I realize I'm not going to sway anyone completely, and that there's a lot of cultural distrust of the NSA and the Patriot Act. All of that is good, and you should be skeptical and resistant to what appears to be heavyhanded Big-Brother type domestic surveillance, but I want to lay out some details that a lot of people seem to not know.

First off, our surveillance practices are severely outdated. We as a country, and our representatives as a legislature, have failed to allow our intelligence programs to evolve with changing technology. The anonymous, autonomous analysis of metadata is less sophisticated and more hamstrung than modern data mining applications which you consent to on a daily basis through various social media and search platforms. In addition, the courts have ruled that no citizen can reasonably expect absolute privacy through the use of third-party telecom providers since 1979, and in fact this is the basis for police wiretap warrants, which are representative of the same process the NSA goes through to actually see data of calls or texts, except the approval process is more rigorous for the latter. It is incontestable that we as a global society have opted for faster flow of data and more personalized connections across the web, be it joint accounts over various platforms to simple targeted advertising we opt into on a daily basis.

It's a widely held belief that the NSA is abusive in its use of collected data; after all, didn't Edward Snowden's leak reveal a slew of illegal activity perpetrated by the government? Actually, no. The only misuse of NSA information was at the hands of Snowden himself. There is zero evidence of any abuse of data or violation of regulatory policies. In addition, the recent court ruling against certain metadata gathering practices did not say they were a violation of the Constitution.

I mentioned that metadata is sorted autonomously and anonymously, and that's true -- but what's striking about this isn't the potential for massive violation of privacy, but rather the complete opposite. The NSA doesn't even have the authority to use analysis algorithms to find suspicious trends, and in order to actually do a manual search on these records the NSA has to demonstrate a "reasonable, articulable suspicion of terrorism or another threat to national security." And of the 320 million citizens and tens of billions of calls and texts sent each year, the NSA only conducted 170 searches last year. Chances are your state's police department conducted far more searches, with far less significant reasons for doing so, in numbers orders of magnitude higher last year.

To put this in perspective, Google has more refined (and legal) databases and search functions than the NSA. One of the Muslim extremists participating in the attack in Garland sent a tweet with the hashtag #TexasAttack, and nobody in any law enforcement department saw this until after the attack. Meanwhile, one of dozens of advertisement programs will have already analyzed the hashtag and directed targeted advertisements at the user before the tweet even posted. President Obama himself, now decrying the NSA programs, recognizes that 9/11 may very well have been prevented if our intelligence programs weren't decades behind and had been able to have access to metadata -- and he's right. 9/11 was a massive ongoing operation and it may very well have been prevented or lessened if we didn't willfully and ignorantly handicap our intelligence agencies. In a time where the director of the FBI predicts thousands of grassroots Islamists in Americe already, it is important to recognize the need for these programs.

Its difficult to say to what extent they are necessary since we don't have access to the same information that the president does. There are certainly areas where they over extend their purpose and intrude on the rights of citizens. Even the writer of the bill has said that there need to be changes made.

I don't think anyone one should be happy with things in their current state.

Quote from: Naoto on May 12, 2015, 12:01:38 PM

There are certainly areas where they over extend their purpose and intrude on the rights of citizens.

Can you provide a single example?

Really?

https://www.aclu.org/surveillance-under-usa-patriot-act
http://www.scn.org/ccapa/pa-vs-const.html

I mean take a read if you're not familiar I guess. I don't think you should be fine with any of that. It pretty blatantly violates the constitution. That much unchecked power will eventually be misused.

Quote from: Naoto on May 12, 2015, 12:09:56 PM

Quote from: HurtfulTurkey on May 12, 2015, 12:01:51 PM

Quote from: Naoto on May 12, 2015, 12:01:38 PM

There are certainly areas where they over extend their purpose and intrude on the rights of citizens.

Can you provide a single example?

Really?

https://www.aclu.org/surveillance-under-usa-patriot-act
http://www.scn.org/ccapa/pa-vs-const.html

I mean take a read if you're not familiar I guess. I don't think you should be fine with any of that. It pretty blatantly violates the constitution. That much unchecked power will eventually be misused.

I'm specifically referring to abuses by the NSA in its metadata collection, though a lot of the listed "abuses" in those links are easy to rebut.

Your title says Patriot Act and NSA. I said the Patriot Act oversteps the rights of citzens. You asked me to show a single example. I showed quite a few. Those links also reference data collection.

If its all easy to rebut then be my guest.

The way you illustrate the effectiveness of the NSA makes them appear inefficacious. Am I correct in assuming so?

If that's the case, what's the point in having an NSA then? If they can't curtail terrorism by either constitutional or unconstitutional means, then I fail to see their relevance within intel operations.

