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[Mrhappyface]

There are federal courts in such positions to act as oversight. They are secret though, but that's sort of the point when dealing with such procedures.

Not really. You can't trust a court that you can't examine the decisions of to oversee a program you don't know about and expect them to be perfectly benign. I don't understand the cultural armor you've put over the US intelligence community, but it certainly doesn't reflect the reality of how incredibly important management oversight is in any other agency.

Then what? I don't see any better system than using federal judges.

[Eagleon]

There are federal courts in such positions to act as oversight. They are secret though, but that's sort of the point when dealing with such procedures.

Not really. You can't trust a court that you can't examine the decisions of to oversee a program you don't know about and expect them to be perfectly benign. I don't understand the cultural armor you've put over the US intelligence community, but it certainly doesn't reflect the reality of how incredibly important management oversight is in any other agency.

Then what? I don't see any better system than using federal judges.

Then no massively scaled datamining looking for anything that could possibly be incriminating? Why is this so difficult? If the NSA really needs this kind of access and freedom with our data to guard against terrorism and espionage, there is no hope for democracy. This is not hyperbole, this is the NSA being in a position to control every branch of the government - who is tried, who is guilty, who gets elected, who gets removed from office. If no one can come up with a better solution than a court blind to its own proceedings, it's madness to let it continue.

[SalmonGod]

There are federal courts in such positions to act as oversight. They are secret though, but that's sort of the point when dealing with such procedures.

Not really. You can't trust a court that you can't examine the decisions of to oversee a program you don't know about and expect them to be perfectly benign. I don't understand the cultural armor you've put over the US intelligence community, but it certainly doesn't reflect the reality of how incredibly important management oversight is in any other agency.

Then what? I don't see any better system than using federal judges.

That's issue, isn't it?  Opinions vary immensely from person to person, and it mostly depends on how seriously you take the threat of terrorism.  I don't take it very seriously at all, and am consequently of the opinion that these programs shouldn't exist.  I understand that's unrealistic, so I would be happy just to see them not abused, but I have very little faith that can happen.  What are we supposed to do when officials constantly lie to us?  We can't even have a reasonable interaction between the public and these agencies to reach a compromise.  They still won't even acknowledge that the most serious complaints even exist.

[Mrhappyface]

There are federal courts in such positions to act as oversight. They are secret though, but that's sort of the point when dealing with such procedures.

Not really. You can't trust a court that you can't examine the decisions of to oversee a program you don't know about and expect them to be perfectly benign. I don't understand the cultural armor you've put over the US intelligence community, but it certainly doesn't reflect the reality of how incredibly important management oversight is in any other agency.

Then what? I don't see any better system than using federal judges.

Then no massively scaled datamining looking for anything that could possibly be incriminating? Why is this so difficult? If the NSA really needs this kind of access and freedom with our data to guard against terrorism and espionage, there is no hope for democracy. This is not hyperbole, this is the NSA being in a position to control every branch of the government - who is tried, who is guilty, who gets elected, who gets removed from office. If no one can come up with a better solution than a court blind to its own proceedings, it's madness to let it continue.

I think you're overstating the NSA's ambitions and power a bit.

[GlyphGryph]

Aren't you the one who's repeatedly made such hilariously false claims as "they can't spy on everyone" and "you're not important enough for them to be collecting your data", even after it was revealed they were pretty blatantly doing both?

They may not being DOING what Eagleon has described but they are most certainly in a position to. What he says is true.

[Eagleon]

I think you're overstating the NSA's ambitions and power a bit.

Here's the thing - you can assume that they're the Good Guys. I have no doubt that the vast majority of the people in the NSA assumes that they're the Good Guys. The problem is that some of them might have a warped sense of what that actually means. This means that they might not be doing things that are entirely legal, even while they have the blanket approval of the secret court in the exact same situation.

The reason you have oversight (which, thankfully, FISA apparently understands enough to admit that they don't) is that if no one is looking over your shoulder, you'd do things that people might not like. Yes, even you. Everyone in the NSA is a human (unless they developed SHODAN while we weren't looking), with a human life, subject to human pressures and fallacies. Past a certain point, the procedural niceties of government work has to break down into individual action, and then you have a problem. It doesn't matter how many internal hoops you manufacture for your agents to navigate, because there's nothing stopping them from lying. How big of a problem it is, is kind of irrelevant compared to how big of a problem it could be - the quintessence of security is that you don't assume that a risk won't happen because of warm fuzzies, you take steps to mitigate it, and if you can't, you rebuild the entire system from the ground up.

