; they are taking away our guns while intentionally giving guns to Mexican gangsters and black panthers, using the IRS, preparing the Peace Corps as a Marxist militia and sending drones to kill Americans just for opposing him. No incompetence, just pure and concentrated tyranny and malice intentionally resulting in the apocalypse, because Obama and his supporters literally hate America and are literally violating the rights of Real Americans and literally preparing to exterminate them.
The ones who should get funded are types who will support us, particularly right-wing groups like Oath Keepers and militias, who won't comply with the Obama agenda and will help us defend ourselves from Obama's tyranny and restore the glory of America as a Christian state, as the founders intended. This isn't "the government," but rather "the people."
Obama and his supporters are winning right now by treachery (a brainy kind of competence) and support from archvillain "elites" like George Soros and almost every college professor, but in the long term they are corrupt and weak; the strength and purity and common sense of Real Americans will win and the cancer will be purged.
"Strength", "purity", "glory", "purged". It's frightening that people frame their thoughts in that way, as that bears remarkable parallels to the beginnings (and vocabulary) of some of the most horrific things in history.
" the idiots that can't be trusted to do anything right are the ones in charge of the jack-booted thugs who will ruthlessly come exterminate your family for (abortion|gun ownership|bad religion|scare topic of the second)"
To be fair, the thing you described sounds like they're doing they're jobs, but that they're also idiots, so it actually makes sense to me.
That reminds me of a story of someone (I think it was one of the Cambridge Spies) joining MI6 and being faced with a complete shambles of an organisation - they assumed that, given MI6's reputation for deviousness that this was just a front and that once they had been there a while they would be introduced to the real MI6. Of course, that day never came...
What technical organization could you name which didn't have those two aspects?
What about Facebook? I think we could all name things they do which are brilliant, and things that are... not so much. How much worse would it be without the market to discipline them, with official secrecy to cover their every mistake, and limited to the pool of engineers who can pass a security screening?
The picture I get of the NSA is that the poles are just more extreme. Large scale architecture is done by someone like Binney, and then there are thousands who are like Snowden, with marginal academic credentials.
The form of the argument depends on the two not meshing. The Snowden leaks provide evidence of the former case. The contradiction between that and the latter case suggests that perhaps the NSA is not being completely forthright with the public about the scope and purpose of its domestic surveillance. It's not that hard of an argument to follow, and given how tight-lipped the executive branch has been so far it's a pretty persuasive one.
Not only that, but it assumes the bumbling terrorists (the ones using cloud services) would never compromise their more clever counterparts.
Basically, if you can glean information on the clever ones by the exposure offered by the bumbling ones, then this is an obvious indirect way to track the competent ones. Not only that, but it assumes the competent ones are always 100% competent and never make a mistake.
As they say in the SE world, it's a signal. One of many.
Secret government agencies don't tend to tell you what they can or can't do. So, even if they have hacked into the bad_guys computer and decrypted the messages instructing people to place the bombs you're not going to hear about it.
In the UK we've had some weird private courts (where NOT EVEN THE ACCUSED KNEW WHAT THEY WERE ACCUSED OF (caps because really come on even I think that's bad)) and in the US I guess the intelligence is passed onto to other agencies who then claim the arrests and other evidence is used for convictions.
I know that NSA and GCHQ have very smart, capable, people working for them. I have no doubt that if GCHQ wanted to get access to my hard drive they'd find it trivially easy to do so. Whether those people are allowed to operate at that kind of level (because of oversight or internal politics or they're just doing different work) is another matter.
How competent do they have to be if they have a feed at the major providers? I don't think they are bumbling idiot; i think they are very good at maximizing their budgets and keeping their budgets safe. That's what bureaucrats do. If they have to spy on all americans to maximize their budgets they will.
That they can access my email from a desktop without any oversight is an example of extreme incompetence. Mandatory Access Control is something the NSA of the 1990's and early 2000's thought important enough to demand and to add to Linux (with their contribution of SELinux).
The NSA can competently access your citizen-grade e-mail, that's it. When it comes to real terrorist communication, they are bumbling idiots. They are wasting their time and our money.
This article wasn't written for the NSA's benefit, it was written for the average person who might actually believe that terrorists are plotting their next attack on Gmail/Skype/Facebook and thinks the NSA is justified in performing this surveillance.
This implies two options: the NSA really are idiots and don't know this (unlikely), or they are well aware of this but are using terrorism as an excuse to do the surveillance anyway.
To what end? I don't believe the US government or the NSA are saints, but it just seem odd that to think entire agencies' purposes are intentional lies in order to achieve some vague goal that surveilling everyone achieves.
An organization with government weight to throw around can get access to a lot of things. That does not imply competence. Both very competent and very incompetent organizations are capable of making a database 'accessible via desktop' and are capable of working without oversight. Your comment makes no sense.
Politicians think the public service is a literal genie, which will do exactly what they are told (but will screw up if they are given the wrong instructions). From within, everyone has a hammer, and they tell the people above them that every problem looks like a nail.
The NSA can do sigint, and data mining. Every problem requires lots of data, and if they have enough raw data they should be able to predict anything and everything. So the politicians give them more data, and the resources to process it.
There seems to be no reason in itself to believe that the truth is between two (arguably) suspicious portrayals, and merely splitting the difference won't lead us closer to any truth.
"The fact that one is confronted with an individual who strongly argues that slavery is wrong and another who argues equally strongly that slavery is perfectly legitimate in no way suggests that the truth must be somewhere in the middle."
What does that even mean? People usually say this when they want to sound wise but to me it sounds like nonsense cowardly pseudo-intellectualism. So you've determined the truth is "somewhere in the middle" of two vast extremes. How does that contribute to the conversation? It's like playing the "guess what number I'm thinking of" game and the options are between 1 and 1,000,000 and you guess "somewhere in the middle" and proudly walk away. More importantly, it adds to the idea that there is one truth, that the whole thing can be boiled down to any easy and simple truth. This isn't the case, reality is far more complicated than that.
Wow, people are reading so much more into that than I intended.
I only meant that portrayals of the government, particularly on HN lately, sometimes seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them, or a useless bureaucratic morass. I wasn't intending to make a value judgement on anything. I probably shouldn't have used the word 'truth.'
So, if you're a death-dealing junta, you can always soften criticism by advancing a completely contrary lie? Or alternatively, if you want to attack a group of Girl Scouts, make up and tell terrible lies about them.
>seem to assume that it's some kind of ultimately corrupt, death-dealing junta that will put you on a blacklist for just thinking about them
I haven't seen anyone call them a junta, otherwise, it's not without precedent, you know. Hell, the FBI's headquarters still proudly bears the name of its most disgraceful former director (37 years!), who directed every kind of activity we find antithetical to liberty and justice.
So, if you're a death-dealing junta, you can always soften criticism by advancing a completely contrary lie?
Actually, probably yes. Almost always.
But again, Kylekramer was suggesting it seemed odd for these two contradictory portrayals of the NSA to exist. I was just suggesting that there was no real contradiction, because people can tend to resort to extremes to advance their point.
Or there are different groups within the organization with varying degrees of secrecy, importance and competence. In particular, the mathematicians working on cryptography are probably hidden far away from the regular employees in the organization.
It doesn't mesh.