U.S. Spy Network Will Survive Any Amount Of Public Outrage, Experts Say

[kpete]

Source: Talking Points Memo

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Britain needed U.S. intelligence to help thwart a major terror attack. New Zealand relied on it to send troops to Afghanistan. And Australia used it to help convict a would-be bomber.

All feats were the result of a spying alliance known as Five Eyes that groups together five English-speaking democracies, and they point to a vital lesson: American information is so valuable, experts say, that no amount of global outrage over secret U.S. surveillance powers would cause Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to ditch the Five Eyes relationship.

The broader message is that the revelations from NSA leaker Edward Snowden are unlikely to stop or even slow the global growth of secret-hunting — an increasingly critical factor in the security and prosperity of nations.

“Information is like gold,” Bruce Ferguson, the former head of New Zealand’s foreign spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, told The Associated Press. “If you don’t have it, you don’t survive.”

Read more: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/us-spy-network-will-survive-any-amount-of-public-outrage-experts-say.php

[leftynyc]

1. There was and is no global outrage

about this regardless of what many on this board think. Snowden is considered a sideshow.

[cantbeserious]

3. Pure Conjecture - Do You Speak For The World

eom

[leftynyc]

4. Do you?

I just spent 2 weeks in Europe reading the local papers, chatting with people and nobody, NOT ONE PERSON, thought Snowden was a hero. Have you had a different experience in the last couple of weeks? Which governments are recalling their ambassadors? Closing their US embassies? Which countries have people taking to the streets over their relationship with the US over this issue? The drama is on this board and others like it ONLY.

[Thinkingabout]

5. Some have not realized most of us knew about spying for many many years, maybe they just learned

spying is happening. Also, good point, how do they know the world and in the US really don't care about their "cause".

[Mojorabbit]

26. Well my Portuguese relatives are following the story closely. nt

[leftynyc]

32. Are they out in the streets?

Are they petitioning their government to punish us somehow? That's what real outrage looks like.

[Mojorabbit]

37. My 79 yo mother in the states is following it on

the Portuguese satellite channel she gets. There are a lot of people unhappy with it. It is in the news there and people are talking about it. I can't speak for anyone but my relatives but at least I know for a fact they are following the story.

[leftynyc]

38. I'm unhappy about it also

but that goes back to when the Patriot Act was signed and shredded the 4th. It seems to confound some people that I can be outraged at the NSA and still think snowden is an asshole.

[PSPS]

17. You say that because you think this is about Snowden. It isn't.

[leftynyc]

30. Tell that to those who

think he deserves a nobel peace prize or who think Pres Obama should hire him. You can thank Glenn Greenwald for making this all about snowden. Nobody who didn't think the Patriot Act didn't suck before we knew who snowden was is getting swayed by a person who committed theft and sold (or just gave) secrets to China and Russia. He and Glenn portrayed this as the taking down of a superpower, right down to threatening that nothing better happen to snowden - it's become all about the messenger because 2 attention whores made it that way.

[cantbeserious]

2. And There We Have It - Democracy Is Dead

eom

[dbackjon]

7. Was Democracy dead

When slavery was allowed?
When blacks were denied civil rights?
When Native Americans were rounded up and forced on to reservations?
When Japanese Americans were rounded up and placed in internment camps?
When GLBT were denied basic equality - oh wait, we still are.

[AllINeedIsCoffee]

33. And this is not close to being in the same vicinity of those issues. nt

[blkmusclmachine]

18. The cheerleaders/apologists/sock puppets want you to think democracy is dead.

[FiveGoodMen]

53. Exactly

[The Stranger]

6. This was the question I posed on the General Discussion board some time ago.

Even if Congress were to somehow investigate and get to the bottom of it, the technology is there and the information too tempting for it not to simply begin in another agency, another contractor, another set of eyes and ears watching you.

