Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published(computerweekly.com) |
Why only 1% of the Snowden Archive will ever be published(computerweekly.com) |
Ignoring the operational limitation requirement (of which there is no way it's 99% vs 1%), a capable public can make this determination; we do not need journalists doing it for us. I am uninterested in the journalistic value of these documents; I am interested in the public value of potentially knowing the content of those documents and how the government is surveilling us and/or abusing their authority.
>“The bottom line is that Snowden is facing charges under the Espionage Act. If he was ever to return to the US and face trial, the documents could be used against him.
Snowden knew this when he leaked the documents and he now resides, ironically, in one of the most surveilled countries in the world. He believed he was acting in the best interests on the public and is it NOT the job of journalists to protect a known source entity; they are to protect unknown sources.
Release MORE of the files, your profits and/or biased concerns for the journalistic value of the information shared be dammed. There is WAY more at stake.
So, based on the article, we shouldn't be blindly trustful of the journalists' thoughts on this matter; they are clearly biased toward the information published as well as the value it brings their brand (individual or employer).
If Snowden himself had had to redact everything ahead of time, or study everything in fine detail beforehand to determine all the implications of publishing it, he wouldn't have been able to leak nearly as much material.
I wonder what motivated this story to be published.
The public is not capable, either technically nor emotionally nor politically.
The public is not just the bottom most or the average member. It's everyone. If "the public" is not capable of understanding this information neither are the members of "the public" normally producing and consuming this information.
However there are many organisations who can analyze different aspects from different perspectives and pull out consumable information from it.
By having the raw material available this then can be cross-ckecked. If it's kept secret you need complete trust.
It can’t be that hard.
Just to put the end of that sentence in context:
"Privacy International's 2007 survey, covering 47 countries, indicated that there had been an increase in surveillance and a decline in the performance of privacy safeguards, compared to the previous year. Balancing these factors, eight countries were rated as being 'endemic surveillance societies'. Of these eight, China, Malaysia and Russia scored lowest, followed jointly by Singapore and the United Kingdom, then jointly by Taiwan, Thailand and the United States."[0]
There are many, many reasons to criticize Russia - now more than ever - but those of us in the West should reflect on why we rate so poorly on this, too.
It very well could be. People with a background jnnsocial engineering know there are many small and seemingly innocuous pieces of information that could be useful to an attacker.
Sorry, was the point of these revelations to increase public interest (aka to make the newspapers money), or to bring accountability against the NSA? So far there has been nothing published that would give any individual standing to bring such a lawsuit. Is this because Snowden was naive, or because the journalists sacrificed real accountability for self-interest?
There were several lawsuits. Some activities were ruled illegal. More accountability would require prosecutions and political action. And there was enough evidence for them.
When MacAskill replied: “The main reason for only a small percentage [being published] was diminishing interest [from the public]...”
This is insane. They have 99% of the leak under lock and key and they say the reason is because no one wants to see it? My guess is its a gag order/request, if they publish they will lose other access or something but why would this Ewen MacAskill, @ewenmacaskill feel comfortable lying so directly?
To make money is the purpose of journalism as much as eating or breathing are the purpose of your life, i.e. they are not.
They're just the bare necessity that needs to be done to continue to exist so that you can do more 'important' things (see Maslow hierarchy).
I think there's probably a lot more in those files that's of great embarrassment not just to the NSA and the US government in general (such as proof that it was conducting an illegal warrantless mass surveillance program in violation of US law) - but also to their collaborators in the private tech sector who seem to have been quite active participants in the program.
For example, one of the most revealing revelations was that NSA spied on the Brazilian oil company Petrobras - which is very hard to justify on national security grounds, and instead points to industrial espionage of the kind the NSA claims it doesn't engage in (as compared to China, etc.).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-snowden-petr...
I hope that eventually all the technical papers eventually are available out of nerdy curiosity, but I’d prefer that be through declassification and not espionage.
Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/the-intercept-the-first-online-p...
The point is that these documents have interesting content, but it would not sell newspapers so they don't want to invest time working on that... it's nothing related to the publics interest.
What a sham. The NYT has openly said many times that it allows the US Government to determine what is "fit to print". How did it come to this?
I strongly believe there was some level of collusion between Greenwald & the USG. How else did he get to have a successful media career in the West, while fellow publisher/journalist Assange rots in prison?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/opinion/government-censor...
