The NSA's Philosopher 95
An anonymous reader writes: In 2012, the NSA decided it needed an in-house ethicist to write about the philosophy of surveillance. They searched within the organization for a candidate, finally giving the job to an analyst who had abandoned a writing career that hadn't worked out. The Intercept got its hands on some of his work: "The columns answer a sociological curiosity: How does working at an intelligence agency turn a privacy hawk into a prophet of eavesdropping?" At one point, the analyst wrote, "We probably all have something we know a lot about that is being handled at a higher level in a manner we're not entirely happy about. This can cause great cognitive dissonance for us, because we may feel our work is being used to help the government follow a policy we feel is bad." The article analyzes this man in detail, including his life history and his personal blog — it's a strange coupling of invasiveness and anonymization, for they take steps to avoid revealing his identity. The article's author correctly notes (while the NSA does not) that surveilling somebody doesn't mean you really know them.
Spying on the spies (Score:2)
I love this story.
you set up an ethicist. he finds issues. congrats (Score:2)
you both achieved a goal. so don't investigate the guy because he tagged you. he did his job. you did your job, you found an ethical dilemna worth studying. win-win. I want a cookie.
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If we gather data, and nobody knows we did it, how can it be illegal!
Job done.
Easy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called rationalizing, and anyone can do it. First, do whatever you want. Next, come up with a justification. As long as you act first and justify second, you're doing it right! Under no circumstances should you reverse the order of operations, you you may end up actually behaving ethically.
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Man is not a rational animal - man is a rationalising animal.
The easy bit is seeing this in other people. The hard bit is accepting it of yourself.
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Even easier ... make someone's paycheck dependant them supporting X.
Most people will happily compromise whatever ethics/morality they CLAIM to have if it means getting paid to do so.
Putting bread on the table (Score:3)
No, I call it putting bread on the table. Picture this. There's a call for "writers", a guarantee of relative anonymity (the column will be published in an internal network of a highly secretive organization), and a chance to either get paid extra or at least rise in the eyes of your bosses (and thus make yourself a wee bit less dispensable). If I were already in his or her position, I'd apply and do my damnedest to write something at least grammatically and stylistically competent while pleasing to the tar
Re:Putting bread on the table (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, that sums up the problems with modern capitalism very well. Everyone is doing something wrong because it pleases the boss and makes them money.
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To be fair, government employees don't really fall under Capitalism (the concept). Nonetheless, when it comes to invading our privacy, private corporations are at least as effective as the government. The difference is that the former are pursuing profit, while the latter are pursuing power and control.
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I think it is pretty obvious now that they are working together to make both money and increase their power. It is almost like a form of neofascism where corporations and the government are working together to keep control, and increase power and wealth. Most regulatory agencies have been "captured" by big business, think FDA, EPA, USDA, SEC, FEC etc. Corporations now write the legislation through ALEC, which then gets passed around from state to state, and the bribed politicians push for the legislation an
Re: Putting bread on the table (Score:1)
Boy, WE are the target audience. They have a P.R. problem and want to fix it with things like this.
Now, lets use this medium to communicate with them: Dear NSA, we would be much more sympathetic with you if
A) You did not perform wholesale collection, but targeted collection. If you threw away the innocent stuff. You actually build FILES ON EVERYBODY and no amount of denial invalidates this. It makes you more powerful, just as it made the Stasi and the KGB more powerful. Do we have to explain you the content
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A) You did not perform wholesale collection, but targeted collection. If you threw away the innocent stuff. You actually build FILES ON EVERYBODY and no amount of denial invalidates this
Stored data doesn't count as a "file," until a human looks at it. That's a big difference between the Stasi and the NSA: Stasi had actual humans examine and physically sort pieces of data; NSA does it by computer, hence no "file".
B) Would go after folks like Cheney and Bush when they work for the Saudis and Israel.
Elected officials, by definition, represent and therefore do the will of the people. The appropriate question to ask is why the people would want to place the security and welfare of a foreign nation above their own. The answer to this may lie in massive data archive, given the
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I suspect your last sentence is spot-on, but I was speaking more about the role of "Socrates," not the person.
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It's called rationalizing, and anyone can do it. First, do whatever you want. Next, come up with a justification. As long as you act first and justify second, you're doing it right! Under no circumstances should you reverse the order of operations, you you may end up actually behaving ethically.