And there is no readily accessible way for ordinary citizens to know that their Fourth Amendment rights are being completely eviscerated. You are plugged into the Matrix, and there is no going back now.

This is how it is going to be from now on.

[GliderGuider]

24. It's my conclusion too (Speculation Warning...)

Humanity appears to be in the grip of a global system that we originally created, but which now shapes our lives independent of our wishes.

I've recently begun to suspect that humanity is at a point of endosymbiosis with our electronic communications and control technology, especially through the Internet. In a sense, we humans have incorporated ourselves as essential control elements of a planet-wide cybernetic super-organism. The precedent for something like this is the way that mitochondria migrated as bacteria into ancient prokaryotic cells to become essential components of the new eukaryotic cells that make up all modern organisms, including us.

To expand on the "super-organism" concept a bit, it looks to me as though what humanity has done over the last few centuries is built ourselves a global cybernetic exoskeleton. Although its development started back with the emergence of language and the taming of fire, it's most visible in the modern world, and especially in the last two decades.

Transportation systems act as its gut and bloodstream, carrying raw materials (the food of civilization) to the digestive organs of factories, and carrying the finished goods (the nutrients) to wherever they are needed. Engines and motors of all kinds are its muscles. The global electronic communication network is its nervous system. Electronic sensors of a million kinds are its organs of taste, touch, smell and sight.

Human beings have evolved culturally point where we now act largely as hyper-functional decision-making neurons within this super-organism, with endpoint devices like smart phones, PCs and their descendants acting as synapses, and network connections being analogous to nerve fibers.

Just as neurons cannot live outside the body, we have evolved a system that doesn't permit humans to live outside its boundaries. Not only is there very little "outside" left, but access to the necessities of life is now only possible though the auspices of cybernetic system itself. (For example, consider living without a socially-approved job. It's barely possible for a few people, but essentially impossible for most of us.) As we have developed this system around us, we have had to relinquish more and more of our autonomy in favour of helping the machine continue functioning and growing.

While we can no longer survive outside our cybernetic exoskeleton, in return it can't exist without our input. I realized over the last month or so that this means the the symbiosis has already occurred. If I had to put a "closure date" on it, the period where it transitioned to its current form was around 1990 (plus or minus a decade or so). We didn't even notice it happening - to us it just looked like our daily lives going on as usual.

I realize that I'm touting an old and over-used science-fiction idea. Luckily, it seems to have happened through a process of coevolution driven by the mutual amplification effects of human ingenuity, electronic technology and large amounts of available energy, rather than through a Borg-like assimilation of humans into a hive mind, or Ray Kurzweil's eschatological Singularity.

Here are some data that describe aspects of the system:

• The data traffic of the global Internet is now over 150 terabytes per second, and will be over 400 TB/sec by 2016;
  
• There are over 12 billion devices attached to the Internet, rising to over 20 billion by 2016;
  
• There are over 6 billion mobile phones in use world-wide;
  
• There are over 1 billion personal computers in the world.;
  
• Human beings today use on average 20 times the energy our distant ancestors did. For highly developed countries like the USA and much of Europe, the number is 50 to 90 times as high.
  
• This energy and technology use is occurring in a population that has grown 7-fold since 1800. We are now part of a gigantic s system.

The spying we see but can't stop is a natural part of such a system. The system needs to know what's going on in order to function optimally, so monitoring technologies appear. Their development isn't so much a product of human malice as a result of the standard need of an organism to know what's going in its "body". While these espionage systems developed within a political context, their value to the super-organism is more on the level of a nervous system that detects and signals critical information from place to place in a living body. It's just that the organism has now apparently transcended and incorporated the people that created it. It now has a life that is in a sense independent of mere human values, concerns and goals.