The reason that didn't happen after this boils down to job security. We are risking our country's integrity because a few desk-jockeys don't want to be out of a job - understandable at their end, everyone has a right to defend their livelihood, but it isn't something that should bypass the constitution. And I hate to use the cliche that started this mess, but if the constitution is less important than defending against terrorism, the terrorists have already won.

[Mrhappyface]

There are rather stringent tests when it comes to gaining security clearances and such, and oaths and contracts have to be signed, with grave consquences if they're not followed. And contrary to popular belief, there are no crusaders or General Rippers in charge of these operations. It's all rather like any other security or law enforcement company.

[GlyphGryph]

It's all rather like any other security or law enforcement company.

So... prone to abuses of the law for personal profit, likely to ignore regulations they don't agree with and protect their comrades from facing repercussions for their actions, likely to go well beyond the power they are actually allowed and with a long and storied history of being almost completely able to self-regulate their wrongdoing in situations where they are not held up to public scrutiny?

Aren't you supposed to be trying to support this program?

[Eagleon]

There are rather stringent tests when it comes to gaining security clearances and such, and oaths and contracts have to be signed, with grave consquences if they're not followed. And contrary to popular belief, there are no crusaders or General Rippers in charge of these operations. It's all rather like any other security or law enforcement company.

This is a joke, right? What grave consequences has the NSA director faced for lying under oath? Are the tests multiple choice? Essay questions? Who gets to evaluate them? Who gets to decide the conditions under which they're evaluated? If the security clearances are so difficult to get, why was Snowden ready, willing, and able to leak the documents available to him? Other security and law enforcement 'companies' have to provide the public a very thorough understanding of what they're doing and why they're doing it, and if they fuck up, the President of the United States isn't the one protecting them. Why should the most thorough investigation and analysis of US telecommunications be given carte blanche based on this very small, very limited, and completely blind chain of trust alone?

[Mrhappyface]

There are rather stringent tests when it comes to gaining security clearances and such, and oaths and contracts have to be signed, with grave consquences if they're not followed. And contrary to popular belief, there are no crusaders or General Rippers in charge of these operations. It's all rather like any other security or law enforcement company.

This is a joke, right? What grave consequences has the NSA director faced for lying under oath? Are the tests multiple choice? Essay questions? Who gets to evaluate them? Who gets to decide the conditions under which they're evaluated? If the security clearances are so difficult to get, why was Snowden ready, willing, and able to leak the documents available to him? Other security and law enforcement 'companies' have to provide the public a very thorough understanding of what they're doing and why they're doing it, and if they fuck up, the President of the United States isn't the one protecting them. Why should the most thorough investigation and analysis of US telecommunications be given carte blanche based on this very small, very limited, and completely blind chain of trust alone?

Snowden didn't have the entire investigation on him finished. And yes, much of the government's affairs are run on the trust system as weird as it seems.

[Bauglir]

You don't even need scheming or crusaders or General Rippers. You don't need much of a conspiracy at all to wind up with results that look very much like a conspiracy. I'm a big believer in never assuming malice when incompetence is an adequate explanation. Just a potential example jumping off SalmonGod bringing up Occupy:

An analyst at the NSA is, by all accounts, going to be a very intelligent person. They're keeping up with things, and Occupy events start coming across their radar. On some level, a very intelligent person is going to realize that a changing status quo is going to make their job harder. Now, I don't think anybody actually would think, "Geez, I don't want to work any harder, I'd better do what I can to shut these guys down." But, the point is, they're now aware of something that can make their life more difficult. They're going to keep tabs on it, so that they can adapt appropriately as things progress. They're going to keep an eye on leaders as they emerge, on whatever else they can, because it's stuff they Need To Know. They're in the business of worst-case scenario, so they're not going to treating it optimistically, either.

