On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 04:23 -0300, Juan Garofalo wrote:
What's the purpose of all the US spying? It obviously is not directed against 'terrists' <snip>
Or are they spying on behalf of american business,<snip>
Or are they mostly a useless bureaucracy that only steals and stores data,<snip>
Are any of these humanly realistic? The people working at the NSA are the heroes of their own stories. Do you think they tell any of these stories to themselves? I think it's most likely that: * It's always safer from a managerial perspective to have more data than less, because * if there's ever *really* an attack, and you didn't have the data, you'd be fucked, both from a personal standpoint (you, the NSA manager, would know that people died because of you) and from a career standpoint (shit flows downhill). * The people who run these systems are selected, not primarily, but in large part for, patriotism and loyalty. They think America is maybe flawed, but still the greatest country in the world, the last bastion of freedom and free enterprise and McDonald's and apple pie. They care about keeping it safe, and there's some amount of mission creep that's inevitable. This is actually a much worse situation than any of the storybook villians you've sketched out. It's not universal (LOVEINT is a thing after all) but it's probably the main reason.
So, are they spying on ordinary american subjects? What for? I mean, what actual benefit are they getting from that? They are the ones who caught DPR.
This is almost certainly not the case. DPR posted his personal email address in the clear on a public forum. He was caught with old-fashioned detective work. Municipal cops could have done it. But this is an aside. -- Sent from Ubuntu