Such a cybernetic super-organism should be expected to exhibit rapid, conscious, teleological evolution driven by a mesh of human ideas and electronic information rather than the slow Darwinian genetic/reproductive process, so the possibility for the rapid emergence of unexpected social behaviours would seem to be fairly high. One of these behaviors is a variety of self-protective immune responses directed against what it sees as "rogue cells" within its body - cells that just happen to be people. Those immune responses are rapidly becoming more subtle and pervasive as the development of the cybernetic aspects of the organism explode in complexity and scale.

I don't even think there is anything we can "do" about it any more - certainly not to reverse it, and it's an open question whether we can even moderate its development at this point. The only real opportunity I can see for the return of more humane values to the world in general is a partial collapse of civilization, due possibly to climate change. That's a very dismal perspective for someone who values human autonomy above all else, and also happens to enjoy the fruits of civilization.

Most people aren't going to agree with this analysis, but it's the conclusion I've come to after digging into the why's and wherefore's of life, societies and civilizations for the last decade.

[Surya Gayatri]

29. Excellent, thought-provoking analysis, GliderGuider...

You might consider posting it as an OP in a separate thread.

Your essay gives artful expression to so many ill-formed and inarticulate ideas I've had since Snowden let the cat out of his lap-top carrying case.

[GliderGuider]

34. Thanks. I've posted it as an OP in GD. nt

[The Stranger]

48. The Machine Stops (E.M. Forster, 1909)

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

[GliderGuider]

50. Egggg-zactly! Nice catch! :-) nt

[Helen Borg]

8. Information is gold...

Just because something is gold it does not mean you can take it. Some information is illegal to obtain. That is why insider trading is illegal, for example.

[iemitsu]

15. Insider trading is not illegal if one is a congressman.

Laws do not apply to all equally and never have (not to suggest that this is how it ought to be).
It ok for those with power to spy on us but if the tables were turned it would not be so acceptable.
Privacy laws were meant to protect those, who could afford privacy, not for the rest of us.
I love the argument in this article though, "New Zealand relied on US intelligence to get into Afghanistan". Gee, they needed us to get them into a war. I bet the people of New Zealand just love and need that.
The BS that our intelligence "saved" anyone from attack is questionable and if it did happen I'd bet the intelligence did not come from snooping on individual Americans phone calls.
This article thumbs its nose at our legitimate and legal concerns about our government overstepping its bounds. It suggests that the information gathered is so valuable that citizens cannot expect their own governments to follow their own laws. Well, with that as a model they will find it hard to expect their citizens to be inclined to follow law either.
The article suggests that those governments, who do not engage in this sort of information gathering will not survive, but it may be those governments will be the ones that don't survive.
We will see.

[Laelth]

19. +1 n/t

-Laelth

[karynnj]

31. Yes it is - per a law passed in 2011

Even before then I think it would have been a problem.

[iemitsu]

45. It should have always been a problem

and, as you note, in 2011 congress passed a law making them equals, under the law, with the rest of us, regarding insider trading. But this year, congress repealed most of the 2011 law making it once again possible for congressmen and women to enrich themselves with the legislation they pass.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130416/08344222725/congress-quickly-quietly-rolls-back-insider-trading-rules-itself.shtml

[karynnj]

49. The 2011 law was a knee jerk response to a book that

was written by a Palin ally that used idiotic methods to conclude that there was likely insider trading. For example, for any Senator or congressman on any committee with any jurisdiction over health care who bought any healthcare stock in 2003 and sold in 2004 or bought in 2009 and sold in 2010. This was because they "knew" the drug bill and ACA would pass and what was in it - and the stocks made big gains.

In fact it would have been hard to RANDOMLY buy stocks in 2009 and not have them gain by 2010 , just as in 2003 to 2004. Not to mention, he mainly looked at Democrats even claiming that they wrote the bill in 2003 - when actually they fought the bill!

I do think that at minimum, any real insider trading would be easily seen from their disclosures and could be used against them when they run. (It would have better to keep the law - to get real penalties.)

