The NSA watches you poop.

Current and former judges on the nation's secret surveillance court said in a letter released Tuesday that several recommendations made by a White House review group would significantly increase the court's workload and undermine its effectiveness.
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The judges' principal objections focused on recommendations to appoint an independent privacy advocate to represent the public's interests before the court and on a proposal that administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters, be approved by the court before being issued. They also objected to a recommendation to end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of data on Americans' phone calls.

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The dual mission of the NSA generates cognitive dissonance. Right on its home page, the NSA says its core missions are "to protect US national security systems and to produce foreign signals intelligence information." The officials repeatedly claimed they pursue both responsibilities with equal vigor. There's a built-in conflict here: if US industries distribute strong encryption throughout the world, it should make the NSA's signals-gathering job much harder. Yet the NSA says it welcomes encryption. (The officials even implied that the tension between the two missions winds up making both efforts more robust.) Nonetheless, the Snowden leaks indicate that the NSA has engaged in numerous efforts that tamper with the security of American products. The officials resisted this characterisation. Why, they asked, would they compromise security of products they use themselves, like Windows, Cisco routers, or the encryption standards they allegedly compromised?

Spoiler

They believe their intelligence gathering is palatable because it's controlled by laws, regulations, and internal oversight. Looking at the world through their eyes, there is no privacy threat in collecting massive amounts of information -- if access to that information is rigidly controlled and minimalised. This includes efforts to excise data (about Americans, mainly) that should have not been collected in the first place. The NSA feels that if people knew about these controls, they'd be OK with the collection. This argument reminded me of something I learned from my approved NSA source in the 1990s. The official who concocted the Clipper Chip scheme had a vision where private citizens could use encryption. But the NSA, though its built-in backdoor chip, would be able to access the information when it needed to. The official called his vision "Nirvana." The NSA is still envisioning Nirvana, this time a system with huge haystacks accessed only when national security is at stake. But many people believe the very creation of those government-owned haystacks is a privacy violation, and possibly unconstitutional.

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chaos_sl said:

But it isn't, really. The encryption stuff, the malware, the intrusion into US companies, there are tons of pieces here that have domestic impact. Not that I expect, or even want, for them to shut down all of these programs but the idea that they are intercepting laptops en route to their destination and exploiting them and we're talking about phone records, it seems a little bit retarded.

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