Not at all. I think those docs showed that they have much better capabilities and collection, targeting and delivery platforms than what people had assumed at the time but there was zero evidence that I’m aware of where they were misusing that to go after illegitimate targets. I think the most controversial thing on that front from memory was Angela Merkel and other EU heads of state which inside of an intelligence agency isn’t particularly controversial at all, that’s just doing your job.
> but there was zero evidence that I’m aware of where they were misusing that to go after illegitimate targets
How could you claim that without (a) having insider knowledge of the secret activities of the FISA court and (b) violating some sort of legal restriction on publicising your knowledge of said court? One of the major complaints about the US surveillance program (indeed any surveillance program) is almost nobody is allowed to know who the targets are or why.
> I think the most controversial thing on that front from memory was Angela Merkel and other EU heads of state
And I think the most controversial target to date was actually Trump.
> The fact he happened to suddenly become a politician doesn’t mean he is suddenly in the untouchable category only that the level of scrutiny goes way up.
So when you say "legitimate targets" does that include all US politicians? Or only ones that you think are a threat to your interests? Perhaps we can speed up the argument and you outline what you think the illegitimate targets would be. Because that case sounded like clear cut abuse of the spying apparatus to me. Bearing in mind that people involved in obtaining the warrant ended up being charged with related crimes of falsifying documents.
Listen Trump was running a whole lot of policies entirely off the books that wasn’t publicly declared and was entirely inconsistent with the goals of both the US and all of their allies but was entirely consistent with personal enrichment.
He had multiple people go down around him that were actively working as Russian agents and then he had Kushner working to set up a secret communications channel out of the Russian embassy that was actively designed so that it couldn’t be intercepted by US intelligence.
When you do that kind of thing, no matter if you’re a politician or not, in fact ESPECIALLY if you’re a politician you should absolutely expect people to start asking questions and opening investigations.
We don’t need to pretend he was some normal candidate who had a couple of whacky ideas.
Just to hammer on the point here, the polling is close to wall-to-wall that people prefer him as the next US president - so in that sense he is probably slightly above normal. Are you saying you consider deploying the spying apparatus to monitor domestic political candidates is legitimate? What is the line where you consider it illegitimate?
They bought this system in notionally to fight terrorists. It has in short order turned out that "terrorists" include someone who can be described as a relatively popular (!) Republican candidate. Are you contending that this is legitimate use of the foreign intelligence apparatus?
Most US presidents have dealings with foreign countries. The Biden family are famously involved in Ukraine (& others), Trump was all over the place including Russia. Obama was probably just domestic but the Bush family have a lot of interest in oil which is going to involve foreign contact and the Clintons are closely involved in US foreign policy. There'd be a case for spying on almost every president in the last 30 years!
> There were a whole range of specific actions that occurred that resulted in an investigation as it should.
One of the FBI lawyers involved plead guilty to a felony false statement charge. They were literally making up pretexts to spy on the Trump campaign. I think the issue here is when you talk about "legitimate" you mean that you are happy enough to see the FISA system used as an internal political club. There is no way that it is being used legitimately, we're in the opening stages of a process where every single incoming US president is going to have their communications examined by the incumbent's administration. Or at least when the party in power changes.
There isn't anything special about Trump here. He turned out not to be doing anything suspicious, or they'd be going after him for it (or have gone after people in his campaign). Ergo, any clean candidate is probably suspicious enough to warrant surveillance.
I am going to quote your own article back to you verbatim because it says something entirely different to what you seem to be claiming.
“The letter sent to Grassley reveals that there have been at least 12 recorded cases of spies abusing their powers since 2003”.
So, no, the NSA is not out there abusing their powers to go after illegitimate targets. It’s also worth keeping the context that this was in a pre-Snowden era.
In 2024 you can’t access a single thing without their being a log of who you are and why you are looking at it and under what legal statute that is allowed precisely to prevent something like that ever happening again.
You claimed there was zero evidence that the NSA was spying on illegitimate targets. Both articles emphasize there were numerous incidents of exactly this, both discovered and undiscovered. Snowden in particular emphasized the rather poor level of content auditing that was (and probably still is) going on.
Listen, everybody can read the exact same comment I wrote and see how you are ignoring all the parts that are inconvenient to you. It’s there in black and white.
We are talking about if the NSA abuses its power to go after illegitimate targets.
You quoted the same single source twice but written by different people which when we got down to the heart of the claim showed that there was actual evidence of approximately 1 incident per year over more than a decade time frame.