[Iliyah]

9. As long as Americans can keep it front and center

along with the civil liberties being trashed upon it won't go away any time soon. That means if people physically keep up visual protest in the streets, social media (corporate media won't cover it) and word by mouth.

[Scurrilous]

10. Dear Glenn Greenwald - Must try harder!

Luck!

[heaven05]

11. got

that right. It's omniscient now.

[Blue_Tires]

12. I still contend the time for public "outrage" was 10 or more years ago...

Back when the 'framework' was still getting put in place and something could still be done about it...I'm glad more attention is being paid to the issue now, but the people who say with a straight face that they're "shocked" or "surprised" about Snowden's leaks make me shake my head...

I know nobody likes talking about this either, but there are dozens upon dozens of environmental issues (on a global scale) that are reaching critical mass in the very near future...How many people will claim to be surprised when those things come to pass?

[GliderGuider]

27. I completely agree. See post #24. nt

[nolabels]

13. Yea, right

The tail would like to wag the dog

One of the main jobs being performed right now is damage control. Find some underling from another country with the population around the same size as the county i live in to tell me about my civil rights. By the way, tell Agent Mike to eat shit and die



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand

[bobthedrummer]

14. K&R

[Laelth]

16. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[iemitsu]

20. Here's the problem with "Five Eyes",

"But John Blaxland, a senior fellow at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, said politicians Down Under have often criticized the security relationship until they’ve gotten into power and been briefed on its benefits.

Then, he said, they tend to go silent.

“The perception is that the advantages are so great, they’d be crazy to give it up,” he said."

Free-thinking individuals hate the idea of being spied upon but once one gains power they love spying on others. Are they really so impressed with the value of the intelligence or are they being threatened, by those with the information, to keep them compliant?

I don't think that the question of total surveillance is settled yet.

[stonecutter357]

21. K&R

[PSPS]

22. "critical factor in the security and prosperity of nations."

This "tail wagging the dog" piece from AP uses the curious statement that this worldwide wholesale spying on everyone is a "critical factor in the security and prosperity of nations." Substitute "the top 0.1%" for the word "nations" and I think that accurately describes the real motivation.

The question isn't whether or not it will survive, but whether or not it will be forced down our throats with the assistance of the compliant press, like the AP.

[stupidicus]

23. in other words they are free to ignore the will of their respective citizens

if they so choose.

I'm sure about any fascist/plutocrat/oligarch can get fully behind that one.

[HardTimes99]

25. If everyone in the country cancelled his or her cell phone contract and

home internet service (and maybe credit cards?), that would put a serious crimp in this shit.

Threaten the financial interests of AT&T and Verizon shareholders and you'll see the security state fold like a cheap suit and shut its doors like the carnival con game it always has been.

Americans want their privacy and their Iphones. Sorry, you don't get to sacrifice liberty for safety, expect to keep either AND keep all your toys to boot.

[brooklynite]

52. But if they did that...

...how could they log on here to complain about the loss of their privacy?

[HardTimes99]

55. True. Just one paradox of contemporary life, I suppose. - nt

[DCBob]

28. Thats pretty much how I saw this from the beginning.

Its legal, necessary and critical. No responsible person in leadership is going to discontinue surveillance/spying no matter how much public outcry. They might scale it back a bit but not to the point the critics would be satisfied. Better get used to it.. like taking off our shoes at the airport.. its a hassle and most people hate it but we have to do it.

[Maedhros]

35. I fail to see why surveillance of U.S. citizens by the NSA

is necessary or critical for our safety. I have an orders-of-magnitude higher chance of being killed or injured by gun violence than by terrorism, but the State doesn't seem particularly worried about that. The 1st and 4th Amendments should be on equal footing with the 2nd, right?

I can certainly see why the State thinks it necessary and critical to protect the State. The key question is: protect it from whom? A clue to the answer is: who are they surveilling?

