Privacy, Government, Surveillance, and You.

"No such analysis was carried out"? Then what's up with the thousands of pages of analysis that everyone and his brother did of the 9/11 intelligence failures? Was what ran on the news daily for years just propaganda?

Well, it's always propaganda, but I mean specifically the reporting on the intelligence leading up to the event.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Had the security state been honest with itself, it would not have passed the PATRIOT Act, which is the root cause of all the recent controversy over surveillance. Had they carried out the proper analysis, they would not have reached the conclusions they did. The 9/11 Commission is far too lenient on the intelligence services, whose negligence and bickering is the primary cause of their failure to stop the attacks.

In the days and weeks immediately preceding the attack, the US intelligence services, between them, had:

• The knowledge that Al-Qaeda was planning something big.
• The knowledge that Al-Qaeda operatives had entered the United States two years prior to 9/11.
• Two active FBI investigations into Al-Qaeda.
• Photographs of at least one of the attackers' passport, which showed his entry visas for the USA, which was not passed on to the State Department or the FBI.
• Photographs of the Al-Qaeda operatives who attended a meeting in Kuala Lumpur to discuss plans for the USS Cole bombing and 9/11.
• Via Thai intelligence, that one of the hijackers had entered the USA via Los Angeles. Had they checked the flight manifest, they would have found another had arrived on the same flight.
• The San Diego address of that hijacker.
• A warrant to investigate anyone connected with AQ in America.

The last point is crucial. Had the preceding information been shared with the FBI, who held the warrant, they would have - extremely easily - been able to round-up the hijackers rather quickly. The point is, however, that crucial information was not shared by the NSA and CIA with the FBI. The CIA photographs of the USS Cole meeting, for example, were never shared with them. They were never told al-Midhar and Hazmi were in the USA. When the FBI eventually did find out, it was because the CIA had copied them into an e-mail chain by mistake. The NSA and CIA did not think it relevant to inform the FBI agents carrying out an active investigation into AQ activities that, for instance, Al-Qaeda operatives were in the USA itself.

The US government failed to prevent 9/11 because of it's own pig-headedness and incompetence. Not because they couldn't invade the privacy of half the globe. Not because US Marines weren't standing astride the Iraqi oil. Not because the NYPD didn't have fancy military-surplus hardware. Not because the TSA weren't feeling up grannies at airport security. Because they fucked up. They did not need to trample the world's privacy rights underfoot to rectify that.

edited 7th Mar '14 7:47:22 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Security Agencies would answer that point with a simple, "You're welcome."

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

Or say "Appeal to Worse Problems".

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Quite.

In a given situation, it's easy to identify what you do need. Harder to identify what you don't. If I gave you a magic rock and claimed that it wards away tigers, and then you never saw a tiger after gaining the rock, how can you say whether the rock is actually magic, or if the lack of tigers is for other reasons - say, because tigers don't exist in this part of the world, for example.

There's a strange type of logic that people undergoing medication can easily succumb to: I feel fine. I don't need to take my depression medication, because I'm not depressed; the medication is unnecessary because I already have the effects I would be taking it to achieve anyway! This type of logic is a pitfall, ignorant of one important detail: the person in the example only feels fine because he's taking the medication. It's not "doing nothing"; it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing, and the fact that nothing seems to be wrong is symptomatic of that. With medication, you don't notice when it's working; you only notice when it's not.

edited 7th Mar '14 9:29:53 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

No, the US government failed to prevent 9/11 because organizing and maintaining the proper level of privacy and information sharing on a national level is hard. Not being sarcastic. When you have multiple federal agencies with differing mandates and goals (which is, you know, why they're separate agencies in the first place), each of which has different pieces of the puzzle, and there are strict rules for sharing information between them (for good reason), it's not inconceivable that something would slip through the cracks.

As Fighteer pointed out, hindsight is 20/20. When looking back and saying "how did everyone miss this" and looking through the records of everyone involved, it's easy to say "oh, well, if they'd just shared information with each other, this never would have happened!" That's the benefit of hindsight. This doesn't mean that they didn't fuck up. It doesn't mean that things shouldn't be fixed. It just means that failing to solve an incredibly difficult problem is not "pig-headedness and incompetence".

