NSA Director Defends Surveillance To Unsympathetic Black Hat Crowd 358
Trailrunner7 writes "NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander's keynote today at Black Hat USA 2013 was a tense confessional, an hour-long emotional and sometimes angry ride that shed some new insight into the spy agency's two notorious data collection programs, inspired moments of loud applause in support of the NSA, and likewise, profane heckling that called into question the legality and morality of the agency's practices. Loud voices from the overflowing crowd called out Alexander on his claims that the NSA stands for freedom while at the same time collecting, storing and analyzing telephone business records, metadata and Internet records on Americans. He also denied lying to Congress about the NSA's capabilities and activities in the name of protecting Americans from terrorism in response to such a claim from a member of the audience."
Re:Privacy concerns now outweigh terrorism in poll (Score:5, Informative)
> The "trust us" defense isn't good enough
It's not, because we are unsatisfied.
But it is enough, because what do they even need a defense for? What threat must they defend themselves from?
Congress? If Congress does anything, it will expand NSA powers, not reduce them.
SCOTUS? Somebody has to sue the gov first and prove harm. But it's all secret, so nobody can do that. If anyone managed to get proof, they'd end up in a jail cell with Bradley Manning.
Re:Not much of a defense (Score:5, Informative)
They find out about them with the intelligence they collect.
If they suspect that someone is a terrorist, then they can get a warrant to monitor his phone records. It is also reasonable to cross check the few dozen people that the terrorists talked to. Maybe it is even reasonable to go another level and look for patterns of calls in the "contacts of contacts" which would be thousands of people. But to go beyond that to contacts-of-contacts-of-contacts-of-contacts, which encompass millions of people seems unreasonable, and I have seen no evidence or even claims that these 3rd or 4th degree searches led to any arrests. Of course there needs to be a surveillance program, but they should be looking at far fewer people, and they should stop lying about it to the elected representatives of the American people.
Re:Not much of a defense (Score:1, Informative)
Another irrelevant post from cold fjord. Damn quisling.
Re:In case you're wondering what he got applauded (Score:5, Informative)
“There are allegations [the NSA] listen to all our emails; that’s wrong. We don’t,” Alexander said.
Words matter.
What he said is almost certainly true - these spokes holes are trained how to deceive without lying. Sometimes they use performatives [youtube.com] in deceitful ways, but this one is easy: They don't listen to your emails - he didn't say they don't read them.
The title is rather misleading... (Score:5, Informative)
I attended both this morning's keynote with the general and he also spoke at the blackhat executive summit.
This morning there were a few thousand people in the ballroom for his presentation. There were at most 2 vocal 'hecklers' - though really I think it was just one person. The heckling was met with very limited support, maybe a dozen or two people clapped. However, when the general countered the heckler(s), his comments were met with applause from most of the crowd.
For the record, I'm not commenting on either side of this debate. I am just arguing against the artistic license taken by the author of the story. As I said, I was there for both talks and the alleged tension and heckling was dramatically overstated.
Re:USA cloud providers (Score:3, Informative)