[GliderGuider]

36. It has nothing to do with "our" safety.

It has everything to do with defending the larger system of Western techno-industrial civilization against disruption by potential "rogue" elements, whether individuals (that means us), non-state groups (terra, terra, terra), or other nations (like North Korea or Iran).

Think of it as part of global civilization's immune system. It was inevitable that this would happen once the system became sophisticated enough. If it is found illegal, the laws will be changed - that's how important this is. Important to the system, that is, not to us...

[DCBob]

40. Did it ever occur to you that the surveillance is actually working..

and this is why we havent had many incidents or any large attacks since 9/11?

[Maedhros]

42. Is there any reason to believe that what you say is true?

All we have is the NSA's remarkably dubious word on the matter. Given that the NSA has no problem lying to the United States Senate, why would we think they would tell the truth to us lowly citizens?

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130620/01331123543/yet-another-claim-how-nsa-surveillance-saved-us-terrorists-falls-apart-under-scrutiny.shtml

As NSA apologists in the government seek to defend the NSA surveillance program, they keep talking about how critical it was to stopping "more than 50" terrorist operations. However, every time they've described any, the details have shown that the surveillance programs often had little to do with uncovering the plot, and were clearly not a key component of stopping anything. We already discussed the NYC subway bombing plot, which was discovered through other means. The other story initially raised, concerning David Headly was similarly found to be on shaky ground as well.

It's sort of like John Brennan in 2011 claiming that U.S. drone strikes had not resulting in a single civilian casualty. This was quickly proven false:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/world/asia/12drones.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Of course the NSA will claim the surveillance program has stopped terrorist attacks - they're trying to cover their asses. But a close analysis of the claims shows them to be exaggerated or outright false.

[DCBob]

43. The effect is more as a deterrent than to catch one in the act.

[Maedhros]

44. Then it is an exceptionally poor deterrant.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-nsa-prism-is-aimed-at-terrorisms-idiots-2013-6

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-23/u-s-surveillance-is-not-aimed-at-terrorists.html

The infrastructure set up by the National Security Agency, however, may only be good for gathering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists. The Prism surveillance program focuses on access to the servers of America’s largest Internet companies, which support such popular services as Skype, Gmail and iCloud. These are not the services that truly dangerous elements typically use.

Why should we put up with such an extensive, intrusive and Constitutionally-questionable surveillance program if it is so easily sidestepped by those who it purports to deter? It clearly neither deterred nor stopped the Tsarnaevs.

We didn't have this level of surveillance in the 70s and 80s, when Europe was experiencing a widespread rash of terrorism, and there were no attacks in the United States.

[DCBob]

46. In case you didnt notice alot has changed since the 70's and 80s.

and of course the surveillance and security systems in place are more than just monitoring Skype, Gmail and iCloud.

[Maedhros]

47. Q: If terrorists aren't using those systems, then why is the NSA surveilling them?

A: Because the NSA is not after terrorists.

[DCBob]

54. Well if they stopped surveilling those systems for sure the terrorists would start using them.

[Maedhros]

58. OH NOES!

If the Terrorists were to have Gmail, THEY WOULD BE ALL OVER US THE NEXT DAY!!!

[Ash_F]

39. Defund PRISM like they defunded ACORN

Should be as easy to do it for one as the other, right?

[avaistheone1]

51. Like your idea.

k&r

[MindPilot]

41. And THAT is the problem. n/t

[OnyxCollie]

56. That's too bad. nt

[Major Hogwash]

57. Information is like platinum!!

Platinum is better than gold!!!

Everybody knows that.

[bobthedrummer]

59. 5 eyes are kept safe by folks like Iran/Contra felon John Poindexter and Total

Information Awareness imho kpete.

Total Information Awareness (SourceWatch)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Total_Information_Awareness

[bobthedrummer]

60. Still LBN, kick. n/t

[Enrique]

61. experts whose livelihoods depend on the expanding surveillance state

say that efforts to scale back the surveillance state are futile.