Not only is there no pertinent evidence to demonstrate that surveillance has ever paid off; There is much more so, extremely pertinent evidence that demonstrates the past 30 years of foreign policy have directly contributed to past and current day terrorist threats: Financing the Taliban and Bin-laden to fight the soviets in the 80's, invading and destabilizing Iraq, financing Syrian rebels (in part ISIS supporters and/or sympthathizers) while destabilizing Syria, etc, etc..- Yet somehow none of this is part of the main-stream narrative and a couple months later Obama will be asking congress for more funds to fight Assad and the NSA will be asking for broader surveillance powers.
I'm very sorry for the people that have lost their family members and loved ones in the course of these things but the answer is not and cannot be "more drone strikes" and "everyone forfeit your privacy".
If Europeans hadn’t drawn completely arbitrary national borders all over the region after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, if Palestine had been left to its Arab inhabitants instead of displacing them in favor of European Jews, if the British and Americans hadn’t put so much emphasis on securing the Suez Canal via support for friendly dictatorships nearby, if the US hadn’t toppled the Iranian democracy under Mosaddegh in 1953 to reinstall the Shah, if Western European, Russian, and American guns hadn’t been handed out on all sides like candy, etc., the region would certainly be far different from now.
But it’s impossible to guess exactly what the effects of some counterfactual foreign policy over the past century would be.
It's true we can only speculate as to what the results of a different foreign policy might have been - but after years of disastrous foreign policies with all of the same destructive elements - Maybe it's time to build some schools and hospitals instead of bombing another city, sending more guns or eroding more human rights?
Africa absolutely suffers the same kind of chaos and terrorism -- we just don't hear about it because it's less densely populated and the people there have darker skin. But Boko Haram is still a huge problem in Nigeria and Islamic fundamentalism in Somalia is a way bigger problem than you would think given the total lack of news coverage (the US launches almost as many drone strikes on eastern Africa as it does in the middle east).
Much of sub-saharan Africa is still under de-facto apartheid. Wealthy (often white) land owners are in bed with corrupt government officials who, while black, are more than happy to continue the status quo as long as they get paid. It's very hard to have a cohesive ideology behind your insurgency when there are for-profit death squads operating in the area. But you're right; there is also no great unifying force for the people in the area like there is in the middle east and north Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burundian_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%9308_Kenyan_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko
The amount of oil in the ground in places like Canada might indeed rival the Middle East, but it's lower-EROEI more expensive oil. The amount of money in the ground is higher in the Middle East than anywhere else. Sub-Saharan Africa does have quite a bit of resource wealth but it doesn't have anywhere near as fat and juicy a prize as the ME does.
You sir, are very close to the truth. The reality is that it isn't about control of the information per se, but what can be accomplished with said information. In this case, the "information" we are referring to is the massive amount of metadata we generate, not to mention the content thereof, and I would posit that the true goal is the control of the people, through ownership of the information. The distinction is a small but important one. It is about control, not security, and anybody saying otherwise is generally ill-informed or ignorant.
From an intelligence side of things, it used to take so much effort to do dirty tricks on people. You had to black bag their place of residence, you had to tail them for days, weeks, sometimes months.
These days, you just PRISM/ECHELON your way into their data, pull all the dirt you need out, and approach them with your demands as you will.
This is only one of the most palpable dangers of the surveillance age, in that the intel agencies and potential moles/infiltrators can potentially have vast amounts of power over institutions they shouldn't, for example, congress. It's essentially setting us up for a coup d'etat of the oligarchy. (people need to remember that the OSS/CIA came straight out of London/WallStreet! I think people should also be made aware of the often at odds nature of the different intel agencies. I think military intelligence is rightly suspicious of the Company.)
I spent a long time trying to understand this machine because I was an action arm of it at one time (and perhaps if called upon, may one day again be), and my conclusions are not hopeful, pretty, and often are considered conspiracy theory. What I have said above only scratches the surface.
keep going.
be aware the analytical & technically savy are also considered threats to the establishment: "NSA: Linux Journal is an "extremist forum" and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance"
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extrem...
We found out about continuity of government during Iran contra, but were misled into thinking it went away. The people mostly responsible for it were the same neocons who manipulated GW Bush (eg: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer) The best writing about this is from former diplomat Peter Dale Scott. I think it's possible that CoG is in effect and the Constitution has been secretly superseded by secret law. (Originally designed for nuclear attack, it was later expanded to be overly broad so as to potentially apply to almost any "national emergency". By the way, we have officially been in a state of "national emergency" since 2001, with renewal every year by all presidents since.
Beyond that, resource wars are incoming, which includes a reduction of the power of the petrodollar, which is the core reason behind expansion into the Middle East, Africa and the Russian border (Georgia 08, Ukraine).
Add to that the fact that since 2010 Citizens United, corruption of our electoral process is almost unilateral, that we are haemorrhaging jobs to overseas (which will increase once the TPP TTIP inevitably passes), and even if the horribly destructive so called "free-trade" systems don't do it, we are on the verge of an automation age which will remove many jobs from the market, and the oligarchy are increasingly done extracting wealth from third world countries and have turned inward and are now eating their own people so to say.