And this is going to be the case with a lot of analysts. When they notice problems, they're going to talk to coworkers and superiors about it. When they don't, it's not worth reporting on. Over a couple of weeks, the entire movement is going to get thought of in a pretty poor light, not because anybody intentionally sets out to sabotage it, but because that's just how its reputation is going to evolve in the office. And that feeds right back into how they focus their resources. And now, with the spotlight focused and the attitude of the organization turned against Occupy, any perceived transgression is going to get slapped down, whether it's really illegal or not. And that's pretty much where we're at right now.

No plots were set in motion to keep the rich in power. Nobody set out to abuse their authority. Nobody's set on an arbitrary crusade. But that doesn't mean everything's fine. There's more to good governance than motivations.

EDIT: tl;dr version
A lot of people independently acting in their own best interests, for reasons that are benign and sensible at the time, can create some shitty situations.

[GlyphGryph]

The entire structure of the government that is set up as the foundation of the US is built on adversarial relationships and checked powers. Having such a crucial system based on nothing but trust, and not even trust that they will do their job but trust that they will NOT do the things they are explicitly incentivized to do, his hilariously stupid. Doing so in direct opposition to our countries founding principles is incredibly UnAmerican.

[lue]

I believe that most people in the NSA and the government in general only want to do right by the people and protect the country as best they can. I just happen to worry about that one guy who gets access to important data and abuses it for his own evil gain (the worst case scenario).

For what it's worth, a public debate of these programs before they went into effect would have done wonders. (And, if the programs did get enacted after public debate, I'd be unhappy, but hey it's democracy.) It's completely fine by me to keep specific operations secret, but it's totally wrong to keep government policy secret. Them not having an open discussion on the matter makes me think that, on some level, they knew what they were doing is wrong.

Also, if they want to prove these programs are necessary, they could start by advertising to death how many lives were saved and specific incidents prevented thanks to PRISM and XKeyscore and the like.

[Mrhappyface]

You don't even need scheming or crusaders or General Rippers. You don't need much of a conspiracy at all to wind up with results that look very much like a conspiracy. I'm a big believer in never assuming malice when incompetence is an adequate explanation. Just a potential example jumping off SalmonGod bringing up Occupy:

An analyst at the NSA is, by all accounts, going to be a very intelligent person. They're keeping up with things, and Occupy events start coming across their radar. On some level, a very intelligent person is going to realize that a changing status quo is going to make their job harder. Now, I don't think anybody actually would think, "Geez, I don't want to work any harder, I'd better do what I can to shut these guys down." But, the point is, they're now aware of something that can make their life more difficult. They're going to keep tabs on it, so that they can adapt appropriately as things progress. They're going to keep an eye on leaders as they emerge, on whatever else they can, because it's stuff they Need To Know. They're in the business of worst-case scenario, so they're not going to treating it optimistically, either.

And this is going to be the case with a lot of analysts. When they notice problems, they're going to talk to coworkers and superiors about it. When they don't, it's not worth reporting on. Over a couple of weeks, the entire movement is going to get thought of in a pretty poor light, not because anybody intentionally sets out to sabotage it, but because that's just how its reputation is going to evolve in the office. And that feeds right back into how they focus their resources. And now, with the spotlight focused and the attitude of the organization turned against Occupy, any perceived transgression is going to get slapped down, whether it's really illegal or not. And that's pretty much where we're at right now.

No plots were set in motion to keep the rich in power. Nobody set out to abuse their authority. Nobody's set on an arbitrary crusade. But that doesn't mean everything's fine. There's more to good governance than motivations.

EDIT: tl;dr version
A lot of people independently acting in their own best interests, for reasons that are benign and sensible at the time, can create some shitty situations.

This is what I've been trying to get at. Although the NSA wasn't in charge of the Occupy's surveillance (that was primarily Homesec and domestic police working together), it's not necessarily malice. It's increased efficiency and distribution of information between law enforcement agencies due to the rise in the use of internet and phone based communication.

[GlyphGryph]

Which is why "checks and balances" is just as important as it ever was, and your constant admonitions that we don't need them despite the abundant evidence demonstrating otherwise, and the longstanding tradition of our country to enshrine the concept as the basis of government, is just foolish.

If there's no way to do something without instituting an appropriate system of checks and balances, you don't do it. And in this case, the checks and balances WE do have ALSO say don't do it.

That's a pretty good reason to not do it.