Comment by bilbo0s
12 years ago
Maybe I'm not being clear.
My assertion is that trust has broken down. And therefore the ability to validate has broken down.
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the President and the Congress eliminate these programs...
How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that?
How would I, in good faith, tell a foreign person, or even another citizen, that their communications are no longer being monitored?
I don't believe we could give such assurances.
So even in the BEST case where the President and the politicians eliminate the programs... we would not be able to assert in good faith that there is no longer any communications monitoring going on.
The flaw in your idea, is that it is predicated on trust in the system.
The NSA requires money to operate, huge amounts of money. If that black funding was cut, they wouldn't be able to pay off GCHQ for example to provide hacks like this. If those programs were eliminated, the funding would stop, and you can't redirect that level of funding from other projects without someone noticing.
Obama is complicit with this system and quite happy for it continue.
"...If that black funding was cut..."
How would you know? The answer is, essentially, "Trust".
You would trust the politicians when they say that the funding had been cut. The politicians, in their turn, would trust the functionaries when they say no funding was going into communications monitoring.
What if you don't trust the politicians or the functionaries... do you have any method of validating the elimination of the funding not based on "Trust"?
"...you can't redirect that level of funding from other projects without someone noticing..."
These are, at their core, intelligence agencies. "Redirecting that level of funding... without someone noticing..." is their job. It's what they are trained to do, among other things. I think it's a little optimistic to believe that they would not use that skill to accomplish their mission if they found it necessary.
What if you don't trust the politicians or the functionaries... do you have any method of validating the elimination of the funding not based on "Trust"?
Gov accounts are prepared and audited by civil servants. At a certain point a conspiracy is too large to be controlled, and I'd suggest managing to divert hundreds of millions from other budgets is a conspiracy just too large to hide from an entire people when gov. accounts are public. I'm all for official oversight as well by politicians, but politicians could easily cut funding for this sort of activity if they wanted to.
Obama certainly doesn't want to, for whatever reason, as evidenced by the his disingenuous lies about this topic to the public (no one is reading your email) and the way he left Clapper in power after lying to congress and proposed fig-leaf reform, not real reform.
"Redirecting that level of funding... without someone noticing..." is their job
No, it's not. Their job is spying on enemies of their country, nothing more, nothing less. In peacetime that should be a pretty simple job of spying on a few terrorist networks using targeted attacks.
> Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the President and the Congress eliminate these programs...
> How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that?
How would the President validate that?
This. Consider: is the NSA snooping on the president? If they were or weren't, would he ever know it for certain?
Considering he was being spied on in 2004, before he even ran for Congress, and considering Supreme Court justices and other world leaders are monitored a well, I'm willing to bet he's still being spied on now.