I can confirm much of this article. (A couple years ago I provided some comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3296691)

There's lots of condemnation of the poster, and the NSA practices and some of the murkier parts of this article. I thought I'd tip in with some explanations as possible while staying outside of anything classified or naughty.

jonknee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910978

- "It's compartmentalized enough that the individual actors can justify their actions by the assumed competence and benevolence of the others."

It's compartmentalized a bit more than the OP lets on for mostly security/separation of concerns/need-to-know reasons. For example, a Air Force analyst who is cleared to view TS//SI material won't have access to the NSA systems directly. Some of the NSA systems have external (Intelligence Community (IC)) facing equivalents that omit quite a bit of the information that less scrutinized IC analysts shouldn't have access to. w/r to the information the NSA collects, NSA employees and contractors are held to stricter standards about how that material is used and treated. An analogy, a minor commits a crime and his record is sealed. The local court employees who handle the record, the judge etc. have really nothing that prevents them from leaking that information to an overzealous cop or lawyer or some such other than the standard to which their held for their job. It's more or less the same thing with the NSA.

> The mental leap here is subtle, but substantial. Since I have been told I can't use US selectors , I assume the system enforces this.

Actually, one of the higher standards the NSA employees are held to, and I believe they sign something to effect is that it's outright illegal for them to do so and even one misuse could result in loss of employment, clearance (a death sentence in IC heavy employment areas) and possibly time in prison as a felon. This is taken very seriously and I've never known an NSA employee to not treat this rule and US citizen data as radioactive to them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911054

> Definitely a bizarre mix, I thought it was a parody a couple of times. To combat the threat of nuclear war with the completely isolated totalitarian state of North Korea we must create and store copies of all global communication...

It's easy to generalize, and if the world worked as simply as the model you propose here, then things would be much better for everybody, but it simply doesn't. For example, to uphold various sanctions regimes, by law, the U.S. must know if a business has connections two hops out that are linked to any bad activity. For example, how did Kim Jong Il buy all his whiskey? It's outright illegal for a U.S. company to sell to the North Korean government. Okay, so they sell to an overseas distributor who then sells to the North Korean government. Turns out that's illegal as well and the government must take action to not allow the U.S. whiskey maker or the distributor to operate in the U.S. any longer. Okay, so the whiskey make checks out their distributors finds one who doesn't sell to NK, but one of their customers does. Same deal, it's illegal for anybody in that chain to operate in the U.S. After that, the chain becomes so long it's not worth looking into and Kim Jong Il was eventually able to get his whiskey.

Just talking whiskey and North Korea here, but you can guess it goes for all kinds of goods and countries under various sanction regimes. So how do you propose things should be collected? Collecting only on North Korea gets you nowhere, it's everybody else who may or may not be supplying whiskey to the Norks that makes things much harder and requires a much larger collection apparatus.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911216

> It's helping diplomats illegally snoop on our allies.

Good! Our allies are most definitely snooping on us! Spying and espionage is sometimes called the second oldest profession for a reason. There's been no time in history that two countries aren't doing a bit of spying on each other, most especially at the diplomatic level.

rst: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911150

> In fact, it's been known for months that the DEA receives intercepts from the NSA in such volume that they have an office devoted to handling them (the DEA's "Special Operations Division").

This is a problem. In general, the work the IC does in collection does not hold up to LE scrutiny. Having worked on both sides of the fence, LE is both more difficult in some cases and easier in others to work in. For example, you need a warrant to gather phone records in LE, but you can share those records more freely once you have them. In the IC the opposite is true, you can pretty much get whatever you need, but it's virtually useless if a criminal approach is taken. That's why it's often simpler to blow up the target then to arrest and try them. Parallel Construction is an investigative focusing approach that saves LE from getting collection warrants that go nowhere. The IC approach is to find the connections or whatever, then help LE figure out where to focus their warrant-based approach in doing the same collection from their side. Scrubbing U.S. Persons IC data and reusing it directly for LE is highly illegal for all of the participants involved.

revelation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911022

> Well, following his explanations, you can fail the polygraph and just do it again. The cost of failure is zero, so really just keep trying.

Actually the penalty after enough tries is no clearance which means no job and a permanent record that you were denied a clearance...which pretty much deep sixes any attempt in the future to get one. In some parts of the country, like the Washington D.C. area, that's virtually a career death sentence.

kabdib: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910969

> My best friend's dad was a spy in the CIA

> During the 70s and 80s my dad worked with Russian scientists

> So, how likely is it that my email is read, that my phone records are looked at, and so on? What are the chances that I'll have trouble the next time I cross a border or try to board a plane? One percent? Fifty percent?

Assume it is collected but probably not read, but not for the reasons you gave above. There's just simply not enough manpower to read everybody's email, and it's a useless thing to try to accomplish. Now suppose one of the guys you email also emails somebody who's "nefarious" in some way. Then yeah, maybe your email is read. And if all you talk about in your emails are things that don't involve an armed insurrection against the United States you'll probably be filed into the "don't give a shit" bucket and the analyst will move on.

A common thread here is that everybody who's worried about their email being read seems to assume that whatever they're doing is important enough for it to get read. Trust me, it isn't.

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