What is it you want to see happen with the NSA?

[Liberal Veteran]

Let's just put it out there. What is your ideal balance of security and personal freedom?

While we are at it, let's also discuss how much we trust the government to do the right thing. I asked before and got no answer. Why do we assume a nefarious plot in the NSA thing (or potential for one) and at the same time we want things like single-payer health care would expose as much, if not more personal data to the government? If the government can target you by who you called, couldn't they also target you by leaking something private in your medical history?

From my point of view, I want a government worthy of my trust. They already have so much info at their disposal it makes me nervous, but at some point, I have to say "I trust them to do what is correct with that information or we might as well just be done with the notion and become an everyone for themselves society".

It's a tough question. What data do you trust the government with to do the job we expect it to do? Some folks are looking for easy answers and I don't think there are going to be any.

What is the proper balance? Should they look at banking transactions to catch tax cheats and money laundering? Should they look at health data to see if their is a cluster of illness that may indicate a public health concern? What about background checks for guns that list mental illnesses?

It seems to me pretty much anything can have a slippery slope argument applied to it.

So what do we do?

[leftstreet]

1. Make the rich stop stealing our resources

'Security and personal freedom' increases for us all, globally

Problem solved

[Liberal Veteran]

2. How? Would you make a database to see who might be exploiting our resources unfairly?

How would you accomplish a laudable goal like that?

[dkf]

3. No dragnet data collection. Access through warrant with probable cause.

Better tracking of travel records and money transfers to areas of the world we know are dangerous.

Better citizenship and visa screening.

Start with all the holes they discovered in Boston. The data collection is useless anyway until they do all that.

[Liberal Veteran]

5. What constitutes probable cause for data collection?

Would we then be screaming, "Why didn't anyone notice this before now?" when something really bad happens?

[dkf]

10. If you've been in contact with a terrorist, I think they should be able to get a warrant to look

Further.

I'm not sure the exact legal terminology, but basically you had to have cme under the radar for a reason.

Being turned in by the Russians would suffice.

[Liberal Veteran]

18. If no one is looking, however, how would one know?

What would be the alert?

Do you begin to see the problem here? Relying on the Russians might be a good idea, but I wonder how well that would work in the case of something involving Syria where we are at odds with the Russians.

I don't pretend to have the answers. But I do have a shitload of questions.

It all eventually becomes a game of who is watching the watchers, but I think we can agree some form of watching is going to be necessary.

[dkf]

23. It's fine to examine the web of known terrorists.

But police work is the best way to find these potential problems. The odd thing is we don't seem to go far enough when we do get the tipoff.

So... Target more narrowly, look deeper. Right now they target wide, and examine very lightly. It's backward.

[PSPS]

4. Your essay is based on a false statement of fact

You ask, "What is your ideal balance of security and personal freedom?" That's a false choice because one isn't inversely related to the other. For one to go up doesn't mean the other has to go down. They aren't related in any way.

But, beyond that, the real issue here is one of oversight. It's this whole idea that America has become the land of "secret laws" with their "secret interpretations" supposedly resulting in "secret warrants" issued by a "secret court" to perform "secret surveillance" of a "secret nature" and "secret scope" against a "secret target" to accomplish a "secret goal." That's what sticks in everyone's craw.

[Liberal Veteran]

6. As I recall, on this very board, most of us were arguing in favor of FISA when Bush...

...was fighting against it. And I daresay, there is a quite a bit of secrecy involved in the FISA process. Bush's argument was that the court was unnecessarily cumbersome. Why was a secret court at the time okay, but now not?

[PSPS]

19. FISA has now been shown to be a fig leaf

This dragnet surveillance of all Americans has shown the whole purported FISA setup is meaningless. The FISA concept sounds good but, in practice, we see that it is just a fig leaf to cover blatantly illegal, unconstitutional and, frankly, unamerican behavior.

[Thinkingabout]

26. Actually Bush did not want to wait for FISA Court time frame for an answer, he wanted to make the

orders without warrants.

[Liberal Veteran]

30. Exactly my point. And the majority here at least was against bypassing FISA.

It seems that we are all over the place with regards to this based on the testimony of a particular individual.

It's a giant clusterfuck with so many strange bedfellows.

At this point, the only conclusion I can come to is that I don't believe this is some evil Obama overreach.

He doesn't strike me as that kind of person or I never would have given him my vote.

[1-Old-Man]

7. I want their activities scaled back to off-shore and direct military support only.

Absolutely no operations within the United States what so every. Any wire taps needed by our police can be acquired by the FBI at the national level and by individual Police Departments in the states, counties, and communities - all with appropriate warrant issued by a sitting Judge.