I think the people doing this have a completely different notion of national security than the general public, one that includes a supposed right to know about surprises in general and big events in general, not just about bad guys plotting to attack you. For example, they might believe that details of economic activity, prices, religious movements, relationships among foreign politicians, epidemics, boycott and antiboycott campaigns, etc., are matters of national security in the sense that they could eventually develop into things that would affect a society negatively, or that could tend to increase or decrease the power of a state.
In maintaining the idea of privacy, we have to also maintain that others have to accept surprises and uncertainty. I don't know my neighbors' religious views, I don't know what oatmilk will cost next week at the supermarket, I didn't know when my former coworkers started trying to organize a union, I don't know if anyone has a crush on me. But all that information exists somewhere in computer systems. I accept that I have no right to it, but it seems incredibly hard to get governments to think the same way.
When Glenn Greenwald first talked about how spying on Petrobras wasn't a matter of U.S. national security, I thought that was obviously right. Petrobras isn't going to attack the U.S., it doesn't have any means of attacking the U.S., and it doesn't have any obligation to sell or not sell oil to the U.S. or any other country at any particular price. But now I think that it's not just like "the NSA must plan to help the Texas oil industry" or "the NSA must plan to help the Saudi oil industry" or something; it's more like "they don't accept that they should have to contend with surprises and uncertainty".
To be clear, I think that spying on Petrobras is wrong and I wish that Petrobras had a remedy for it. And I think disclosing that it happens is right, but it doesn't seem to have led to the kind of discussion or debate that Greenwald seemed to hope for.
Edit: The comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181265 had a more concise take on this point.
> If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
(But in this context we're not just talking about risks of violent attacks, but really risks of anything disruptive.)
Edit 2: The U.S. in particular is powerful enough to enforce economic sanctions which are themselves justified on national security grounds, so then there's also the sanctions enforcement part like figuring out whether Petrobras is working with the Iranian oil industry or whatever. Most countries probably wouldn't even expect to be able to do anything about that, although they might want to exert diplomatic pressure like "please stop trading with our enemy, from whom we concretely fear a physical attack".
On what grounds does Petrobras have any right to privacy from the USG?
Reason 1 to reject spying for this reason: literally any spying could be justified this way. Every butterfly's wing flap could theoretically contribute to a "national security risk". In line with that great quote that "If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified." There's no way to use this logic to ever argue that you shouldn't spy on someone.
Reason 2 to reject this: when we start broadening the scope of "national security risk" to include things like "economic disruption", then essentially anything that's outside of the status quo is suddenly classified as a risk. Basically our spy agencies' jobs become protecting the entrenched interests of those already in power. A technological breakthrough in battery tech has a big potential for "economic disruption"; is that a national security risk? What if it's invented in Iran? Would the U.S. sabotage the (hypothetical) "Iranian national energy laboratory" if it were on the cusp of a revolutionary technology that could weaken the U.S.'s economic position?
Reason 3 to reject this: we get it wrong. If the CIA's "terrorist detector" says Joe Schmoe has a 99% chance of becoming an active terrorist, based on his religion, political views, age, recent Google searches, facial hair, income, and gait, what is the actual probability of him becoming an active terrorist? The standard "Bayesian false-positive" puzzle applies here: the base-rate of humans committing actual terrorist acts is extremely low. Even if the CIA's terrorist-detector model is 10x better than OpenAI's wet dreams, there's no way it's more than 99% accurate. With a base rate of something like 10^-6, we're looking at a roughly 0.01% chance that Joe is actually a terrorist, given a very accurate model giving a 99% positive result. Do we think the person making the decision about whether to make Joe disappear is aware of these subtle nuances in Bayesian statistics? Even if he did, he also knows that if Joe did go on to bomb an office building, there might be a headline soon that "the CIA's own model said Joe Schmoe had a 99% chance of being a terrorist and DID NOTHING!!" So of course Joe disappears forever, based on a futurecrime, because he Googled the wrong thing at the wrong time in his life with the wrong skin color and facial hair.
Put all these reasons together and you can get some really questionable behavior from these agencies, and that's even assuming it's all done with the legitimate good intention of protecting the U.S.
sorry to break it to you, but the answer was too succumb to a full blow 60s style coup which remove the president who autored the Reuters article above.
she was ousted by the senate, the right wing vice who was there for "governability" signed rights to new oil reserves to texaco on his first week in power and then brazil got an election that was free for all (main candidate jailed on bogus claims, candidate working with steve banon leading, etc)
It's kind of odd that neither of these oil giants have put pressure on the U.S. government as a result. They are about the only "victims" big enough to pursue the case legally.
