Who is pooh-poohing what he and other journalists have revealed? Facts are facts. These journalists are journalists and not opinion columnists, right? Why the need to pooh-pooh the facts that they reveal? My response to these facts may be different than your response, but that doesn’t mean I’m denying these facts. And when discussing the NSA I rarely, if ever, mention Obama. The laws that the NSA are currently operating under were passed by Congress, including by then Senator Obama. It’s going to take Congress, or potentially the Supreme Court, to further reform the NSA or remove their current authority as it stands.
I think a big disconnect with the ‘debate’ here is what we do with the facts that have been revealed. Do we move forward and seek out necessary reforms? Or do we use them as a political cudgel to attack politicians or political parties that we don’t like? I’m in favor of moving forward with reforms.
"The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.
The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.
Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge"
**For more than a year, NSA officials have insisted that although Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, he didn’t have access to the actual surveillance intercepts themselves. It turns out they were lying.**1 In fact, he provided the Washington Post with a cache of 22,000 intercept reports containing 160,000 individual intercepts. The Post has spend months reviewing these files and estimates that 11 percent of the intercepted accounts belonged to NSA targets and the remaining 89 percent were “incidental” collections from bystanders.
You do realize that Senator Obama voted to grant the NSA the authority detailed in this article back in 2008? I knew that when I voted for him. Are you suggesting that President Obama’s administration would somehow stop the NSA activity that he as a Senator voted to authorize? Just out of curiosity, what sort of reforms or safeguards have been implemented since 2012?
You seem to complain a lot about people who “pooh-pooh everything” because of Obama, yet, it seems you yourself are heavily motivated by your feelings for Obama while pooh poohing aspects of this story that don’t fit your established opinions. I have long admired your passion for this issue, but I’m starting to suspect you may have ulterior motives or clouded judgement. Thanks.
Well to date, the majority of the “discussion” here at TPM on the subject of the NSA has been basically "Greenwald sucks! or “Snoball sucks” or “Obama Sucks!”. This type of story today is pretty rare here, usually it’s “check out Greenwalds Selfie” and not the meat of the issue which is more what this story is about. Its a big, important story and I appreciate your raising the bar here and actually trying to discuss it, whether I agree with you on a particular point or not.
The irony was strong enough to pull a magnet off my refrigerator.
But, give yourself some credit for a World Cup-worthy accomplishment: while you were skewering the drones on one side of the issue, a drone from the other side charged into the sharp end and impaled himself.
Thanks, and same to you. I get that internet comments can be ridiculous and off topic and snarky. I can be as guilty of that as the next person. I don’t really take much stock in the majority of the “discussion” on TPM, and I certainly don’t see it as an important indicator of reality or of anything really except for the opinions of people that read this site and have too much time on their hands and/or an inflated sense of self.
I agree that this is an important story (however not the most important story and increasingly a distraction from other important stories, but that’s a matter of perspective and political priorities…)
This article is important in that it clarifies a few things that I feel are important to this discussion:
1). The NSA is using their current legal authority for legitimate national security concerns providing considerable intelligence value
2). NSA surveillance engages in problematic incidental collection of metadata and outright data, including that of American citizens
3). The number of actual targets that the NSA is collecting data is incredibly minor to the number of non-targets that also get swept up in this data mining
How people prioritize these three issues (and other issues I may be blind to), probably will determine their reaction to the story at large. I imagine a lot of people will ignore #1, while others will ignore #2 and #3, and vice versa. I personally see #1 as being important and revealing, while #2 and #3 are things I’ve long known or suspected and see as issues that require reform, while also acknowledging are broader issues related to the nature of the internet and how digital data is collected/protected by ISPs, social media companies, email services, chatrooms, and the government.
Um,no. It has nothing to do with my “feelings” about Obama…it’s strictly about him endorsing the same shitty policies as his predecessors, and in the case of busting whistle blowers, taking it to a new level entirely.
Good grief – more hyperventilating and hysteria from the Greenwald/Snowden fans. Still no illegalities, and still no abuse shown. LOL – 900 email address. . . over FOUR years . . . that “MAY” be linked to Americans. OMG! The sky is falling!
Meanwhile, back in reality, what we have is a program that worked effectively, and the NSA did exactly what it’s supposed to do when Americans’ communications are included. Unless you can show that the NSA deliberately intercepted Americans’ communications that were in no way tied to the process of intercepting the targets’ communications, then, as usual, you have a big fat nothing, which you should probably be used to by now.