[marions ghost]

11. DITTO!

The NSA is WAY out of control. They are no longer working for the best interests of the American people.

[Whisp]

15. according to a Teabagger. Let's not forget the source. n/t

[marions ghost]

24. So what? If I do agree with a teabagger for once

--on this issue--so what? Not the end of the world. Strange bedfellows, but I take it issue by issue.

If teabaggers really want to scale back the powers of the NSA, I applaud that.

[DirkGently]

8. Secret domestic surveillance is not analogous to healthcare.

We don't have a Bill of Rights to protect us from unwarranted healthcare.

This is supposed to be the difference between rightwingers and Democrats and progressives.

Conservatives don't "trust government" to limit the power of private business entities to exploit people for profit. They don't want environmental regulations or limits on how financial institutions can gamble with depositor money, or the possibility of large jury verdicts when someone is injured by a defective product.

In short, conservatives seek more power for the already-empowered, and distrust government interference in that.

Progressives / liberals / Democrats typically favor regulation aimed at preserving the common good and protecting people without the leverage provided by money or class, or race or gender.

Domestic surveillance programs have not just a history, but a nearly exclusive history, of being abused -- to the precise extent they operate without accountability to the public -- to attack political dissidents, which typically includes progressives.

The FBI has a disgusting criminal history here, trying to threaten and torment MLK into suicide after learning of his affairs, and pursuing all manner of civil rights proponents, supposed "communists," and even longhaired musicians like John Lennon.

The NSA has not a leg to stand on in terms of benefit of the doubt. It's supposed to be surveilling FOREIGN signals, not domestic, in the first place, And when the Bush administration decided to interpret the law *IN SECRET* to permit it warrantless wiretapping, what was the NSA's response?

Well, of course, they immediately set about warrantless wiretapping without an eye batted. Then they went a little further and started passing around "sex calls" for their own amusement. Not a thousand years ago -- during the Bush administration.

And it's not like the view that lefties are possible "enemies of the state" has changed. Homeland Security apparently spent so much time checking out what OWS was doing on Facebook and writing reports estimating its possible "damage to the financial industry," that no one paid much attention to the conversations they were having with Russia about the Boston bomber.

This is what government does when it can spy on people in secret. It worries a lot about embarrassment to itself and damage to the powerful, and then maybe looks for "terrorists."

The issue now continues to be secrecy. A FISA court ruled as recently as 2011 that the law used to justify the PRISM program had been ... wait for it ... applied in an unconstitutional manner. We think, anyway, because the Obama administration has fought tooth and nail to make sure no one ever reads that ruling.

This is the problem. The conceit invented by Bush, with obvious bad faith, was that Executive Branch can claim state secrets privilege and hide behind supposed "national security interest" as to not only what it's DOING, but whatever it may be doing WRONG. No investigation, no courtroom discovery, nothing. Zip.

And the Obama administration, which came into office riding a wave of, at the very least, very sweet-sounding talk about "transparency," has, at the very most, done not one single thing to change that conceit. It still takes the position that we not only can't know who's being spied on, but we can't even know what legal interpretations it's using to define how and to whom it's doing that.

That's not a situation that can be cured by "trust." There's only one cure for government secrecy regarding what it thinks its own powers are, and that is DAYLIGHT. Transparency. Accountability. Examination.

The argument that it would somehow destroy our ability to watch "the bad guys" by simply coming clean about what the rules are is specious and unworkable.

So it's not a matter of "trust," which is why it isn't cured by however much anyone likes Obama or any other President.

This is the way government power works, and it's the reason we have safeguards like the Fourth Amendment. Safeguards that mean nothing if they are applied "in secret," because that means that as far as anyone knows, they're not being applied at all.

[marions ghost]

13. Excellent post!

"it is not a matter of trust"

[marions ghost]

9. You know, any questions

about what they should be doing is not really the point.

Catching tax cheats = IRS.
Medical issues = HHS/NIH.
Guns = ATF.
NOT the NSA's business--I hope you're just being a devils advocate with that one. (If not, :wtf?)

Let's not give them any more "work" on our behalf. The NSA--obviously--does not have the best interests of the American people at heart. Could that be any more clear? They are out of control (I'm not impressed by the so-called oversight).

I am for slashing their budget and their staff by at half. And firing many if not most of the contractors.
That's the balance I would like to see. We can use that money for things that have an actual benefit to the American people.

The point is what they should NOT be doing.

