NSA - What for.

[Ted Smith]

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
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