None of which has any immediate connection to privacy, security, and surveillance. But it annoys me when armchair quarterbacks criticize people for "DUH HOW COULD YOU HAVE MISSED THAT IT'S SO OBVIOUS" when speaking with the benefit of hindsight. Federal agents are, as a general rule, very smart people who are legitimately dedicated to keeping the country safe. They're not bureaucratic fatcats kicking back in their fancy office, drawing their fat government paychecks and trying to think up another way to scam taxpayers out of more cash. There are failures at the policy level, yes, and I'm not saying that either the agencies as a whole or individual agents should be immune from responsibility or criticism for their failures — but at least have the decency to grant that they're trying to do a very, very difficult job for which they receive little or no recognition or credit the 90% of the time they do it right.

edited 7th Mar '14 9:34:04 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

If you actually do some research instead of saying "hindsight = wrong", you would find that the failures go far deeper than what might be expected of an organization trying it's best and making a regrettable failure. Of course organizing intelligence sharing is a hard task. But that shouldn't blind us to when it is done extremely badly. The logical conclusion of such a position is that because these people are smart and do a hard job, they should be immune from criticism. The record does not bear such a contention out. Quoth Wright:

And if you'll only take it from those smart government agency people, then look no further than the CIA inspector-general's report into 9/11:

There are mechanisms by which intelligence agencies can co-operate; the operation of foreign intelligence services and the post-9/11 intelligence reforms prove that. They were not deployed by those of the United States during the Al-Qaeda case. Nowhere have the NSA or it's supporters been able to demonstrate that the metadata collection programs, the mass-internet surveillance, the manipulation of online discourse, or the intercepting of webcam images would have foiled 9/11, and it's disingenuous - and some would say extremely cynical - to suggest they would have done.

But yes, having actually read around the issue, I do respect the federal agents. I have, for instance, great respect for the FBI agents who went to Kenya and interviewed Al-Qaeda suspects, and then went to Yemen and dealt with astonishing obstruction from Yemeni authorities. Or the head of the FBI's Bin Laden team, who, in a rather grim twist of fate, died a hero on 9/11 just after retiring. I have less respect for the individuals named for their incompetence both by the pioneering journalists who uncovered the dysfunction of US intelligence services at the time and by the internal disciplinary mechanisms of those services themselves.

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Did you even read my whole post? Such as the part where I explicitly say that that's not the case and I'm not implying it should be? You've done a wonderful job of setting up a strawman and then knocking it down, but haven't addressed what I said at all.

Oh, hey, I didn't say that, either. In fact, I pointed out that the current line of conversation is somewhat off topic for the thread. Nice of you to set the record straight, though, I guess?

My point is that you can't point the finger at individuals and say "it's them! It's all their fault! If they weren't stupid smelly doo-doo heads, nothing bad would have happened!" Your second quote says that sixty people in the CIA knew Al Qaeda was operating in the US, but none of them passed that information along to the FBI. Do you think that it simply didn't occur to any of those 60 people over the course of two years that the FBI might find that information useful? Your first quote says that someone asked for permission, but was denied. Why was he denied? Who made the decision to deny him? Those are the important questions — which have, to my knowledge, largely been addressed. Hell, I've read that they have the opposite problem now — that agencies have overcompensated and now share more information with each other than they should be.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

@Quag 15: The NSA did what?! Why am I only hearing about this now??

@Achaemenid: So much for the inflated reputation of the CIA's ability, huh?

What's the reason, for those of us who aren't as well-informed on the subject? I don't see why there shouldn't be free sharing of information between the two agencies, given their obvious overlap.

Promoted for what? The only reason I can think of that's related to the obstruction of the FBI's work is that they actually wanted... the attack... to...

Oh, Crap!. Am I the only who's starting to suspect the CIA of conspiring to give the US government an excuse to wage the War On Terror? I mean, what other explanation to the above anomaly is there (unless there's more to it than what has been said above)? Why the hell would you promote people for deliberately withholding critical information on known members of a terrorist organization and their planned attack?

edited 7th Mar '14 2:24:55 PM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

The same has been said about Pearl Harbour, too.

Keep Rolling On

I dunno. Here are a few links regarding Brazil.

Edit: Ok, the Canada link does not really count, but considering the Five Eyes Agreement...

edited 7th Mar '14 2:34:23 PM by Quag15

Hell, I've heard claims that the government steered Hurricane Katrina into New Orleans for various reasons, from murdering all the black people to just plain evil lulz. People love the idea that there is one True Evil Villain behind all the horrors of the world, someone who could be fought and defeated; it's a more comforting idea than the worldview that the world is a random clusterf*ck where awful things just happen, sometimes for no reason at all.