I also explained precisely how and why things had changed in the past decade since that quote was relevant so that it wasn’t possible for people to do that any longer without tripping all kinds of alarms.
If you have other evidence then please share it but what you have so far doesn’t support your claim at all.
Read the articles - they describe two very different scenarios. One is spies spying on love interest (wives, girlfriend, somebody they might want to date, etc). The other is spies collecting sexually explicit media of more random people.
And the auditing systems at the NSA were obviously very poor, and there's no reason to think that has meaningfully changed. Of the very few cases they were able to "catch", a sizable chunk were from self reporting in polygraph exams or even more absurd things like a girlfriend reporting a guy who she suspected was spying on him - and he was, as well as 9 other women. In no cases were there any meaningful penalties, with the worst case being resignation. And similarly, it seems people engaging in the harvesting of sexually explicit material Snowden described were never caught, which is likely why he referred to it as something like a "fringe benefit".
Listen when I talk about single source. I’m talking about “Edward Snowden made a claim”. It doesn’t magically become two sources because he gave two examples.
Moving on from the technicalities though because it’s a dumb argument to get stuck in and into the heart of it.
We are still stuck with the problem however that there wasn’t ever any evidence of this happening that anyone could point to even after an in depth investigation into the topic beyond the dozen incidents over more than a decade time period.
Snowden (and now you) made the claim that in fact it was much higher but you simply can not prove it which is awfully convenient but does leave the question open of how could he possibly have known this?
Are you meaning to tell me that the biggest leaker of classified information in the US’s history for some reason chose to hold back on what he knew about that topic? He must have known of specific people and incidents and could have cross referenced what was in the investigation with what he knew.
He couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect gotcha moment if that was the case to come out and say what about incidents X, Y and Z.
That never happened and you should naturally wonder why that might be.
He either didn’t actually know of any or he chose not to reveal it for undisclosed reasons beyond a vague insinuation.
I also want to put it to you that perhaps Edward Snowden was not exactly an honest broker in the way he claims to be. I know it’s somewhat blasphemous here but as I mentioned in another thread this week there is actually a rather compelling theory in the IC that he might have been part of an malicious insider campaign from the very start. In part because of things like this ironically.
Your argument seems to be basically coming down to "Ah, but we don't have indisputable proof of said claims!" while intentionally ignoring the fact that what evidence we do have makes it clear that the auditing and self investigating capabilities at the NSA are somewhere between nonexistent and abysmal. For things like an agent to be able to spy on numerous "girlfriends" over periods of half a decade, only to finally be outed because one of them suspected he was spying on her and reported him to the government? And even then, in such an extreme circumstance, for there to be basically no penalties whatsoever (besides him resigning)? This is strong evidence in support of the claims of widespread abuse that Snowden made, before these cases became publicly known.
Beyond this Snowden's revelations were not about abuse within the domestic surveillance apparatuses, but about the existence of those apparatuses themselves. Prior to Snowden the idea that the government was engaging in widespread surveillance, of essentially everything, was still just a "conspiracy theory." The entire system itself is likely illegal, as it pisses all over the 4th amendment, but cannot be legally challenged because of a simple problem - for one to prove standing, to enable them to sue, they need to not only prove they were spied on, but also harmed by spying. Each time this is tried, the NSA simply claims national security and refuses to cooperate. So we have a likely illegal surveillance system with no legal means of challenging it.
So people trading sex pics, spying on lovers, or whatever - these are all instances of abuse within a system that should not even exist.
It’s not the absence of “indisputable proof” it’s the absence of ANY proof.
There are only a couple of possible scenarios here that I can think of:
1. Snowden is making a claim here that he suspects but doesn’t have proof of (I.e speculation).
2. He does have proof but isn’t willing to share it. Not with the public, not with investigators and for some reason he chose to never mention it internally beforehand.
3. He is intentionally making outlandish claims he knows are wrong.
I can’t see any universe where option 2 is likely. He is every possible motivation to do so if you go with his public story about why he did what he did.
I’m entirely open to options 1 and 3 however.
Also nobody is claiming that those incidents were anything other than abuse of the system. We are all in agreement on that. The question of is this more common than other threats they face from insiders such as spies for example is what we disagree on and so far I’ve not seen a single piece of compelling evidence to suggest it is.
Furthermore, I’ve explained how there are now new controls in place to prevent that from happening again and you don’t even have to ascribe any kind of altruistic motivation for it about protecting people’s privacy. You can entirely put it at the feet of they want to make sure they never have another Snowden incident again. This is why I’m saying that this just isn’t a realistic threat that people should be worrying about in 2024.