I suspect a Supreme Court case is just about the only thing that can bring some of the remaining documents to light. Anyone with access today is almost certainly under some gag order.
NYT is not only pro-war, they're very conservative.
The NSA might in fact be occasionally helping to stop relatively small-scale attacks. However, as Prigozhin's march on Moscow in Russia and the 10/7 attacks in Israel show, even running an authoritarian surveillance state or a heavily militarized state with top-notch intelligence services can only do so much to prevent attacks. I think that adding more and more surveillance has diminishing returns in preventing attacks, meanwhile its existence is a threat to free society both directly, in that it could theoretically be used against political dissidents, and indirectly, in that it encourages a culture of self-censorship that is antithetical to political freedom.
If no amount of risk is acceptable, then any amount of surveillance is justified. To have a free society some level of risk must be accepted.
You are saying that because if anyone attacks us with conventional forces we will nuke them/invade them then we have no nation security interest concerning anything in classified documents compiled by our espionage services?
Is this a correct interpretation and if so do you stand by it? If not can you please clarify what you meant?
Your comfort is one thing. Noted. But do you know enough about the NYT, what would their job be exactly?
They don't have a stellar track record. Iraq-War, Judith Miller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/reporter-judith-...
It's actually the opposite
National security of least powerfull countries, like Korea, is most complicated. They are most at risk and least likely to harm others.
The most powerfull nation on earth is the opposite, it is not really in danger, its very secure, and presents the most danger to others - whether through ignorance or stupidity or malice.
So we should actually be publishing almost everything from US/Russia/China because they often ruin millions of lives, but in practice ofcourse we do the opposite.
"Truth" and "lies" mean something different than "things that emotionally resonate with me based on my a-priori beliefs" and "things that make me angry". It's weird that it's so easy for us humans to forget that. Or perhaps it's "things the correct people say" vs. "things those other people say"? Not sure which definitions you're using here.
About NYT withholding documents: well, that's just another nail in the coffin of the paper's credibility, along with yet another betrayal of the trust they got from WL...
Because leaks can have consequences and it's not clear to the NYT exactly what those might be?
It's a tough situation because the government may not be a trusted partner, but I understand asking / trying to avoid collateral damage.
With this, the NYT has decided that they want to be a government propaganda organ instead of a journalistic organ.
As to Greenwald's media career? He seems to have gone really fringe the last few years, but maybe I'm saying this because I believe the mainstream Russia and Trump 2016 story, and he seems convinced about US mainstream media incompetence/deference, but he just sounds angry all the time...
The rationale for choosing not to publish from the Snowden Archive because of lack of interest is an economic one.
I know lots of people in Brazil who wrote publicly all the time about how they didn't agree with Dilma's impeachment (and thought it was legally improper) and didn't agree with her successors. They all managed to avoid torture or disappearance or the knock on the door in the middle of the night.
If the impeachment and its aftermath were a coup, they were definitely not a "60s style coup".
It isn't "with this". In a way (in recent history) it always has been. Case in point, almost any political event. See what the NYT publishes on the Israel-Gaza conflict, in comparison with any middleeast/asian outlet. I'm not saying that this is always on purpose, it's likely a lot of it is human bias - but it doesn't change the fact that journalistic organizations have bias, and you need to read different papers for a complete picture.
It's not an all or nothing deal.
This reminds me of a talk by Halvor Flake in which he says that people in intelligence agencies are incentivized to try to know everything, in order to minimize the chance of being surprised by anything.
> A technological breakthrough in battery tech has a big potential for "economic disruption"; is that a national security risk?
I think it's kind of an abuse of language to call it that, but I wouldn't be surprised if many people intuitively thought that yes, this should count as a national security risk.
> The standard "Bayesian false-positive" puzzle applies here: the base-rate of humans committing actual terrorist acts is extremely low. [...] Do we think the person making the decision about whether to make Joe disappear is aware of these subtle nuances in Bayesian statistics?