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

The same reasons why there are rules for what information government agencies can collect on you in the first place. Concerns about privacy, abuse of power, etc etc. For example: my uncle ended up on a watchlist at some point because he made frequent trips to and from Russia (he's a wildlife biologist who studied Siberian tigers). The TSA presumably kept records on his comings and goings to Russia for the purpose of monitoring whether he needs to stay on that watchlist or can be removed. Now, let's say the FBI is doing an investigation into the Russian mafia's activities in the US. Should the TSA give the FBI my uncle's travel logs? I would say no, because the FBI has no reason to suspect him of any wrongdoing, so it's not really justified in investigating him — but the information that he traveled to and from Russia with some frequency might make them think they were.

Obviously this is rather different from the FBI saying "we're trying to catch Al Qaeda operatives in the US, what do you know about that?" to the CIA. But the point is that something that's legitimate for one government agency to know isn't necessarily legitimate for them to share with another agency. Emphasis on "isn't necessarily".

No, but it's still an infuriating and, frankly, insulting thing to believe. I'll just refer you back to my "federal agents are smart people who are genuinely trying to sever their country" post above.

Because one mistake, bad though it may be, doesn't automatically invalidate someone's otherwise-good performance? I seriously doubt it was a case of "so, you're the guy who didn't give the FBI the information they needed to stop 9/11? Good job on that one, have a promotion."

edited 7th Mar '14 2:40:21 PM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

@Jovian

Tu quoque:

But more generally, I did read your whole post, and found it self-contradictory. Most of it seems to be a lecture on how I shouldn't be so mean to the security services (!) because they are smart guys doing their best, which is an argument about tone, not of substance. The only concrete contention you actually advanced was to quibble with my argument that the intelligence agencies were pig-headed and incompetent. Personally, I think the actual record of their action and inaction prior to 9/11 supports that conclusion. In neither post did you actually try to attack that conclusion with facts, aside from a rather desperate set of hypotheticals which, as I explain below, are irrelevant. So forgive me if your weak "but I don't really mean that" disclaimer did not convince me the rest of the post was more than an attempt to fudge the issue.

Seeing as the criticism in the second post came from the CIA's Inspector-General, it would seem to suggest none of the answers to those questions were relevant and/or satisfactory. If you want to go down the whole "they know better than us" route, then presumably the CIA IG knows better than you and I put together - and he concluded the individuals who failed to share data with the FBI should be held accountable.

Why? Within the last century, the CIA conspired with Chilean generals to overthrow Allende, with Iranian monarchists to overthrow Mossadegh, orchestrated drug-trafficking, plotted the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, supported the Contras, colluded with fascists in Europe and beyond, tested biological and chemical agents on their own citizens, sometimes with fatal results, and tortured US citizens...and then lied about all of these things.

The reason people believe absurdities about the CIA is because they've done some genuinely twisted and evil shit in the past, and likely continue to do so. Not that I believe they permitted 9/11 to happen (the LIHOP conspiracy theory), but for the CIA to allow a few thousand US citizens to lose their lives in order to further their perceived objectives is not as far from their usual MO as people might like to think. So forgive me if I don't give extend to them my heartfelt respect and adulation. Now, I do - as I noted in my last post - have great respect for the FBI, and individually decent federal agents. There may even be some in the NSA, who have also given me little reason to treat them with respect. But I have no intention of giving them the benefit of the doubt - nor do I have any intention in falling down with wonder at their Ivy League degrees.

edited 7th Mar '14 3:50:22 PM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Perhaps you should try reading it as a whole instead of looking at each statement individually. When I say that calling individual agents incompetent isn't helpful but the failures of the agency still need to be addressed, I'm talking about issues on a higher level. When dozens of people in the CIA had access to the information that the FBI needed and none of them passed it along, that's not sixty incompetent people, that's a failure of policy. Picking a handful of those sixty — or even all of them — and firing them for incompetence wouldn't fix anything if the policies that they were following remain in place. Fortunately, as I pointed out, those policies have since been changed.

I'm not sure why you're making a point of banging that drum again — at no point did I disagree with that, and in fact I've gone out of my way to explicitly say that I agree with you that the failures, at whatever level they occurred, should be dealt with.

