This is pretty amusing, but they've just made a classic apologists mistake.

Either they need all this access and funding to surveil a large number of dangerous people, or they dont need either to surveil such a small number of people. If it only resulted in 300 phone numbers to track, then sure, maybe the privacy violations weren't as bad (hypothetically). But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio, and should be shutdown because it isn't effective at all and is a waste of taxpayer money.

Lose, Lose NSA - You're either violating our liberties or wasting our money.

I think a large part of the picture is being lost in the title of this submission.

It's not that the NSA's entire mission has boiled down to monitoring 300 phone numbers worldwide.

What is being stated is that "[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA". (http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021199412_nsatechd...)

I guess my point was that if they only use it 300 times, is it really worth having the program around given the combo of costs both in privacy and dollars?

Of course there is more at play here, but they should be selling how many terrorist attacks they avoided, now how many people they snooped.

Would you know WHICH 300 phones to check without the program?

This. The privacy cost is relevant and not easily quantifiable.

Are you saying that the U.S. has more than ~300 people overseas actively working on terror plots at any given time?

You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked. The major reason for why the program exists is to detect and break-up one-off major terrorist plots so even if the NSA was detecting all worldwide terror plans against the U.S. the number of people they were tracking would never be very high.

This is what all the people saying that the risk of dying from terrorism is so completely low have been reminding us, remember?

> You can't represent cost:threat ratio as dollars per person tracked

Sure you can. If you're only using the program to track 300 people, the average cost is the total cost divided by 300.

As you point out, there is a very small risk of dying from a terrorist plot is low. So if we're spending so much money and only tracking 300 people, there is clearly a problem.

Perhaps if the US government wants to protect us from terrorism it should stop acting like a terrorist organization abroad.

    But that argument then puts the whole program at a ridiculous cost to threat ratio.

Sorry but this is just nonsense.

Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy. It results in a country-wide drop in consumer spending, consumer confidence, business spending, business confidence, hiring etc. As well as locally in areas like tourism. It alone accounted for a 1.1% drop in the third quarter GDP in 2011.

As an example in NYC alone 430,000 jobs and 2.8 billion in wages were lost in the 3 months after 9/11. Which in turn results in a big drop in the tax collected.

Then finally there is the after effects. No 9/11 and there would have been no costly invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan which has cost trillions of dollars and an obscene number of lives. Major terrorist acts always demand a response by the public.

So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems like something that will always be "worth the money".

"No 9/11 and there would have been no costly invasion into Iraq/Afghanistan which has cost trillions of dollars and an obscene number of lives"

I have some doubts about us not going to war had there been no terrorist attack. Perhaps it would have been in a different country or continent, but there has been military action under every administration since Eisenhower. I have this sneaky suspicion that the war in Iraq would have happened regardless of any terrorist attack. I would even go as far as to say that the war in Iraq would have happened under a hypothetical Gore administration.

"So out of all the things the government does protecting its citizens seems like something that will always be "worth the money"."

Assuming, of course, that this program has accomplished anything. We are still waiting to see what details will be declassified. It is not enough that supporters of the program claim terrorist plots were stopped; we need to know (a) if the program was actually important to stopping those plots and (b) if those plots were realistic to begin with.

>Major terrorist acts e.g. 9/11 have a devastating impact on the economy.

Citation needed!

9/11 did indeed have a devastating impact on the economy - because of the very poorly thought out response of the Bush administration.

On the other hand, Norway's response to their worst ever act of terrorism was as follows:

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg pledged to do everything to ensure the country's core values were not undermined. "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation," he said. (from: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120724/20363519819/one-ye... )

Do you think the US would be better off today if they adopted such a policy - instead of the Patriot Act?

To be fair, some of the post-9/11 policies did have an impact. However, don't discount the real effects the attack itself had, before the knee even had a chance to jerk.

I was at Sabre (spin-off of American Airlines, owner of Travelocity, creator of travel agency software) at the time, in HR's development group. (Actually that group had been acquired by EDS, but same group, same role, different name on the paycheck) Within a trading day of the attack, they lost 50% in market cap. We went from massive projects to calculate performance based compensation to doing it on a simple spreadsheet. Many lost their jobs, including me.