I think that people at, say, the CIA are somewhat aware of them because they have a notion of confidence levels of assessments, and they're also used to the idea that they have a lot of noise to deal with. Like when they were trying to find Osama bin Laden's house, they presumably had many many many many ideas of places that could potentially be his house for some reason, but then they actively tried to disprove those hypotheses (like scientists!).
They will also literally say that they assess certain things with low confidence. I don't know if some of the analysts writing that maybe actually have an explicit Bayesian probability and are mapping that into particular ranges...?
On the other hand, I think that military personnel in, say, the initial U.S. occupation of Afghanistan did not have this perspective and were happy to detain people for minimal and highly speculative reasons. (Also, I guess the base rate of people in Afghanistan during the war who were violently opposed to the U.S. was much higher than the usual base rate worldwide.) They got a number of tragic false positives which led to enormous injustices.
I think part of what you're getting at here is that governments' power when acting to actually influence the world is, well, a matter of life and death. So things like the base rate fallacy are just as big a deal there as they are in cancer treatment, or, if you believe there's a relevant moral asymmetry between killing and letting die, an even bigger deal. Also, lots of kinds of agents of lots of governments are rarely ever very accountable for their decisions or decisionmaking processes.
I think this is kind of an argument against surveillance and espionage (you can think of the scene in Good Will Hunting where the main character says he doesn't want to work for a spy agency because he can vividly imagine a false positive scenario in which a foreigner gets killed because of his work), but I think overall it's much more an argument for more transparency and accountability in uses of force. Like, you don't want to give lots of information to the CIA if they're violent maniacs because they might use that information recklessly. But while giving them that information might also be highly questionable on moral and legal and political grounds, it seems like the biggest problem in the scenario is if the CIA is composed of violent maniacs, or if it's incentivized to cultivate rather than restrain people's tendencies to violent maniacal behavior.
As an analogy about the base rate argument, people have argued that it could be beneficial for people's health to perform fewer tests, in cases where false positives often lead to wasteful or dangerous medical interventions. But if there's nothing bad about the tests themselves, theoretically it would make more sense to give doctors more information rather than less, while trying to improve their decisionmaking.
> you don't want to give lots of information to the CIA if they're violent maniacs because they might use that information recklessly ... the biggest problem in the scenario is if the CIA is composed of violent maniacs, or if it's incentivized to cultivate rather than restrain people's tendencies to violent maniacal behavior.
The problem is that the system can act like a violent maniac without any individual human being one. Each person running a model, typing into Excel, making just a small decision, can add up to enormous injustices. Similar to how an experiment that just tries to collect all the data can be much more vulnerable to p-hacking and researcher bias, even with well-intentioned researchers who would never dream of intentionally faking or fabricating data.
> As an analogy about the base rate argument, people have argued that it could be beneficial for people's health to perform fewer tests
And I think a similar argument could be made to show that, in the face of flawed models (possibly much more flawed than diagnostic tests), it may be beneficial for the country if spy agencies actually had less information. I think this is why I included "gait" as one of my features that identified my theoretical terrorist. Maybe it's a useful feature, maybe not. Maybe he injured his foot yesterday, causing him to walk like someone who's planning a bombing. To make it really obvious, how would you feel if you found out the CIA was using Zodiac signs as one of the features of its terrorist-detector model? I'm sure it's not literally doing that, but I'm less sure it's not using features that are just as spurious.
Even this idealized scenario about the terrorism-detector and taking action based on it... well, it's one that came up a lot around the post-9/11 environment (with selectees and the no-fly list [the rare case where people could actually experience the government making an adverse determination against them on classified grounds and get even the one bit of information] and the Guantanamo detainees and the drone kill lists).
However, the task of deciding if person X is a good guy or a bad guy, or trying to make a list of the bad guys within some population, is a very small part of what the intelligence community does. And that's partly because of the super-expansive notion of national security that we've been talking about, where so many parts of the government feel that it's their business to know everything that's going on in the world, largely without even thinking about the "who is a terrorist" question at all. As we discussed elsewhere in the thread, the government does not think that Petrobras is a terrorist. But somehow it thinks that it should know what Petrobras is going to do in the future, including "by hook or by crook".
I guess there are really at least two threads in the conversation, one of them being the inherent morality of surveillance and espionage activities, and another being "given how (one might think, but probably doesn't actually know) a government makes choices about the use of force, is it a good idea for that government to have access to more and more information?".
