worth reading -- loophole in FISA?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Date: December 22, 2005 5:47:25 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: [IP] worth reading -- loophole in FISA?

Well, Dave, here's a couple of relevant personal thoughts regarding  
vacuum-cleaner-like data gathering...

1) there's a saying I heard recently that the NSA's approach to  
intelligence is like trying to find a needle in the haystack by  
sending tractors in the field to gather more hay.  Based on my  
understanding of the reliability of inference-making I suspect the  
problem is that and worse.   So these so-called vacuum-cleaner  
technologies probably won't improve the ability to predict terrorism  
that much, but the elimination of checks and balances will almost  
certainly result in lots of "false positives" that can be used as  
presumptive reasons to harass both US citizens and foreigners for  
"inferences" that are little more than wild-ass intuitions about what  
kind of activity might be correlated with bad actors.   Of course  
there are lots of technology companies who sell stuff to the  
intelligence community who are full of hyperbolic claims about the  
wonders of mass data collection and analysis, but if they were so  
good, why don't they predict the stock market instead and make money  
the old fashioned way?   Predicting the stock market is a trivial  
problem compared to predicting and preventing terrorism, but in the  
market there is actually a measure of success, whereas the measure of  
success in the beltway intelligence technology business is getting  
another, bigger contract.  (that's what comes from outsourcing to a  
military-industrial complex that is so big it can buy members of  
Congress, lock stock and barrel, as we saw with Duke Cunningham).

2) what the NSA does outside the US may be legal under US law, but by  
no means is it either legal or a source of pride when viewed in other  
countries or in international law.

The grand glorious endeavor of spying is fundamentally anti-social  
and anti-humanity.   Apparently, part of the standard CIA induction  
briefing is being reminded that humint is just another word for  
fraud, deception, burglary, and other things that we do not tolerate  
in civilized societies.   If agents carrying out such acts are  
discovered in our country they can be executed, and by symmetry most  
countries can and will execute our spies if caught.   (this may be  
cruel and unusual, because theft of information inside a country is  
usually punished by more lenient methods).

Sigint (though the hands *seem* cleaner) is legally and morally just  
wire fraud and peeping-tomism etc. by another name, and again, agents  
who listen in on radio or wire conversations in other countries are  
violating their laws, just as agents doing that in the US would be  
guilty of espionage and subject to execution or harsh penalties.   So  
by any "golden rule" standard of justice we should be careful.

One can argue that, just as war is sometimes thought to be necessary  
to deal with threats to the citizens of our nation, intelligence  
gathering, however illegal, might also be sometimes necessary.   But  
it's not a "good" at any level, and hardly something we should be  
proud of.

However, the thrill of hanging out with the codebreakers shouldn't be  
used to glamorize what is, at its core, just a government-sanctioned  
form of antisocial behavior.  It's practitioners cannot be trusted to  
decide what is appropriate, because they are by definition able to  
carry out acts that are antisocial and illegal.



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