Tag: NSA

Trust the Spies?

“The Biden administration is spying on us,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his Monday night audience.

“On Sunday, we heard from a whistleblower within the U.S. government, someone with direct knowledge, who warned us the NSA was reading our electronic communications, our emails and texts,” he explained, “and was planning to leak them selectively in an effort to hurt us.”

Quite an explosive allegation.

“[T]he evidence for this claim is lacking,” a Vox story argued, adding that “on Tuesday the NSA took the unusual step of releasing a carefully worded statement denying it.”

Carlson quickly responded that there was no actual denial in the NSA’s verbiage. Huh? Referring directly to Carlson’s charge, the National Security Agency’s statement read, in part: “This allegation is untrue.”

Awfully clear to me. In fact, so straight-forwardly worded that I wonder if the writer is new to Washington, D.C.

Of course, the problem isn’t really one of language.

The problem? Trust.

Back in 2013, James Clapper, then-President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, was asked under oath if the NSA “collected any data at all on million of Americans.” Clapper lied to Congress. He has never been held accountable for making that knowingly false statement.

Carlson showed viewers 2006 footage of then-Senator Joe Biden voicing concerns about NSA spying. “And we’re going to trust the president and the vice-president of the United States that they’re doing the right thing?” inquired Biden. “Don’t count me in on that.”

On Tuesday, Carlson contended “the NSA does routinely spy on Americans. It won’t call it spying — that’s exactly what it is. Millions of Americans. And sometimes it does it for political reasons. And everyone knows this. Everyone.”

But many still deny it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Today’s Thought about lying in the old Soviet Union is relevant to the “everybody knows”/“everybody denies” mentality. Share it far and wide. This wasn’t a feature of America three decades ago, was it?

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Tags NSA, privacy, spying, Tucker Carlson

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies

Inch, Meet Mile

Give ’em an inch, they will take … a continent.

When Edward Snowden broke the secrecy of the NSA’s illegal surveillance on innocent Americans, many folks (especially those in government) said the snooping was OK, because

it is necessary for our security, and, besides,
the collected data would only be used against terrorists, as supervised by the FISA courts.

Well, it is now known that, whatever “a.” may be, “b.” is a dead letter, swept away by broken promises and a new information practice.

Yes, the National Security Agency now shares its (unconstitutionally obtained) information with various and sundry government agencies, for a wide variety of purposes.

Last week, Radley Balko noted in the Washington Post that “the ‘sneak-and-peek’ provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security and terrorism investigations has overwhelmingly been used in narcotics cases. Now the New York Times reports that National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy.”

That didn’t take long, eh?

Many of us have opposed the NSA’s data collection on American citizens because we believed the data would not continue to be used just for the alleged purpose they were collected.

It is not a “slippery slope” argument so much as an “inch-mile” one. Government tends to grow, in size and especially in scope.

And usually at the expense of our freedoms.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags National Security Agency, NSA, patriot act, surveillance, surveillance state, terrorism

Accountability crime and punishment general freedom government transparency moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Zetabytes and Zombies

Zombie government wants to eat our brains. Did I overstate this on Sunday?

Most folks don’t look at the Apple/FBI controversy over digital security quite that starkly.

The National Security Administration sure doesn’t see it that way. The NSA is in the “information harvesting business,” says Business Insider. And boy, “business is booming.” The NSA measures its operations in zetabytes. And in the acreage of its Maryland and Utah sprawls.

The idea is that the NSA protects us.

But notice that government, collecting all that information, and in trying to beat back malicious and sportive hacker attacks from around the world, treats computer companies antagonistically. And it doesn’t provide us, individually, with help on our personal cyber-security: we have to pay for our own cyber-security. When some thief (local or overseas) steals a digital identity and grabs a netizen’s wealth and credit, of what help is government?

Not much.

It’s little different from back in Herbert Spencer’s day, over a century ago, when he noted that government practiced “that miserable laissez faire,” making citizens bear the costs of their own protection, to financial ruin defending themselves in court.

Indeed, for all our reliance upon law enforcement, we have to notice that the real work of defense and conflict avoidance happens best outside of government “help” — as is the case in Detroit, Michigan, where it is private security that does what many expect the police to do.

As long as the police and the federal government operate mainly as antagonists to peaceful citizens as well as to criminals, then looking warily at police power and privilege (and thus the NSA and the FBI) seems like …

… Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Apple, NSA, privacy, security, terrorism

folly general freedom government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Safety, Savings and Symbolism

Post author By CS Admin
Post date June 25, 2015
2 Comments on Safety, Savings and Symbolism

How can the U. S. save $2.5 billion a year, reduce the federal workforce by 4,000 hires, and engage in a symbolic act of undoubted patriotism, all at the same time?

Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security.

Matt A. Mayer, a former DHS employee who claims to have “written more on DHS than just about anyone,” writes in Reason that dismantling DHS would increase co-ordination and decrease inefficiencies.

Since DHS was put in place, in 2003, to increase governmental co-ordination in the face of terrorist threats, Mayer’s charge that it serves the opposite cause should … give us pause.

Establishing the DHS didn’t get rid of turf wars. Why would it? It increased the turf rather than merely reroute chains of communication and command. All other agencies still exist. Extra turf exacerbates co-ordination difficulty.

And then there’s what state and local law enforcement faces: “the multi-headed hydra.” The federal operation remains fragmented, which “only ensures that key items will fall through the cracks between these departments, whose personnel spend far too much time fighting each other for primacy than they should. Our enemies couldn’t ask for a more fertile environment within which to attack us.”

I added the italics, for emphasis.

Ever since Jimmy Carter ran for the presidency on consolidating bureaucratic departments in the nation’s capital, but delivered, instead, new departments, the “logic” of adding new bureaucracies onto old has proven to be the “easy answer” for insiders. But a transparent failure, for everyone else.

So, start over. Get rid of the inefficient monster.

And take heart: republics don’t have “homelands”; empires do. Let’s stop playing the wrong game.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags law, National Security Agency, NSA, police, terrorism

too much government

Yes, You Are a Suspect

Sometimes the Internet makes a mistake.

The other day, one of my favorite websites embedded a Fox News video about NSA spying. Fox News entitles their video “Citizens Treated As Suspects.” At the site showcasing Fox’s story, though, the headline reads: “The NSA Grabs Information from Non-Suspects; Ninety percent of those spied upon are under no suspicion.”

Can this be right? When you’re treated as a suspect, you are a suspect, aren’t you? You’re being suspected of something. At least of being somebody who might be up to something worth snagging in an all-embracing fishing expedition. If you’re not guilty, somebody else leaving comparable data traces is, surely.

On the other hand, no matter how innocent you feel, you gotta be guilty of something for which the government could come after you, right?

I do not say you have done something actually wrong. Only something some policeman or bureaucrat could hassle you for. We live in an era when parents get arrested for letting their kids play in the park

Fox News reporter Shephard Smith says that most Americans caught up in the particular NSA surveillance net discussed in his story are just ordinary, everyday blokes — not reasonably suspected of anything NSA-spy-worthy. This is unsurprising given all we’ve been learning from the NSA documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden (see ProPublica’s revelation-chart).

These days, in the eyes of our government we are all suspects. Continuously.

And there’s something very suspicious about that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.