There are many threats to human life. There is a cost associated with preventing each life lost. Obviously it makes sense to consider it.

We could have never allowed foreign tourists into the country. That has a cost associated with it, right? That would prevented Saudis from going to flight school and booking those flights, right? Shouldn't protecting lives be before every other consideration?

No, we have to balance things. Protecting life can not prevent us from living our lives. Not everything the government chooses to do is worth the price.

If we're going with a cost/benefit analysis, it should be noted that the NSA accessing data that AT&T, Google, Facebook, etc, already collect is just about the cheapest sort of counter-measure you could have to terrorism. The "good old fashioned police work" that people keep suggesting would be far more expensive and invasive.

Then let people volunteer for it in exchange for lower taxes. If the impact is truly minor, there should be many takers and much savings.

That makes no sense.

What makes no sense is assuming that all of the data collection being discussed has prevented a single genuine attack.

Oh, they told us it has. Shouldn't that be good enough? They've been open and honest so far.

Are you answering the right person ?

Because I was specifically talking about the costs associated with terrorist acts. And that preventing them has significant and widespread benefits to the economy. It's pretty clear that focusing just on ROI alone this program is easily worth the price.

And just banning foreigners is free. The ROI is infinite on free things that work. But ROI is not the only consideration.

The economic numbers you're listing are pretty clearly dwarfed by the amount we've been spending on anti-terrorism.

And nobody can take you seriously trying to shovel the excessive amount of money spent on anti-terrorism (or, as for Iraq, not on anti-terrorism) into the cost of a terrorist act and then trying to use that as justification for spending money on anti-terrorism. If we spent half the GDP on anti-terrorism after 9/11 you would be claiming 9/11 cost us half the GDP and that therefore justifies spending half the GDP on it. It's circular logic.

As far as I know, Iraq was not involved in the terrorist attack of 9/11. Why should the cost of the invasion into Iraq be consider in the damage caused by 9/11?

Who says the cost is purely economic? What is the value of the first and fourth amendments to americans?

Intercepting messages doesn't violate the First Amendment.

Intercepting messages with either "reasonable" means or "unreasonable means + probable cause warrant" also doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment.

So I wouldn't necessarily make your sole complaint about the legality of the program, as it may very well soon be both legal and Constitutional.

>Intercepting messages doesn't violate the First Amendment.

What about all that stuff about chilling effects and anonymous speech?

You mean like how the KKK and WBC were brutally subjugated by the U.S. government for their hateful speech? That kind of thing?

Invoking the KKK is the First Amendment equivalent of Godwin's Law.

We let idiots have their stupid rallies because it's not the government's job to decide who gets to speak, and because the laws you would like to use against the KKK or WBC end up getting used against Malcolm X or Occupy protestors at a different time or in a different part of the country.

And just to remind everyone, the reason we're worried about chilling effects and anonymous speech is that you don't want the first person to write anything challenging corrupt power structures to get indicted with "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" charges backstopped by prolific surveillance, or have their house burned down by ideological opponents who use government powers to discover dissidents and are subsequently never prosecuted. Not only does that allow the injustice of corrupt power retaliating against activists for good, there is a real risk that the retaliation will be an effective deterrent to future activists.

I mean, you're being a little pedantic. Presumably, Americans expect the Constitution and all of our "fancy laws" to protect them from living in a police state.

Presumably Americans don't care that much about Internet surveillance, given the representatives they have elected and the big giant "meh" that has come everytime an NSA or FBI story about aforementioned surveillance has been leaked.

Which is more risky for police state purposes, a PRISM system that requires at least corporate legal review for specific individuals, or a system that would tap into all Internet traffic?

Now, which of those have we known about for a longer time?

You wouldn't happen to be in the market for a tiger-repelling rock, would you?

On the other hand, 9/11 apparently resulted in a four-week drop in the UK suicide rate.

I am reminded for an episode of The Simpsons in which Bart changes his grade from 'F' to an 'A+'.

   Homer: [incredulously]  A-plus?!?  You don't think much of me, do you boy?
   Bart:  [almost proudly]  No sir!
   Homer: You know a D turns into a B so easily.  You just got greedy.

