If you don't believe the United States is actually using its intelligence for fighting terrorism then you're just as delusional as the people you refer to. Of course the government abuses and misuses its power on its own people - but the evidence is clear that the government is fighting terrorism. Many of the leaks, going all the way back to wikileaks, confirm this - not to mention the body bags.
Two places above this link on the HN front page right now is an Ars article about US senators admitting that there is "no evidence" bulk meta data surveillance is useful.
There is a big difference between one particular policy or program not being useful to fight terrorism, and the whole intelligence apparatus not being useful. To analogize to a different domain: lots of people would say programs like No Child Left Behind are not useful, or even harmful. That doesn't mean that they also think that the only purpose of the Department of Education is to miseducate people.
Even people who disagree with particular intelligence programs are likely to support the intelligence apparatus as a whole.
Between people who fight for expensive and inconvenient procedures in the name of a particular existential threat, but when pressed admit that the methods are not at all effective for that purpose - an enormous difference between those people and people who have a different motive than they claim to have? A minuscule difference.
If you support A to do B, but admit that A doesn't do B, then I assume that you support A to do X. If doing A causes you to make money, I'm gonna assume X is to make money.
The main difference is what they believe they're doing. I seriously doubt that most or many people at the NSA think they're in the line of "suppression of dissent".
Even though people doing the wrong things for the right reasons can cause a great deal of harm and should be stopped, it's still less of a threat than people doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. For example, I doubt anyone from the NSA would show someone footage of their girlfriend "walking into a hotel with other men" as an attempt to ruin their lives.
It's not like the US intelligence services haven't done this before. See how they treated MLK before (e.g. spying on him, accusing him of being in league with communists, leaking details of his personal life to Strom Thurmond).
>The main difference is what they believe they're doing. I seriously doubt that most or many people at the NSA think they're in the line of "suppression of dissent".
What's with all the whistleblowing then? Snowden wasn't the only one. He was just the one who released the information directly to the public (at enormous personal risk).
I think I need a citation for "...less of a threat than people doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons." Offhand, I cannot think of any societal-scale examples of anyone doing "the wrong things" for anything other than what they perceive to be the "right reasons".
For example, the Chinese internal intelligence services were likely not attempting to "ruin [anyone's] lives"; instead, they were probably trying to limit the damage a purported "human rights lawyer" could do to their society's stability. Unlike you, I have no doubt that United States (or any western) intelligence service would use similar tactics for similar perceived ends.
And if you want evidence of that, I'll just point you to the entire discussion of the justified use of torture after Sept. 11, 2001.
They certainly put up a good show of it, but then they need to be able to justify the spending somehow. Historically though they've sponsored magnitudes of difference more terrorism around the world than they've prevented.
>They certainly put up a good show of it, but then they need to be able to justify the spending somehow. Historically though they've sponsored magnitudes of difference more terrorism around the world than they've prevented.
Oh come now. Nobody actually thinks this is a war on terrorism - Terrorism is a tactic. That would be like waging a war on, say, artillery bombardment.
Make no mistake about it. This is a war on some non-state actors, and perhaps on some states. We may be a little bit unclear on who, exactly, those other states and other non-state actors are, but it's certainly not a war on a tactic.
A conspiracy is only as good as its theorists. To this point nobody has presented evidence of the government's "master plan". It looks to me like a lot of misguided policies and arrogance. I don't see anything more sinister than government power trips gone bad. Since we have no evidence otherwise, but plenty of evidence that fighting terrorism is the case, I am forced to conclude that fighting terrorism is their main goal.
The master plan has always been continued military spending to secure American financial interests (those of the elite and not of the people mind you) domestically and throughout the world even at the cost of local democracy and governance, as exemplified by numerous coup d'etats arranged by the US in countries with democratically elected governments. Security for the American people has never been the highest priority: http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-state-fears-its-own-peo...
If a house is on fire, one bickers about wether that was malice or stupidity before putting it out, they're nuts. That as a foreword, a note to self and everybody.
> not to mention the body bags.
Unless you have a specific set of bodybags in mind, I would actually say, the way civilians get attacked with drones (including a second strike to hit first responders, yay), and also going to war with Iraq for exactly zero good reasons, including niceties such as Abu Ghraib, would make it obvious that "the government" is fighting for terrorism, that is, the creation of more terrorists, while ignoring warnings from both experts in the field as well as random strangers who happen to be able to add 2 and 2.
Of course they wouldn't want to actually get overtaken by terrorism, but at the same time, NO terrorism would be nearly as useless. All of this is huuuge business, taken in total. All the gadgets and wars, all the dead people ("even Americans") and all the people being spied on ("even Americans"), may not do anything to prevent terrorism, but they represent a real cashflow, that's one big, fat fact. They also do provide a justification for total surveillance and the militarization of pretty much everything. That doesn't mean it's all made up and just a scam; terrorists are real, and they're not all "created by being mean to people", sometimes people are terrorists because they're dicks. But that doesn't mean that a.) other parties can't find ways to profit off all that, and b.) they can't find ways to fuel the fire, either on purpose or by being so stupid and full of it, that there isn't a meaningful difference between that actual malice, and the question becomes moot.
Why is terrorism objectionable? Because it destroys lives, and the lives of all those who live in fear. Not "because it's terrorism", but because of those and related things. So something done "in reaction" to that, and to "fight" it, especially when it is zero effective in actually fighting it, that does those same things, is a sibling of terrorism, not its counterpart. Which is unrelated to the question at hand but I wanted to point it out anyway. That you and I are not activists that "goes to sleep each night worried they might wake up with a gun in their mouth" (to paraphrase Appelbaum), or kids in Elsewhereistan whose grandmother was killed in a random drone attack and who can't enjoy a sunny day without fear ever since, or any day for that matter, makes it easy to underappreciate how real and fucked up this is. The terrorism it "fights" does not cause as much pain to the American people as the actions of the military-industrial complex causes others, and, as sick and sad as it is to say that, it's a thousand times cheaper.
You know how some people don't light fireworks on NYE because they realized that's just blowing money and dirt into the air for no reason? Now consider all those drones and carriers and rockets, consider the data centers, consider the TSA, and stop pissing the future of your children away. Even if you can't be arsed to feel empathy for others, consider the damage it does to you.