With the surveillance engine already in place, the inevitable unrest will be put down harshly (for national security of course), and the internet will be balkanised and the real world model of law will be applied to the internet... you know, the one were everything is illegal and everyone commits at least three felonies a day, so then you can arbitrarily enforce the law in order to stifle dissent.
All three branches of the government are compromised, and the fourth estate is in the gutter, along with the education system.
So basically we are returning to some strange form of neo-fuedalism, but this time it will be high-tech and global.
On one hand, I'm horrified at the things the US does. We kill innocents, we send our own citizens to die for really very little reason, and we spend an epic fuck ton of money with very little to show in terms of tactical results. We stick our nose in situations that don't involve us just because we can, and I'm tired of the US always being the world's police force.
On the other hand, global power politics aren't about playing nice. As far as hegemonist world powers throughout history go, the US is relatively benevolent (wiretaps and extrajudicial renditions are nothing compared to the genocides perpetrated by nearly every preceding global power). In the absence of a dominant global power, you would have multiple equally-matched regional powers vying for supremacy -- a situation that would almost certainly end in war and the emergence of a new, potentially less benevolent global power. A lot of innocent people likely die in this scenario too.
The world is undoubtedly a safer place because the US does horrible things to bad people (and yes, at times to good people too). The fact that there is a single superpower that can and will defeat anyone, anywhere deters a lot of large-scale bad behavior -- the last 70 years since WWII have been some of the most peaceful in human history. Casualty counts from armed conflict measure in the thousands to tens of thousands; not the hundreds of thousands or millions that you'd see in a major war.
But that still doesn't make what the US does in regards to surveillance right. Can there be world peace without a dominant military power to keep everyone in check? I don't know, but we should at least try to find out.
Resources which Isil has benefited from handsomely, and in fact the only reason Turkey and the KSA are currently engaging Isil directly is because of the domestic threat posed by homegrown Isil cells. While the West is equally guilty of this abject laziness and callousness, Turkey and the KSA have contributed far more to the global jihadi movement than any other organization since Isil announced independence in June 2014.
As for Saudi Arabia, their government is just about as bad as Assad on human rights - which of course doesn't prevent the US and US politicians from being very cozy with them as long as it serves their geo-political agenda.
Why do they have no choice? Well, if the House of Saud falls then the weapons would reach the hands of jihadist terrorists before you can say "9/11," and the Royal Saudi Army has a very large stockpile of all of the best hardware you can buy with petrodollars.
They are a whole lot worse.
I believe the word you're searching for is "banana republic"
Bear in mind that the data used in this article are from arrest records. In fact, many of the arrests supposedly resulting from online activity could just as easily have occurred because of reports by concerned citizens. Would you put it past the authorities to seize a suspected terrorist identified through dragnet surveillance without creating a record of arrest? I think it is not inconceivable.
If you are opposed to mass surveillance, I think the best argument is that its social costs surpass the benefit of reducing terrorism. But perhaps this is not such a palatable argument after two well-publicized tragedies.
This is a laughable statement but typically upvoted on HN. Politicians have to appear to have done everything possible to prevent these attacks. They are not dictators, if the public feels they were soft on terror they are gone, no pentaverate necessary.
You did not make a counterargument.
Can anyone make guesses how Afghanistan would have turned out if the Soviets had been let to freely occupy Afghanistan? Would the country have turned into another North Korea, or perhaps something like Afghanistan's northern neighbors, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, are today?
Or would the secular socialistic and religious elements have gone into civil war anyway, even without the US supporting the religious side?
In all honesty, it would probably look relatively similar to what it does today. In that alternate universe, it wouldn't necessarily be the Taliban itself that came to power, but the group that occupied that role would be similar in ideology and effect to the Taliban that exists in this universe.
[0] ignoring the pending collapse of the USSR, of course, but since this is all speculation anyway, we can take some liberties.
So, speculatively, even without the US supporting the mujahideen in the 80s, the Soviets would have eventually left, Taliban or something similar would have kind-of-won the civil war, and Afghanistan would be about the same chaos as it is now. So why is US blamed for "destabilizing Afghanistan" and "unintended consequences", if the area would probably be similarly unstable even in this alternate timeline? And if bin Laden and such are anti-American in our universe, even after having received American support in the 80s, they surely would be anti-American in the alternate timeline, too?
So if the US meddling didn't change anything for the worse, why all the blame?
However, this article does the reverse. And claim that it is useless because it hasn't prevented something that never happened in the first place.
My seat-belt never saved my life but I put it on anyway.
0 for 0 isn't good information in either direction.
But even today 99.9% of Americans aren't really surveilled in the conventional sense. FISA courts only issue ~3,000 wiretapping, data download requests a year.
* People like to play games with definitions. Captured: Data goes into a device owned and operated by an american intelligence agency.
Plus they had not ramped up Arabic translators since before then it wasn't a priority.
Plus most mass shootings are lone gunman. You are never going to prevent that with communication spying.