No, the opposite is just called "The ends justifies the means" where you get a free pass to do anything for the greater good. That's how you can nuke Hiroshima and still sleep at night. Probably how Nazi death camp staff thought about gas chambers and the Jews too. No doubt many at the NSA feel invading everyone's privacy is for the greater good, even though they'd vehemently oppose China or Russia doing the same to them. But the NSA are the good guys so what they do is good, if the bad guys do the same it'
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He was tasked with creating internal propaganda and he did an excellent job of that. The NSA doesn't want its workers to suffer bad moral or be forced to question the ethics of the orders they carry out.
They used it for spying on spouses ffs! (Score:1, Insightful)
Years of reports for the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board show NSA analysts were caught mishandling surveillance data and spying on people through their job. Analysts with the National Security Agency have been abusing surveillance data to spy on significant others and spouses for more than a decade, heavily redacted government documents show.
And now they want to convince us they are "ethical"? Never mind the legality of it.
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But how are you going to know whether your spouse is a Soviet agent if you don't spy on them?
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People with no real past or roots in a nation tend to stand out after sit down interviews with friends, family and all teachers.
If all you have is a vast domestic SIGINT collection bureaucracy then case studies, projections would always show all Soviet agents in the USA always slip up while using phone, email, fax and routinely book expensive online travel to other international countries.
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routinely book expensive online travel to other international countries.
Just out of curiosity, how a travel to another county can be not-international??
His argument makes a tiny bit of sense .. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you assume the people watching are in fact the good guys and bear you no ill will and will never misuse their knowledge or incompetently leak it to others.
If, on the other hand, they happen to be human beings, who will inevitably abuse their power, then maybe not so much.
No, it doesn't (Score:3)
As someone wise once told me.. "Wish in one hand and shit in the other. One hand will be full and the other empty, tell me which is which." What you are attempting to claim is that someone today can unlearn thousands of years of study on human nature. I realize you were attempting to be nice, but nice and honesty don't always go hand in hand.
To the psychopath that decided this person was Socrates I will ask that they actually go study Socrates. This person was not Socrates or Plato by any stretch of the
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I guess you didn't RTFA. The article calls him that because he answered a writing job ad for the NSAs internal magazine that asked, "Are you the Socrates of SIGINT"? The articles author didn't name him that, and he didn't name himself that.
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Actually I did read TFA, but thanks for making a false accusation. Who gave the person the name makes no difference to my comment.
Anyone with ethics would immediately have seen a problem with the question. "Are you the Socrates of [ROLE]?" in any Government bureaucracy would have been scoffed at. Anyone knowing anything about Socrates would have known the idiocy of that question.
Instead of remaining ignorant and making baseless accusations ask questions to educate yourself! That method completely contra
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The "Gay Precedent" (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a rule in politics that I always agreed with. You don't bring the other guys sexuality into it, unless it makes him an actual hypocrite by his policy. So you don't mention a man is gay, even if he is, unless he comes out and gives a speech about how gays belong in prison. Makes sense right?
well.... This man argues everyone should be transparent.... I feel the author made a mistake in not doxing him completely and releasing his full name and phone number.
I hate this man, but maybe its just because I don't know EVERYTHING about him. Clearly he needs to be helped by releasing that information so I can come to understand him as a real human and not a threat to my privacy.
This is one of the few cases where doxing is not only justified, but, the moral imperative!
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I was trying to argue for why he should have been doxed. Which, is my honest opinion on the matter. People like him deserve it for what they choose to do with their lives. In fact, deserve it specifically, its not something I would wish on most anyone else.
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It's trivial. The article has enough specific info to locate the guys blog very easily.
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Yes, the hypocrisy is the most stunning thing about this guys position. His rationalisation for SIGINT was "if the state knows everything, they'll see that you're truly a good person", where the word good should of course actually read loyal.
But then when a journalist contacts him and offers to let the world get to know him much better, he suddenly decides he likes his privacy and anonymity after all.
I wonder if he feels the cognitive dissonance at all. Probably not.
Well, can't have it both ways. I agree -
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Yes, the hypocrisy is the most stunning thing about this guys position. His rationalisation for SIGINT was "if the state knows everything, they'll see that you're truly a good person", where the word good should of course actually read loyal.