So, please, dude-bros, help us out, since you’re such experts at all this, and you claim this all so terrible: Please (1) explain your evidence, if any, that the NSA was deliberately targeting any communications they shouldn’t have been or that they’ve done something improper with those communications; and (2) tell us precisely how the NSA can gather the intelligence they gather, without incidental intercept of non-target communications. Without that, then I’m really not sure what you’re whining about. Here’s a hint: “They shouldn’t be doing any of this at all!” is not a serious answer.
Any thoughts on why a faux-liberal fox sock puppet would always hijack NSA and Hillary threads? Disinformation? Deep-seated hatred of liberals? Below 60 IQ? There has to be a reason…
The NSA admits to using a 2 hop or 3 hop test to determine relevancy. That means they are deliberating targeting people who they have no evidence of suspicion of committing a crime…besides having talked to someone who talked to someone who talked to someone that was under suspicion. That doesn’t even come close to meeting the bar required by the 4th Amendment.
The NSA’s charter is to listen in the communications of foreign powers. They were specifically NOT allowed to spy on Americans, re-emphasised in the 1970s FISA Act. Now very every foreigner they are targeting, they are also targeting 9(!!!) Americans.
Instead of focusing on the guy who spoke to the guy who spoke to the guy who spoke to the guy under suspicion, they could tighten things up a bit and focus on the guy under suspicion? Yes, they will accidentally listen in on people not involved in the investigation, but at least part of the conversation WILL be of the person under investigation. When you are listening to the conversations of someone 3 jumps removed, nearly every thing you hear is going to be unrelated.
I am truly sorry you hold the concept of the 4th Amendment protections…that the government be able to identify the suspect, the crime he/her is suspected of, and can swear under oath what they believe they will recover from the surveillance, and that it is relevant to the investigation, but it is still the standard that they need to meet. They aren’t, and they aren’t even trying.
I do, however, get your total disdain for Constitutional protections. That part comes through your own whines pretty clearly.
the newspaper said the files showed that months of tracking communications across dozens of alias accounts led directly to the capture in 2011 of a Pakistan-based bomb builder suspected in a 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali.
Money and civil rights well spent? They probably could have found the suspect quicker by doing a door-to-door search.
Dude, I love you, but could you not even give the conversation a chance to be on topic before preemptively derailing it into a meta-argument about the content of other arguments? I mean, it seems to me like this one actually had a decent chance of being substantive given that it was about actual data rather than motives or personalities.
Because I would have liked to have maybe seen a discussion about fact the reporting that, on data Snowden provided, the NSA had failed to mask 900 out of 65,000 personally identifying references of persons who were likely Americans and whether people think that is an acceptable and predictable error rate.
I get that a bunch of people will think that if the NSA can’t look at the communications without somehow magically not seeing communications it’s not supposed to see before it sees them or magically determine which ones its not supposed to see without looking at them, it shouldn’t gather this data at all. But if you aren’t of that option, the question is whether a 1.3% failure rate in making identifying information in communications deemed likely to between Americans is a big deal. And given the volume we’re talking about here, you could easily go either way on that.
For reasons I cannot even begin to guess, this topic, unlike any other on TPM, has produced a great many PTSD (Post Thread Stress Disorder) cases, and we should all support those afflicted and hope for a speedy recovery. Rumors of actual substantive discussions have been flying around, although I dare not say that too loudly, lest it be jinxed.
As if the petulant young female that calls herself UnfadingGreen has accomplished something in her short nondescript life that warrants even a second glance.
She’s the stereotypical example of someone’s Dunning-Krueger syndrome convincing the person that they are noteworthy.
Wow, that’s a lot of rambling to completely avoid answering my post, Davey. In other words, you cannot point to a single illegality or abuse under the current program – you just don’t like the program. It’s also clear you can’t offer any type of alternative at all – you can’t offer the slightest indication of how the NSA can legitimately target foreign targets without also scooping up some Americans’ communications (which they promptly scrub). So, basically, just as I said, you’re just whining because you don’t like the program, not because there’s anything illegal or improper use of it. So, once again, we are still right where we were when we started – still no evidence of illegalities, still no evidence of abuse, and still no suggestions of alternatives that would be as effective. In other words, you and the rest of the Snowden/Greenwald crowd are still sitting on big fat pile of nothing. Sorry that upsets you so much.