I think one of riversflow's points in reply to you was basically that, if a government doesn't make choices about the use of force in a good way, that's already a problem, which is not clearly improved by reducing the government's access to information, although you're also right that it could be. (And I've seen Bayesian arguments about that before, including a Bayesian justification for some legal standards involving in the rights of criminal defendants.) But overall, if we know so little about how those decisions are made at all, it will be hard to be very confident about whether more or less information would be likely to make them better or worse!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38183380
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scooter_Libby#Involvement_in_t...
Bad faith actors would use it and a pile of techniques used mainly by religions and cults in order to try to seize power.
The docetns are at British The Guardian and German Der Spiegel and the person extracting those initially sits in Russia and who knows who got copies or extracted them.
https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hpsci_snowden_r...
I can imagine there being classified documents that pose an actual significant national security risk. Perhaps some details about how nuclear plants are secured, or the details of the mechanisms by which authorization to fire nuclear missiles is given. Stuff like that. But there should be nothing like that in the NSA documents. Maybe there is something in there that would tip people off about the NSA's encryption-cracking capabilities. But no system that is actually critical for national security should be vulnerable to such information being revealed. And if there is some system that is vulnerable because of it, more surveillance is not the answer anyway.
You are wildly incorrect. NSA does lots to help secure the homeland.
At least this claim could be probed. Most claims in the report relied on proven liars.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/06/29/483890378/during-tenure-in-ru...
> On what grounds does Petrobras have any right to privacy from the USG?
Among other things, their confidentiality is protected by Brazilian law. If hackers break that law, Petrobras should be entitled to a remedy against them, just like Americans should be entitled to a remedy against Russian hackers, whether they intend to steal money or private information.
As far as I know, all governments harbor criminals in this sense, but I think they should be incentivized to do so much less, including by pointing out that the espionage is a crime and not glamorizing it (or being upset with governments for not doing it!).
Brazilian law isn't US law, if Brazil wants to it can try and arrest spies I guess. That's all there is to it.
> I think "personal ethics" applies to everything and everyone in the world.
I think that spies have the moral agency to gather and report information in order to better promote the welfare of their countrymen.
> I think they should be incentivized to do so much less
How? That's an impossible task in my book, and the main reason I think that spies are ethically just is because it's the nature of the beast. If you figure out a good way to do this, might I suggest focusing your efforts on de-militarization instead of de-espionage? The people with bombs and tanks are the one's who do the most damage.
> The most powerful country in the world should have an inside track on whats going on in important markets, by hook or by crook
We can get a pretty good idea of what's going on in important markets with publicly available information. Why is this the job of a spy agency and not its economics departments? I would like the U.S. to have a strong understanding of upcoming weather patterns, but that doesn't mean we ask the CIA to spy on everyone who's using aerosol sprays.
How can you possibly know that, are you claiming to be privy to the forecasts generated by the information gathered by US spies? Further, as stated later, spying is the status quo, if spying stopped wholesale wouldn't keeping information private be significantly more valuable?
> Reason 1 . . . literally any spying could be justified this way.
I don't give a solitary care about the spying a foreign government does. Why should I? They don't have jurisdiction over me. I care about what it does with that intel, but that is completely separate, which gets us to your Reason 2.
> Essentially anything that's outside of the status quo is suddenly classified as a risk. Basically our spy agencies' jobs become protecting the entrenched interests of those already in power
No, that isn't the job of spies, they gather intelligence. You are confusing other government actions with spying.
> Reason 3
Again, do you have some sort of inside track on the DoD(or some other 3 letters)? You have concocted a hypothetical about a Joe Shmoe, being caught in a dragnet filter. Is that actually a real problem? Or just a hypothetical about where this slippery slope goes.
Overall I think the burden of proof is on the group who wants to go against the status quo; nations constantly spy on one another. Justify why we shouldn't spy, rather than pointing out it's pitfalls.
In the "realpolitik" environment you mentioned, when you lose control of your private information, you lose control of what's done with that information. That's is a good reason to care about protecting information and not regard this as "completely separate".
An example that people mention a lot in the domestic context is that laws and governments can change, so that information that was innocuous before could be sensitive in the future.
Someone doesn't need to have jurisdiction over you in order to harm you with your secrets. They could taunt you about them, they could blackmail you with them, they could use them to compete with or undermine your business, they could pass them to your government as a tip, they could reveal them to your political opponents...