Quote from: Voro 'Cinotai on May 12, 2015, 11:53:49 AM

One of my conservative teachers actually surprised me (and the rest of the class) by supporting the NSA.  His reasoning, which I actually agree with, was:  "If you have nothing to hide, why are scared?"

I can definitely understand why people want their privacy 100% secure, but I suppose I'm just a tad apathetic to the whole thing.

I think that's a very poor argument. It implies the NSA has far more power than they actually do. In reality, we don't need a justification for wanting privacy, so we enact regulations to ensure that it's protected at all times unless its violation is necessary to prosecute a crime

But then, wouldn't that argument make sense?  If you're not doing any wrongdoing or making stupid posts like #ImGoingToKillObama, then you wouldn't even be on the NSA's radar.

Quote from: HurtfulTurkey on May 12, 2015, 12:01:51 PM

Quote from: Voro 'Cinotai on May 12, 2015, 11:53:49 AM

One of my conservative teachers actually surprised me (and the rest of the class) by supporting the NSA.  His reasoning, which I actually agree with, was:  "If you have nothing to hide, why are scared?"

I can definitely understand why people want their privacy 100% secure, but I suppose I'm just a tad apathetic to the whole thing.

I think that's a very poor argument. It implies the NSA has far more power than they actually do. In reality, we don't need a justification for wanting privacy, so we enact regulations to ensure that it's protected at all times unless its violation is necessary to prosecute a crime

But then, wouldn't that argument make sense?  If you're not doing any wrongdoing or making stupid posts like #ImGoingToKillObama, then you wouldn't even be on the NSA's radar.

And how exactly would you know this?

Quote from: King pesto on May 12, 2015, 01:00:35 PM

It is appaling that we, as a people, have allowed the state to amass as much power as it has today. Frankly, I think we deserve all of the damage that is done.

Gonna be honest, this makes me think you didn't really read my post, since it specifically discusses how it hasn't done damage, and is debilitated by regulation and stagnation.

It has done no visible damage yet.

There's two main issues I have with this. One is that because of how secretive it all is, there's a good chance that this will be abused. It's easy to say that the NSA will behave and follow the guidelines, but I sometimes strongly doubt that they will. Besides, the rules are easy enough to stretch, especially when there's no communication with the general public. You don't have to be a lawyer to see how "reasonable, articulable suspicion of a threat to national security" can be extended to cover measures way beyond the mere prevention of terrorism and the likes.

Snowden's leak is the only example of leaks or abuses; what was actually leaked demonstrated no violation of oversight. As for secrecy being an excuse to bend the rules, well that's a product of a representative system and the need for their work to remain private to avoid compromising operations. A lot of what this really boils down to is that you just don't trust the government to carry this program out without abuse, despite a (frankly surprising) lack of violations on their part.

For example, merely having a bad relationship with a certain country (Iraq, Iran, Syria...) or groups can be considered a reasonable suspicion of a terrorist attack, being sufficient grounds to analyse a ton of potentially sensitive information. After all, when a specific act has finally been predicted, it'll often be too late to still stop it, meaning that preventive checks "just in case" would be perfectly acceptable. Same goes for what constitutes a threat to national security. A bombing? A plane being hijacked? Sure. But what about riots in a certain area? Protests that could potentially get out of hand? Any situation involving a public official? These policy guidelines leave a significant grey area, and any actions that do end up being taken will likely never be known by the general public.

Those gray areas really aren't there. It's pretty specific how they associate ties, and it starts with whether you have contacted flagged cell phone numbers associated with terrorists, or are within a few degrees of separation from one (I.E., you text your friend who is in contact with a terrorist cell number). They have to demonstrate a connection, and until then they can't even see the names/numbers of the callers or the time and date of the call. As for being too late to act, that's the whole point of a network of data. The recent court ruling pulls metadata databases back to the service providers, effectively nullifying the NSA's network of data. But with Snowden's leak, we have seen that this program has led directly to arrests of foreign terrorists and subsequently put a stop to enemy operations. A massive operation like 9/11 would not have been nearly as feasible today as it was pre-2001.

Secondly, metadata is not as anonymous as you might think. Simply googling "metadata anonymous" will give you several studies by institutions like Stanford and MIT, showing how easy it is to identify a person and create personal data just by going off metadata. I'm not going to bother searching through my notes from last year, but my IT law and privacy classes came to pretty much the same conclusion.

Like I said earlier, it's simply not possible to draw these conclusions based on what they have access to before getting a warrant from the court. They don't have access to name, numbers, dates, and times of calls until they get a warrant. And even if they did, then that's really an issue of the NSA employing individuals who are trustworthy and professional. Obviously, Snowden is the exception in this case.

"These are our guidelines."
- Yeah, but they are very broad.
"Well, we will only interpret them very strictly, promise!
- Which we have absolutely no way of verifying.
"Looks like you're just going to have trust us to sit on all this sensitive and private information and barely ever use it!"