Conspiracy theories piss me off, for the reason that Tobias outlined above. They're an excuse to blame all the shitty things that happen in the world on nebulous "bad people" and then dismiss them, rather than facing the reality that bad shit just happens sometimes and you have to deal with it.

If you don't understand how accusing people of allowing the exact thing their job is to prevent can be construed as insulting, then I don't know what to tell you. Please, by all means, feel free to assume the worst of any and every intelligence agency you care to name. Personally, I find that sort of attitude toxic — it's the same sort of thing that results in people who live in crime-ridden neighborhoods refusing to speak to the police because the police are "the enemy". Treating the people who are supposed to be working for your benefit as antagonists just worsens the situation. Yes, abuses can and do happen, but the solution is not to treat the entire organization as hostile. Working with them to address concerns is virtually always more productive in the long run.

Of course, if you're not willing to trust them even a little bit, then obviously that's not going to appeal to you. In which case you're sort of SOL, aren't you? Who watches the watchmen is an unsolvable problem — all you can do is trust them to watch each other, and get rid of bad apples when they're uncovered.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I have to agree with Charlie Pierce's take on the subject:

Our current intelligence community incentivizes the kind of paranoid behaviour that leads to the utter failures in interdepartmental communication that Ach's talking about. We do not need a large surveillance state for safety. We certainly don't need one with the paramilitary power of the CIA or extortion capabilities of the NSA. If we start changing our foreign and economic policy to stop creating terrorist threats, remove the political and career incentives to interdepartmental stonewalling, and restructure the alphabet soup agencies so that the process is more streamlined (which would mean axing a few of them), we'd be fine.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

It would be very unlike the CIA to do anything that would actively encourage or allow someone to kill several thousand US citizens, if for no other reason than they arent competent enough to keep such a thing secret. But allowing (or actually killing) several thousand citizens of some other country, well that's a different thing. But that isnt the issue here.

The CIA and the FBI fail to collaborate because they compete for the same budget, the same personnel, and the same influence in Congress. Also, there are some legal restrictions against the CIA sharing information that might lead to blowing a source, or the FBI sharing information that might violate the privacy of a US citizen. But presumably the CIA-IG understands this and took it into account.

When all is said and done, although no one doubts that we need law enforcement and intelligence agencies to defend us from a wide variety of threats, and that new threats require new capabilities, that doesnt give them a pass when it comes to actions that appear to weaken longstanding constitutional protections. At the very least, I can think of no reason why they cant just go get a d&^m warrant before they collect my metadata.

Pretty much this. Saying "XYZ is incompetent, the problem is their fault" is lazy and short-sighted. Saying "we don't even need an NSA anyway" is even more so. Instead of just labelling intelligence agencies the bad guys, if we want to fix the issues that have come to light, we need to make a determined and concerted effort to change the culture which allowed the problems to arise in the first place — whether that's inter-departmental rivalry, an artificial sense that the fate of the free world rests on getting as much intelligence they can get their hands on, proportionality be damned, or a maverick Cowboy Cop attitude that oversight and regulations are just holding them back from getting real work done.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

@Native

I'm not entirely sure what our discussion is about by this point. A failure of policy is an indictment of the competence of the individuals who directed that policy and of the policy-following organization itself. Incompetence is defined as "lack of the ability to do something well" (M-W), the XYZ agencies prior to 9/11 lacked the ability to do their job well due to said failure of policy. I mean, we can quibble with words, but that does seem to be incompetence, on both an individual and policy level. The CIA acknowledged that in their internal investigations, and then failed to act upon it, at least at the individual level. Indeed, a case can be made that they actively tried to thwart the airing of their dirty laundry in public - look no further than the smear campaign directed against Richard Clarke.

I understand perfectly how it can be insulting, I just don't care if they're insulted. The reason people accuse the CIA of outlandish evil is because they have done some extremely evil things, have displayed no remorse, and likely continue to do them. The conduct of the US intelligence services during the Cold War, for instance, should have some of their members before the Hague The NSA, for it's part, has already lied to Congress and quite possibly acted unconstitutionally - not to mention spied upon the citizens of foreign nations as well.

Dismissing suspicion of the motives of the security state as "toxic" seems to me to be just as much of an attempt to duck the problem as imagining conspiracies is. The reason people see the police as "the enemy" in crime-ridden neighborhoods is because the police do not act in their interests; especially in ethnic minority neighbourhoods. The litany of cases of police racism and brutality should make that abundantly obvious.