You might say that this is all Reason 2 and not Reason 1 material, but if a government has unauthorized access to secret information of its choice, it's going to be hard to control or predict how it may use that information against your interests later. But, you might say, I also can't actually control whether they get unauthorized access to my secrets, so I just have no power over them at all, so why even talk about it?
Well, I'd say that lots of people who read HN have practical opportunities in their careers to engage in espionage or not, to make it harder or easier, to expose it or not, and so on. Governments are going to ask some people reading this thread to do them favors. They can't necessarily guarantee the safety of their own information, but they can significantly affect the safety of other people's information. It matters whether they think that's desirable or not!
That attitude definitely benefits those who like the status quo. I think the "burden of proof", if such a thing exists, is on the position with the least prior evidence. That something is the status quo is pretty weak evidence in its favor; I can point to many instances in human history where the status quo was pretty awful.
> if spying stopped wholesale
Strawman. I never said spying should be "stopped wholesale". Never anything even remotely close to that, in fact. I'm not responsible for defending a position you completely fabricated.
> I don't give a solitary care about the spying a foreign government does ... I care about what it does with that intel, but that is completely separate
I don't believe the gathering of intelligence is "completely separate" from acting on that intel. I don't believe the accumulation of guns and ammunition is "completely separate" from the act of using those guns. I don't believe the enrichment of weapons-grade uranium is "completely separate" from building an atomic bomb. I don't believe building an atomic bomb is "completely separate" from using it.
> No, that isn't the job of spies, they gather intelligence. You are confusing other government actions with spying.
"Spies don't kill people, bullets kill people. Actually, bullets don't kill people, a rapid transfer of momentum from the bullet to the human body kills people. Actually, momentum doesn't kill people, a rapid loss of blood from the resulting tissue damage kills people. You are confusing human physiology with spying." Right: nobody is ever responsible for anything.
> You have concocted a hypothetical about a Joe Shmoe, being caught in a dragnet filter. Is that actually a real problem? Or just a hypothetical about where this slippery slope goes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Histor...
You don't need a security clearance to know of many instances of this happening.
I think if it's wrong we shouldn't do it (because we shouldn't do things that are wrong), and if it's not wrong we shouldn't punish other people for doing it (because we shouldn't punish people for doing things that are not wrong). Yes, this is exactly attempting to apply personal morality to the "international system". Which is made up of people who make conscious decisions about how to behave toward other people.
https://www.nsa.gov/Cybersecurity/Overview/
Whether or not that justifies mass surveillance is a different question. I don’t think so. The NSA is a really, really big place. You could work there for a lifetime and not engage in illegal surveillance. I think getting rid of the bad parts shouldn’t require us to get rid of the good as well.
I mean, my expectation is that those are the kind of offers you can’t refuse.
Why do you not find information asymmetry completely harmful?
I can do that. Nobody should lie, it's wrong. So, as long as every nation stops lying, they can stop spying too. Easy Peasy.
> Shouldn't we care whether the things that the justice system is punishing people for are things that are actually good or bad?
Absolutely. Which is why usually friendly-nation spies don't seem to get in trouble. Take a look at this list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_imprisoned_spies
I think lying/misrepresenting is bad and very harmful, however I also think it is human nature, and spying helps to alleviate that information asymmetry.
I believe literally all those things you don’t believe about having something being completely separate from using it. A car can kill people just as easily as a gun. So what? It’s who used the object who is responsible for what it does and owning something doesn’t necessarily imply using it or even imply it at all.
How do you justify that point of view? I really don’t get that perspective.
I can’t say for certain, but I doubt extraordinary rendition is only using "terrorist-detector model” and not relying on analysts/tips. Also worth noting is that it seems like it hasn’t happened in ~20 years, and was a product of 9/11 fervor.
Let me put it another way. Why should the powerful countries take weaker ones at their word and not employ fact checkers? Nations are only really beholden to their constituents and greater powers. Why would any country tell a major power who wasn’t spying the truth?
Right, and we have some oversight and regulation about who can operate a car, what kind of (admittedly low) bars they need to pass, and when their license can be revoked. What oversight and regulation do we have on what the CIA and NSA are doing? Congressional, obviously, yet it hasn't prevented the many abuses of the past.
I think this is more in response to me than to you; one might correctly infer from my posts here that I think that a significant majority of espionage activity is morally wrong and should be stopped.
That's just a perennial difficulty in having a multi-way conversation.