[Liberal Veteran]

14. I see. So what do you do about overlap?

If the IRS notices someone getting money from an unfriendly foreign entity? Who do they report it to? The FBI? And then if the FBI looks at this group and notices that a lot of calls have been going between groups affiliated with the "someone"?

Should the data be allowed to be collected but not looked at until there is cause? What is the trigger point for that?

You might begin to see the slope of this and thus the need for balance.

What happens when the data is there, but nobody can connect the dots because Dot A in and of itself wasn't enough for the IRS, and DOT B wasn't enough for the FBI and DOT C wasn't enough for the ATF?

[marions ghost]

21. There are established protocols

for overlap. The FBI & NSA work together on domestic/foreign issues.

NO data should be collected on American citizens through their ISP, FB, Google or anything else without probable cause. Far more stringent privacy policies are needed.

The NSA is way out of control and doing a whole lot of data mining that does not keep us safe. In fact it is doing the exact opposite. There is no justification for the NSA to be keeping all this information on American citizens or citizens of other countries, in the name of national security.

[bemildred]

12. Information is property now, so we need a clear definition of who owns it.

Then your information becomes like any other property of yours that the government cannot seize, or corporations either, without due process or your permission. Now sometimes it is treated as though it is laying around free to collect, and other times you have to pay through the nose for it.

[Earth_First]

16. The depth and breadth of the topic warrants transparency on behalf of the NSA first...

How do we discuss a situation in which we have no starting point for a dialogue to commence?

Without such a starting point, the entire discussion is mired in individual opinion based on what they think is the problem.

I do not see such an honest conversation transpiring any time soon...

[Liberal Veteran]

28. Well, there is that. Perhaps a dismantle and complete rebuild is order.

Instead of the cobbled together "war on terror", "cold war", "international diplomacy", "espionage", "OSI", "CIA", "Local Police", "FBI", chimera we have now?

We ALL seem to want the same thing to one degree or another. But there are a few of us who would like to know how we are going to get everyone to the table to put something that satisfies personal liberty without putting ourselves into a position where everyone is jumping through hoops to collate and access information.

I think part of the problem is going to be finding the middle ground between "everything is up for grabs by all agencies" and "we must have a specific warrant by a judge to look at anything".

We don't live in 1776 anymore, but we also don't want to live in 1984.

[KittyWampus]

17. Contractors removed from the system entirely. Data held for only 5 years by telecom co's.

A more vigorous reviewal process. More audits.

[Pholus]

22. That is the beginning of good...

If you insist this boondoggle is necessary, you should be willing to pay a bit of a price for it...

Without a warrant for an active investigation, NO ELECTRONIC RECORD about a US citizen SHALL be retained longer than 36 months.

The Germans may process but not store anything, perhaps that rule would be good for us too.

NSA must NEVER release anything gleaned from the data for any reason other than national security. No mission creep allowed whatsoever.

Evidence from the system inadmissible in any legal proceeding ever. Even for terror. Make your case from the investigation, not the data.

Release/Leakage of personal information about any non terror suspect punished by life in prison without possibility of parole for the leaker. This does not extend to programmatic information.

If it can be shown that data from the program has been released to influence an election or used to blackmail an individual this should be prosecuted as a capital offense.

External review built into annual operations.

No secrets held past 10 years regardless.

FISA warrants (including the subject of the investigation) are made public after 10 years.

A path for civil litigation for citizens not convicted of terrorism but who have suffered ill effects must be created.

ABSOLUTELY no contractors.

[reteachinwi]

20. It's called the National Security Agency

How about pursuing security, not contracts, paydays, profits, puke.

Eisenhower's farewell.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html

[FLyellowdog]

25. Put more women in positions of authority. It's worth a try. nt

[moondust]

27. Two suggestions.

Approach it from both the front end and the back end.

1. Front end: The FISA court. Give it some teeth, as suggested by Richard Wolff on LOD last night. Ensure that it is a real watchdog and not just a rubber stamp committee (which it may or may not be now). Possibly add term limits for its members to keep it fresh and apolitical.

2. Back end: Hospitals have ways of ensuring that hospital employees are not unnecessarily digging through the medical records of their patients, be they celebrities or average Joes. I don't know exactly what is involved but it's basically monitoring access. Hospital employees found unnecessarily digging through patient records can be fired. It seems that something similar could be done with NSA personnel, comparing user activity to a list of active FISA authorizations to see if there is any unauthorized access and by whom. In other words, spying on the spies.

[Liberal Veteran]

29. Good suggestions. Both of them.