"Socrates" describes himself as a libertarian. Bemoans that he can not just load up his family in a wagon and head out for the prairie. Confesses to guilt/confusion when watching his superiors "misuse" his surveillance product. Then tells the entire, internal NSA audience that they just have suck up the cognitive dissonance and trust that their superiors know what they're doing (or at least that everything will work out in the end).
His whole life seems to be built around justifying his whims. The story
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I think you missed the subtext. The brilliance of this article was the manner in which the author doxxed him without doxxing him. The author can wash his hands, "what, me dox a non-criminal public servant? Guy just trying to live his life and do his job? Heavens no." But the entire time going on and on with specifics of him, his location, his wife, his family, his interests, his education, his career(s)...it would be absolutely trivial to dox this man. I bet I could do it in under and hour (I won't, though)
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You know I fully agree with you, but you also have to consider the...ehm.... meta game.
Some totalitarian nitwit at the NSA is going to have to follow these stories and comments, about them and has to read rants by people either calling for how they deserve it, like me, or reading backhanded insulting defenses, like yours.
All in all, its just win all over.
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Well for a meta-monkey I have no meta-game. Carry on, sir.
A fatal flaw (Score:1)
I do believe that having more information will allow for a more accurate analysis of why people behave the way they do, that is, their motivations.
However, I am not sure that all of the observable facts in the universe about an individual will be sufficient to completely predict motivation and behavior. People are complicated - the older I get, the more introspective I get, the more I pick at and analyze and assess my own actions, the more frequently I find tha
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I do believe that having more information will allow for a more accurate analysis of why people behave the way they do, that is, their motivations.
Except that Mr. Socrates admits to "being loyal to a fault" and "I try to be a good lieutenant and good civil servant of even the policies I think are misguided." So you can read all you want into his beliefs and morals. But in the end, what he does is what he was ordered to do. Ultimately, knowing him intimately is pointless if you don't know who is behind the curtain pulling the levers.
Most of the world runs this way. The guy turning the valve on the ovens at Auschwitz was "just following orders". The ul
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Do you hear what you are saying? You are saying the people who work as NSA are the same as those at Auschwitz who killed masses of people.
They are essentially the same. They're part of a system which kills people it finds inconvenient, all over the world.
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Drones have a long way to go before they are numerically equivalent to Auschwitz, but let's face it, they're both systematic assassination programs that target people in a particular ethnic group which a wildly aggressive administration simply doesn't like. Many strikes are against people whose names aren't even known. The NSA is a key part of the drone program. You can't work there and not be supporting it.
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"Double-tap" strikes: They kill one person, then they have the drone loiter and wait for rescuers to come along and bomb those, on the assumption those must be bad guys too. They have no idea who those people are.
They killed a mid-level Pakistani Taliban guy, in the hope bigger Taliban guys would go to the funeral. They then bombed the funeral and killed dozens of people - no idea who those people were, they just /hoped/ they'd kill some more Taliban.
A clear and utter disregard for the lives of ordinary Pak
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I don't see what your comment has to do with the policy of killing unknown people, with no evidence against them.
Unless of course you're saying that because some people there are bad guys, or because some aspects of culture are disagreeable, that therefore it is OK to kill any one of them - including those girls and women you profess to be concerned about. In which case, you're as uncaring, as hating, as inhuman as any of the worst of them.
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Oh, and your comment demonstrates the dehumanising attitude I wrote about in mine.
You need to take a long hard look at yourself, and try find your own humanity back.
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I find your view extremist.
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I don't think the US military intervention in Afghanistan was well-directed in terms of attacking those responsible for 9/11. Nor do I think the ongoing operations are doing much to improve US security. Indeed, the wider "war" on Islamic extremism ("we must bomb Kobane into rubble, to save it") is likely highly counter-productive and bone-headed.
However, set that aside, let's assume militant Islamic extremists are justified military targets.
Are double-tap strikes justified? How can it be justified to bomb a
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Oh, for the avoidance of all doubt: The last paragraph is highlighting the consequences of saying that it is OK to kill rescuers, or OK to kill people by association. I personally do *not* believe any of these things are ever generally justified, either by western powers in the Islamic crescent or by militants elsewhere.
Double-tap strikes targeting rescuers are very clearly heinous war-crimes.
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Good to agree on that.
Yet, no one in the west has ever been prosecuted for double-tap strikes. Not even in the infamous "Collateral Damage" video leaked by Bradley Manning, where children are clearly visible through the window of the van of a random Good Samaritan who happened to stumble on the scene of a previous attack and stopped to help.