300 phone numbers is a such low number it is completely unbelievable. I would expect a intelligence agency would be better at telling convincing lies, but I guess they don't think much of us. For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million. Also 300 is a surprisingly round number.

>>300 is a surprisingly round number.

"[l]ast year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA"

>>For future reference I might believe somewhere in the range of 15,000 to 50 million

You think that there are at least 15,000 terrorists/foreign targets of interest that would have any reason to call a US number?

Obviously not the OP but I would give a definite yes to the second question, esp. considering what qualifies as a "terrorist" these days.

Let's take the Boston Bombers and make a low balling guess that each one of them has called 20 unique numbers in the last 6 month, each of which have in turn again called 20 unique numbers and we are already at 800 numbers under surveillance.

NSA does drug busts, industrial espionage, and political work for many other TLAs.

For instance we know some details about the MINARET project which was not the full extent of their spying that:

"Operating between 1967 and 1973, over 5,925 foreigners and 1,690 organizations and US citizens were included on the Project MINARET watch lists. NSA Director, Lew Allen, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 that the NSA had issued over 3,900 reports on the watch-listed Americans." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MINARET

One imagines that with the growth of technology and the growth of the NSAs budget from that time they are able to distractedly increase those numbers.

It's a bit like saying that they're going to install cameras linked to a spy agency into every home, but don't worry because only a few homes will be scrutinised closely.

If you look at the growth of the no-fly list, 300 sounds like an implausibly low number considering the likelihood of adding-to-the-list whoever is on the receiving end of each call.

No Fly List Statistics:

In mid-December 2001, two lists were created: the "No Fly List" of 594 people to be denied air transport, and the "Selectee" list of 365 people who were to be more carefully searched at airports.

By December 2002, the No Fly List held more than 1,000 names.

60 Minutes reported on 8 October 2006 that the news program had obtained a March 2006 copy of the list that contained 44,000 names.

TSA officials said that, as of November 2005, 30,000 people in 2005 had complained that their names were matched to a name on the list via the name matching software used by airlines.

In April 2007, the United States government "terrorist watch list" administered by the Terrorist Screening Center, which is managed principally by the FBI, contained 700,000 records.

A year later, the ACLU estimated the list to have grown to over 1,000,000 names and to be continually expanding.

However, according to Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, in October 2008 the No Fly list contained only 2,500 names, with an additional 16,000 "selectees", who "represent a less specific security threat and receive extra scrutiny, but are allowed to fly."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List

I don't know, maybe something happened around the 2008-2009 timeframe to cause the executive agency to start changing the policies regarding the usefulness of lists with millions of names on it... can't quite put my finger on what that change might have been though.

Oddly, the Reuters article and headline changed (and then the moderators appropriately changed the HN headline). That's also why so many of the comments below, particularly those referencing the 300 number, don't make much sense.

Here is the lede of the originally linked article:

U.S. spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized

WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on Saturday.

The unclassified paper was circulated Saturday within the government by U.S. intelligence agencies and apparently is an attempt by spy agencies and the Obama administration to rebut accusations that it overreached in investigating potential militant plots.

The administration has said that even though the NSA, according to top-secret documents made public by former agency contractor Edward Snowden, collects massive amounts of data on message traffic from both U.S. based telephone and internet companies, such data collection is legal, subject to tight controls and does not intrude on the privacy of ordinary Americans.

300 people of interest seems reasonable to me...but that number must not include all the first-degree and second-degree contacts that each person-of-interest has...if you saw that Alice was talking to Bob and Carla and suspected Alice to be a terrorist, why wouldn't you also follow the rabbit holes of Bob's and Carla's records? And when do you know to stop?

In this way, unhindered surveillance is a lot like torture...sure, you may think it's perfectly justified when you just know that Alice is a bad person. But when the dragnet brings in many non-guilty people, it's not just about whether it's ethical to torture/warantlessly-spy on someone (guilty or innocent), it's also about whether you're actually accomplishing anything by bringing in all this irrelevant noise.