I really don't understand why this keeps being asserted. The guidelines aren't broad at all; it's not about how they interpret it.

"Don't worry people, we only collect your data without doing anything with it. Before doing that, we need a warrant! Relax, your privacy is safe. Oh, but let's conveniently ignore the fact that this court is shrouded in secrecy, doesn't have to answer to anyone, doesn't have to reveal records and doesn't even have to prove anything, all while it can potentially routinely hand out dozens of warrants every single day."

It does have a regulatory agency, though, as it's a federal court. Not being able to release records is a stipulation of being involved in intelligence gathering; having each case publicized would effectively nullify any advantage gained.

Either way, like I said before, I am not opposed to certain intelligence gathering. I am just extremely surprised by how you are seemingly downplaying all of this. Not to sound like a tinfoil hatter, but "just trust us, we promise we will play by the rules and not go around some relatively flimsy safeguards" isn't good enough.

I'm not sure what you think I'm downplaying. The majority of your argument, and those from others in this thread, are that you just don't trust the government to not violate your rights. Well, we have seen no evidence of this, even in Snowden's massive leak. The data is anonymous until a warrant is obtained, and put simply there's no reason for the government to want to look into the everyday lives of American citizens. They have a massive amount of information to sort through every day, and even then that only led to 170 searches last year, meaning only 170 times did they request to see even basic cell data, which doesn't even include the content of calls or texts. There's quite a bit of the Patriotic Act I'm not comfortable with, and it's mostly because of the secrecy of the results, and I think that's a normal response. But with the rise of home-grown, grassroots Islamists in our country and in our allies', stuff like this is absolutely vital. We're not sending people to internment camps, we're not drafting college kids to fight someone else's war, and we're not shutting down mosques and falafel joints to catch terrorists, we're going through a regulated judicial process to find terrorist cell connections, and at times an innocent person's name may come up on the screen of an NSA agent who's cleared top secret. In an ideal world this would never exist, but the alternatives of the past are far less reasonable.

a single person leaking what he knew

And what he didn't; he didn't read most of the shit he released.

While I see the use of this kind surveillance

I'm fairly sure the collection of metadata isn't actually surveillance.

One of my conservative teachers actually surprised me (and the rest of the class) by supporting the NSA.  His reasoning, which I actually agree with, was:  "If you have nothing to hide, why are scared?"

I can definitely understand why people want their privacy 100% secure, but I suppose I'm just a tad apathetic to the whole thing.

I agree with this completely as well.

But so many Republican sources juxtapose that statement with Goebbels and are trying to say "HURRR THE DEMOCRATS ARE NAZIS LOOK THIS IS PROOF XPPP"

Quote from: Not Comms Officer on May 12, 2015, 04:31:07 PM

Quote from: Voro 'Cinotai on May 12, 2015, 11:53:49 AM

One of my conservative teachers actually surprised me (and the rest of the class) by supporting the NSA.  His reasoning, which I actually agree with, was:  "If you have nothing to hide, why are scared?"

I can definitely understand why people want their privacy 100% secure, but I suppose I'm just a tad apathetic to the whole thing.

I agree with this completely as well.

But so many Republican sources juxtapose that statement with Goebbels and are trying to say "HURRR THE DEMOCRATS ARE NAZIS LOOK THIS IS PROOF XPPP"

The left was saying the same thing about the act when the Reps were in power.

(but there is no major left party in the US)

Anyways, why am I not surprised this is the case...

US politics are beyond retarded, end of story.

Quote from: Not Comms Officer on May 12, 2015, 04:44:39 PM

Quote from: Arm The Mob on May 12, 2015, 04:41:25 PM

Quote from: Not Comms Officer on May 12, 2015, 04:31:07 PM

Quote from: Voro 'Cinotai on May 12, 2015, 11:53:49 AM

One of my conservative teachers actually surprised me (and the rest of the class) by supporting the NSA.  His reasoning, which I actually agree with, was:  "If you have nothing to hide, why are scared?"

I can definitely understand why people want their privacy 100% secure, but I suppose I'm just a tad apathetic to the whole thing.

I agree with this completely as well.

But so many Republican sources juxtapose that statement with Goebbels and are trying to say "HURRR THE DEMOCRATS ARE NAZIS LOOK THIS IS PROOF XPPP"

The left was saying the same thing about the act when the Reps were in power.

(but there is no major left party in the US)

Anyways, why am I not surprised this is the case...

US politics are beyond retarded, end of story.

It's basically a back-and-forth between two authoritarian parties accusing each other of being authoritarian.

Authoritarian is a significant exaggeration. The Republicans are honestly too permissive in allowing corporations to do whatever they want, and the Democrats are pretty meh. All the Democrats have going for them is that they aren't Republican, which is why I vote them. Tactical voting is impossible in this country, since there are only 2 effective parties.