To take the position that we should blame the victims of state intrusion and violence for "not trusting the state enough" is far more toxic than any conspiracy theories those victims might formulate. Similarly so is the idea that these policies can only be changed by compromise and compromise alone. Some things do not allow compromise: to intercept data without a warrant is wrong. To detain journalists for doing their job is wrong. To torture is wrong. To topple democratically-elected regimes because you're afraid of "socialism" is wrong. I'd be happy to see a security state that demands public respect - but respect has to be earned. I'm afraid that I don't feel that it has been - and I think a good place to start would be to have certain NSA officers before a congressional committee of inquiry and certain CIA officers before ICC in the Hague.

edited 8th Mar '14 4:10:32 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Snowden answers the EU parliament

edited 8th Mar '14 3:59:52 AM by Uchuujinsan

Pour y voir clair, il suffit souvent de changer la direction de son regard www.xkcd.com/386/

An interesting answer:

So everyone is in on it.

Keep Rolling On

Why is the UNICEF so important to the NSA?

I'm expressing frustration with the attitude that the intelligence community screwed up, therefore it must be incompetent and/or evil — an attitude that seems prevalent, at least in the corners of the internet that I frequent. The point I'm trying to make is that even extremely competent people with nothing but the best of intentions can still make mistakes — especially if the systems they're working in is itself flawed. Blaming it on the incompetence of the individuals instead of the flaws in the system (those flaws being the cultural aspects of the agencies brought up by Radical Taoist) will fix nothing. Blaming it on nebulous evil on the individual or the organizational level will just make things worse, by driving a wedge between the community meant to be serving (police/intelligence) and the community they're supposed to be serving (the population at large).

Certainly if you find examples of incompetence or evil then they should be dealt with. I'm not defending anyone who's bad at their job or simply a bad person. But that, by itself, isn't enough — unless you fix the systemic flaws that allow those bad apples to flourish within the organization, then you'll just be playing whack-a-mole. "It's all because those people are incompetent/evil" is a dodge on the level of "it's because those people are secretly working with the bad guys". It's an excuse to not fix the problem — which is understandable, as the problem is extremely difficult to solve and people naturally tend toward quick and easy answers, but that doesn't make it okay.

I'm not dismissing suspicion because it's toxic, I'm dismissing suspicion because it's a stupid conspiracy theory. The toxic attitude comes when you decide that the people who are supposed to be working for you (whether that's the police, the federal intelligence community, the government as a whole, or whatever) are actually "the enemy" and turn your efforts from improving the system to opposing it. Yes, there are problems, and yes, they absolutely need to be fixed. But that doesn't make the NSA or the CIA or whoever else bad people who should be opposed on principle. It means that there are problems and we should fix them. That's all.

Where the hell did I mention "just trust big brother and everything will be okay" or "we should compromise so that the NSA does things that are only a little unconstitutional"? You're fighting strawmen again.

The line about trust was a comment on the problem with viewing the intelligence community as an enemy instead of working with them to solve their problems. If you insist on seeing them as an enemy, then the only satisfactory resolution would be to see them defeated (whatever that means to you). That puts them on the defensive — if you think that someone's coming to get rid of you, your job, your purpose, then you fight back. No good comes of that; it's just wasted effort.

The attitude I see of absolute mistrust of the intelligence community — of assuming bad faith and ascribing the worst possible interpretations to every single thing they say and do, regardless of context — is self-defeating. If you refuse to trust anything at all about them — if you believe that they flagrantly ignore presidential direction, congressional oversight, and basically do whatever the hell they want no matter what — then you will never be satisfied. You're setting up "the NSA is bad" to be an unfalsifiable claim. Anyone pointing out "well, they've made these improvements" is met with "like we actually BELIEVE that? They're just keeping the bad stuff secret!". What good does that do? It means the conversation goes nowhere. It means no progress can be made, because it will never be accepted when it happens.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

A judge has denied the federal government's request to allow the National Security Agency to keep telephone metadata past the current five-year maximum in order to preserve the information for use in pending lawsuits.

Edward Snowden: I Reported NSA Issues to Gov’t Officials, None ‘Took Any Action to Address Them’.

edited 8th Mar '14 12:43:30 PM by DeviantBraeburn

Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016