If the surveillance is gathering up these searches and still has no record of stopping attacks, then two options, amongst others, are: get better filtering and analysis techniques, or my preferred option, disband the (illegal) programs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#E...
Pretty compelling argument for them to be not making, IMHO.
And hardly anyone here would believe them anyways, because the goal posts would just be moved to "Why doesn't the NSA show us proof of the plots they stopped instead of just telling us how many they stopped?".
There will always be a cat and mouse game, it seems the trick is to not play the game in the first place.
To breach a wall, you have to construct a single ladder.
To protect against a ladder, you have to raise all of your walls.
This escalation is in fact the basis of al Qaeda's anti-Western military strategy -- to engage in assymmetric warfare[1].
The only reason they succeed is becomes on infrequent occasions law enforcement is even more incompetent.
The 9/11 attacks had many, many red flag warnings before they went down that were largely ignored. What's so unusual about people training to fly planes, but not take off or land, right?
The same patterns will be found here in hindsight.
Deep, pervasive surveillance will only flood already saturated information channels. What they need is less information of a higher quality, not more noise in the system.
drills as mass attacks are happening - be it 9/11 , Sandy Hook, London Bombing or others
+ factor in: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/17/serbian-police-...
The passport of a "suicide bomber" escaped the bomb blast and landed into the hands of autorities (conviniently) -- but now Serbian police have proven it to be a fraudulent passport...so how did it get there?
France was absolutely not starting from scratch on Surveillance at the beginning of May. The bill dropped the need for things like "get a warrant before monitoring all traffic to/from an IP in realtime"; they had that ability long before.
Edit: I would absolutely love someone to explain why this post is being downvoted
Guess what the limiting factor of effective surveillance of Islamic terrorists is?
And I state that the CIA and NSA have known this since the early 1970s...
Ready? Its the amount of trained foreign language people that the CIA, NSA, and FBI have that happen to be skilled in largely Arabic based languages.
Now for the wrinkle how do we get those numbers increased?
Guess? The exact opposite of what republican law makers want to do that is have a fully functioning immigration system.
NSA could tomorrow sweep all communication world-wide but without concrete steps to increase foreign language people to translate any of it is such a HUGE BONDOGGLE that defies description..
http://as2914.net/ (map of BGP networks)
^ comparing this to finding needles in haystacks is a a severe understatement.
The scale of internet is mind-boggling. The amount of data flowing through it is massive. Considering most of that which is relevant is wrapped in HTTPS and even the best financed SIGINT agency will have a tough time doing mass surveillance dragnet with any cost-effective results.
Add foreign languages into the mix and it's even more expensive.
These programs will be used and are being used to monitor and arrest domestic radicals, support foreign espionage for American economic interests, etc much more than any terrorist prevention:
In order of priority:
1) Target "Occupy wallstreet", G20 protests, Greenpeace etc
2) Target foreign govts & corporations for economic gain
3) Target Radicals in foreign countries that oppose US interests (some of these could very well be terrorists also)
4) Actual terrorists
So if we keep using the wrong metric to measure success then obviously "Mass surveillance" has failed.
The Director of the CIA wasted no time blaming Snowden for the Paris attacks [1] - dismissing all concerns as "hand-wringing". I am now waiting for the "Our current spying is not enough, we need even more spying powers" congress actions to surface. Cynically exploiting the fear and concern after an attack is the real game here - the "efficacy" of the measures proposed is irrelevant, as no one will be able to hold them accountable.
[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/us/after-paris-attacks-cia...
"Citing possible links between terror-related websites and online communications and Friday’s attacks on Paris, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested Tuesday Congress give the agency more authority to use ‘big data’ to monitor and act on potential threats."
http://www.insidesources.com/in-wake-of-paris-fcc-seeks-powe...
This will be pushed into the narrative & they will have their way.
I can imagine that the intelligence agencies may not be thrilled about broadcasting their capabilities.
My nightmare scenario is that surveillance actually is helping, but the extent is a closely guarded secret, which means that we'll never get rid of it, and we'll never know why, or have a chance to, as a society, have a conversation about the tradeoff between surveillance and counterterrorism.
The government and businesses have built a state of surveillance far beyond anything dreamt of a couple of decades ago, with massive continuing investment.
Yet the tool of surveillance was unable to stop this attack. Now they want more surveillance, but maybe it's the wrong tool for this job.
Surveillance seems to have reached that place on the technology adoption curve where people get a little over-enthusiastic and blindly think it solves every problem, and they haven't yet realized it's a tool which, like all tools, is good for for things but not for others.
(That ignores the massive cost to individuals and to our societies of surveillance.)
Even so, how do we KNOW that there haven't been any major terrorist attacks thwarted? If I were the government, I would keep my thwarting as secret as possible (up until the point where the public turns against me enough to start trying to shut me down).
So what would happen if more attacks were planned? (Brilliant habit, reading HN right before going to bed.)
This is the article that should also be on the front on the NYT and Washington Post, the Times and the Independent.
Every major newspaper should be fulfilling its fourth estate responsibilities.
