Month: July 2014

Over the weekend, Barton Gellman reported, based on documents from Snowden, that 90 percent of people whose online communications the NSA intercepts are not the agency’s intended targets. But Gellman also claims that the program has provided more valuable intelligence than Snowden’s fan base would like to acknowledge:

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address. Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Stewart Baker calls the 90 percent statistic in the article’s lede “a phony,” noting that any investigation into a target’s communications will cover the correspondence of many people who are not the target:

Maybe the Post is performing some far more sophisticated calculation, and they didn’t bother to explain it, despite its prominence in the story.  If not, though, the inherent bias in the measure is such that it demands an acknowledgement . (After all, it allows you to say “half of all account holders in the database weren’t the target” if the agency stores a single message sent to the target.) This is something that any halfway sentient editor should have recognized. Which raises this question:  I’ve heard of newspapers chasing stories that are “too good to check.”  Does the Post think that Gellman’s are too good to edit?

Though he also finds the premise dubious, Wittes admits that “the story raises a valid question”:

Is the agency minimizing U.S. identities and communications in all situations in which it should?

The details it provides are inadequate to venture an opinion on that subject. And once again, the story raises a tension that is to some degree inherent in the agency’s project: A valid overseas target who is in communication with people in the United States is, for obvious reasons, of particular interest. He will also, however, by the nature of the activity that gives rise to that interest, be in contact with more U.S. persons than many other people will. And that means that incidental collection affecting U.S. persons will be greater. Minimization is a key protection for U.S. persons, but you don’t want minimization of information that may be of foreign intelligence value. Wherever you draw the line here—or, rather, the many lines—you’re going to pay costs both in privacy and in effectiveness. You’ll retain information that is utterly innocuous and corrosive of people’s privacy and you’ll minimize information that will prove to have value. The question is how much of each harm you are willing to tolerate and when you want to err on which side of the line.

Furthermore, Digby is troubled by the story’s revelation that the NSA “treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers”:

You just don’t know what personal information about innocent citizens you’re going to need until they do something you need it for. (Or maybe, you never know, you need their cooperation on something and having this sort of info make the “persuading” just a little bit easier…) Best to keep as much information stored about everyone as possible. After all, the government may need to target you for something someday and it would be a shame if they didn’t have all of your communications stored in a nice digital file somewhere. Just in case.

Friedersdorf uses the piece to slam the NSA’s defenders:

They have no choice but to admit that the NSA was so bad at judging who could be trusted with this sensitive data that a possible traitor could take it all to China and Russia. Yet these same people continue to insist that the NSA is deserving of our trust, that Americans should keep permitting it to collect and store massive amounts of sensitive data on innocents, and that adequate safeguards are in place to protect that data. To examine the entirety of their position is to see that it is farcical.

Here’s the reality. The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution—but even if you disagree that it’s illegal, there’s no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. It has already been taken and given to reporters. The necessary reform is clear. Unable to safeguard this sensitive data, the NSA shouldn’t be allowed to collect and store it.

Recent Dish on the NSA’s online surveillance program here.

New research suggests that people prefer getting electric shocks to being alone with their thoughts:

[Researchers] report on 11 experiments. In most, they asked participants to put away any distractions and entertain themselves with their own thoughts for 6 to 15 minutes. Over the first six studies, 58 percent of participants rated the difficulty at or above the midpoint on a scale (“somewhat”), and 42 percent rated their enjoyment below the midpoint. In the seventh study, participants completed the task at home, and 32 percent admitted to cheating by using their phones, listening to music, or doing anything but just sitting there. … Participants rated the task of entertaining themselves with their own thoughts as far less enjoyable and more conducive to mind-wandering than other mellow activities such as reading magazines or doing crossword puzzles.

In the most, ahem, shocking study, subjects were wired up and given the chance to shock themselves during the thinking period if they desired. They’d all had a chance to try out the device to see how painful it was. And yet, even among those who said they would pay money not to feel the shock again, a quarter of the women and two thirds of the men gave themselves a zap when left with their own thoughts. (One outlier pressed the button 190 times in the 15 minutes.) Commenting on the sudden appeal of electricity coursing through one’s body, [researcher Timothy] Wilson said, “I’m still just puzzled by that.”

Tom Stafford resists the interpretation that people simply don’t like thinking:

It’s possible that there is a White Bear Effect here – also known as the ironic process theory. Famously, if you’re told to think of anything except a white bear, you can’t help but think about a white bear. If you imagine the circumstances of these studies, participants were told they had to sit in their chairs and just think. No singing, no exploring, no exercises. Wouldn’t that make you spend your time (unpleasantly) ruminating on what you couldn’t do?

In this context, are the shocks really so surprising? The shocks were very mild. The participants rated them as unpleasant when they were instructed to shock themselves, but we all know that there’s a big difference between having something done to you (or being told to do something) and choosing to do it yourself.

Although many participants chose to shock themselves I wouldn’t say they were avoiding thinking – rather they were thinking about what it would be like to get another shock. One participant shocked himself 190 times. Perhaps he was exploring how he could learn to cope with the discomfort. Curiosity and exploration are all hallmarks of thinking. It is only the very limited internally directed, stimulus-free kind of thinking to which we can apply the conclusion that it isn’t particular enjoyable.