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I'll bite. The people at Auschwitz would have been killed if they refused to follow orders, and there would be consequences for close family as well. NSA employees could quit with little, if any, consequence beyond the loss of their pay cheque. What the employees at Auschwitz were involved in is far worse, imo, than anything we're aware of the NSA but that doesn't mean yo
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No, he's saying that "I was only following orders" is in no way a justification for behavior that is morally wrong or even illegal. The parallel is clear.
This NSA guy is actually admitting that he is willing to do his job as a cog in the machine even if he thinks the activities are wrong.
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There are people who value their right to privacy as much as their own lives. So, yes. To them, the NSA is just as bad.
I don't recall our founding fathers prioritizing the Bill of Rights.
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The activities were NOT "authorized by Congress". Bush described a "warrantless wiretapping" program (a clear violation of the FISA Act) back in the early 2000s. Then, the government granted itself ex-post-facto immunity with the FISA revisions act in 2007..
There is no "oversight" when the president and DOJ are overseeing themselves. That's like letting police write their own search warrants and claiming it's OK because the police chief and mayor are cool with it.
Reviewed by the courts my ass! The FISA
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However, more data also simplifies the job of cherry picking data points to prove some totally random theory.
Hope drives the former, while laziness drives the latter.
Anything you say can *and* will be used against you in a court of law (except in cases where you're exempt from the extra paperwork of courts). That takes on a more ominous tone when you can't control the massive volume of data being collected and generated abo
Cheapskates... (Score:1)
They could have hired an actual philosophy PhD, or contracted a researcher in surveillance ethics to write their columns. Instead of which they hire internally and come up with a would-be storyteller.
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My guess is that they have too many people internally that they don't want to fire so they try to give them something to do.
According to that Citizenfour movie NSA has 1.2 million American people on watch. Assuming it is true, it is a ridiculous number : they can closely follow a reasonable number of people, do global monitoring, or both but how can they be efficient with such a huge list? So my guess is that it is mostly to occupate as many employees as possible.
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A lot of the intel gathering falls into it might be useful in the future variety ie young person tracked buying drugs is the child of a politician, they require a corrupt favour from that politician and they threaten them with the prosecution of their child. This then extends out into private government partnerships, so private enterprise via government contacts extends that corruption into the private sphere. This now represents the bulk of government espionage. Those corrupt favours include legislation a
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Maybe he mooooved on?
Sure (Score:1)
They're employing this idiot for the same reason a priest is dragged in to babble pointless bullshit when the state executes someone: It makes them feel better about what they're doing or, at least, gives them a good excuse.
Long term (Score:2, Offtopic)
"Total surveillance" is great for budget growth and domestic expansion requests.
The German "orders are orders" aspect vs the US constitution is another interesting idea that seems to be well established over decades.
Long term the US is facing the same issues the UK faced in the 1930's -1970's
A flood of staff with skills but no vetting just to get the needed Russian or German or later computer skills worked for
Diogenes' Lamp Just Shattered! (Score:1)
It would be an oxymoron to put the terms "NSA" and "ethicist" in the same sentence, much less hire one. Let's see:
Position: in-house ethicist for NSA
Requirements:
Candidates displaying a cloven left hoof and horns will be given preference.
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Your requirements fit perfectly to some actual ethicists I know.
Watching the watchers (Score:2)
I wish we had similar data about all NSA employees, or even all federal government employees.
The information isn't associated with a name. It should therefore be OK for people to have it, right?
Help wanted (Score:2)
The successful candidate will be highly skilled in ethical gymnastics.
Are you looking to sell out your country for the ends of the current malignant government?
Are you unable or unwilling to follow even the basic principals of the constitution? (Preference given to those that haven't even read it.)
Does calling you a patriot or vague warnings about terrorism motivate you to do even the shittiest most underhanded things to innocent people?
Are you highly talented in moral ambiguity and a motivated hypocrite? W
Stockholm Syndrome (Score:1)
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The ironic bit is that the polygraph has no scientifically established power to detect lies (independent of people's abilities). The polygraph is an interrogation prop. So when he was worried about the polygraph, it wasn't the technology that was the threat but the interrogator.
Jacob Weber (Score:2)
Seems he's Jacob Weber, photo on a story of his here: http://baltimorereview.org/ind... [baltimorereview.org] - which links to his blog at http://http//workshopheretic.b... [http]