So that's why 300 closely-inspected people (plus their network, but to a limited degree) seems reasonable...the NSA has finite resources and finite analysts and can only conjure up finite investigations. Call me naive, but I think it's possible that a good chunk of NSA staffers believe their main role is to protect the nation from evil threats...(just like most military staff joined for the "good of country", initially) and if any of them are half-wise, they'd probably realize that wantonly spying for the hell of it doesn't get them promotions nor serves their country...the NSA is still a bureaucracy, after all.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the NSA won't evolve the technology to the point that thoroughly analyzing someone's network and extended network is trivial...and, that all the good-hearted idealists who work for them don't see the true nature of their work, due to the layer of technology and bureaucracy...but...we know of the current controversy because Snowden was able to walk out undetected with the files in a USB drive. So we're not there yet, so hence, it's possible this report is legit.

Yes, because they couldn't possibly have just made up a document saying a random, small number of people were "closely scrutinized". It's also a little odd that a document describing the allegedly tiny reach of still-classified programs is somehow unclassified. This doesn't sound like it was designed for the public at all.

That's nice. The rest are only recorded for posterity, but not "closely scrutinized", right?

They also claimed to delete records more than 5 years old.

Plausible. They may have quite a lot of storage space, but it is finite.

I hate how the US Government says things after the fact that we have seen many lies come from them over the past 6 months. Seriously, what do they expect? For us to start believing them right away?

You're getting the word "fact" in your sentance confused with the word "speculation". They are not the same thing.

Fact. NSA has been spying on all Americans without their knowledge for years.

...and now that the real facts are not fitting your narrative, you're starting to contradict and deny those facts using every emotional response and every fallacy you can think of.

What are those "real facts"? The Verizon Business court order alone is damaging enough.

What I don't understand, especially with the constant barrage of posts on HN about this topic ... Were you all really unaware the NSA did things like this or PRISM? I mean really? You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to be this naive. I find the shock and indignation over this news a little over the top. I'm not defending it or anything and I'm not saying it is not an important issue ... but really you never knew or suspected this before? I find it hard to believe any intelligent person would not be surprised to find out the NSA was NOT "spying" on citizens.

What do you mean "without their knowledge"? You didn't know?

Knowing that the NSA "watches a bunch of people" is a far sight different from knowing the NSA is watching you personally.

Eh, I guess you guys are just more optimistic than I. I've pretty much assumed for years that anything I type or say is recorded. NSA, black hat, script kiddie, whatever.

I wish somebody would ask whether computer-transcribed conversations are considered to have been "listened to".

One has to wonder how they'll define data-mining for the purposes of (for example) credit fraud or insurance fraud, and whether that qualifies as "closely" scrutinized.

There are a myriad of other questionable uses that could come from their data set of everything that don't require "close" scrutiny.

Just like how quickly DNS-based website blocking expanded beyond simple and straight-froward "think of the children" child-pornography hunting turns into "decency" enforcement, this NSA data warehousing program could quickly turn unpleasant.

> "As everybody who has been associated with the program's said if we had this before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego - two hijackers - able to use that program, that capability against the target, we might have been able to prevent 9/11"

These politicians believe it's worth invading everyone's privacy in order to prevent an attack on American soil. That's insane. A surveillance state is far more of a danger to people than terrorism.

I would say surveillance at this level is almost a form of terrorism. I don't not feel safe using phone and web applications. I'm also fearful to post libertarian-leaning comments or comments that could be deemed "anti-government" for fear of being targeted in the future. It may be irrational and slightly paranoid, but I think history has shown us not to trust people with extraordinary power like this.

Well, I'm still overtly anti-government, anti-NSA, pro voluntaryist, pro market-anarchism, pro libertarian, pro anarcho-capitalism, etc. If they're listening to this conversion, well... fuck it, I refuse to be censored. The worst they can really do is kill me. shrug I wasn't planning to live forever anyway.

The key word there is "closely".

#leastuntruthful

You can write all phone conversations to storage and still only closely scrutinize 300 numbers.

But how many phone numbers do they have the capacity to closely scrutinize?

Soon, they will apparently add yottabytes of storage with their Utah's data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center).. that doesn't say how much they can analyze but probably many more then 300.. (1 yottabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000GB)

Where is the title stated in the linked article?

I'm a little offended that as a non American, this invasion of my privacy is apperantly a non issue.