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twoelevenlast week, ipsos ran a couple of polls on the NSA's spying on americans (pdfs). the press has reported the results in their typical confusing, fragmentary way.
i don't want to repeat the entire poll results, so let me summarize what i think are the key findings:
* very few people (6-17%, depending on the specific issue and question asked) think random mass interception of phone, email, and web traffic is always acceptable.
* many people (45-53%, depending) would allow it if there's a "good reason" to do so, or under "most/a few circumstances" (that's the 53%, being 12% "most" plus 33% "a few").
* OTOH, approximately the same fraction of people (37-44%) are always against it.
these questions were repeated to two apparently different groups of people a couple of days apart, and the results vary by less than the polls' margin of error (usually by ±1%). i'm going to therefore take these as stable, accurate results.
i think this is significant because it's showing the public's expectation of privacy. that is, they think their voice and electronic traffic is private and the government shouldn't spy on it, at least with some reason, and in some cases not ever.
the second poll asked one additional question: "In your opinion, is Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor?". to my pleasant surprise, the answer was 31% patriot, 23% traitor, 46% unsure (±4.4%). the impression i'd been getting from the press and random discussion fora i frequent was more americans wanted blood.
recently, various parts of the of the federal government have been making claims about the effectiveness of its domestic spying. jay carney, the president's personal PR flak, claims that david headley and najibullah zazi were caught because of it. and,
the ABC news piece mentions that head spook keith alexander claims that the details on those attacks will be partially declassified, but will that tell us anything? i think not.
my usual sources and methods dug up the public records for headley's and zazi's cases. (i can put the files online if anybody wants, but i'm running late today...) both of them vaguely mention that they used secret FISA evidence, but neither set of documents mentions mass interception orders. the evidence referred to indicates some sort of government eavesdropping on phone calls and email, but it's not clear if that's by mass-interception, specific warrants, or recordings/copies from a friendly double agent.
i expect the same will be revealed in the other cases: vague references, heavily censored, with no clear connections to mass intercepts. if the government wanted to be open about the nature of its spying on us, they wouldn't have waited for snowden to blow their secret operation.
two other curious bits:
1) the ABC news story (and several others) say that the government actually looked at the phone traffic data for only 300 domestic phone numbers last year. question: since the government admits its used only a vanishingly small fraction of the data it collects (there are ~100 million verizon customers), why are they collecting it? it seems like it would be simpler and have a greater respect for our privacy to simply mandate that the telcos keep phone logs for a year or two, and the government can request it by specific warrant. cynical minds minds might suspect that the 300 phone numbers claim is bogus, and/or that the government makes other use of the data, such as generalized clique analysis. (geeky minds might point out that clique determination is NP-hard, but i imagine the spooks have fancy heuristics and lots of hardware.)
2) the tribune papers ran a story that we may get very rapid judicial review of the constitutionality of mass intercepts. a defense attorney in a criminal case has requested his client's phone logs in order to exonerate him. the judge in the case may determine if they're admissible (ie, constitutional) evidence. ah, hope for the republic!
i don't want to repeat the entire poll results, so let me summarize what i think are the key findings:
* very few people (6-17%, depending on the specific issue and question asked) think random mass interception of phone, email, and web traffic is always acceptable.
* many people (45-53%, depending) would allow it if there's a "good reason" to do so, or under "most/a few circumstances" (that's the 53%, being 12% "most" plus 33% "a few").
* OTOH, approximately the same fraction of people (37-44%) are always against it.
these questions were repeated to two apparently different groups of people a couple of days apart, and the results vary by less than the polls' margin of error (usually by ±1%). i'm going to therefore take these as stable, accurate results.
i think this is significant because it's showing the public's expectation of privacy. that is, they think their voice and electronic traffic is private and the government shouldn't spy on it, at least with some reason, and in some cases not ever.
the second poll asked one additional question: "In your opinion, is Edward Snowden a patriot or a traitor?". to my pleasant surprise, the answer was 31% patriot, 23% traitor, 46% unsure (±4.4%). the impression i'd been getting from the press and random discussion fora i frequent was more americans wanted blood.
recently, various parts of the of the federal government have been making claims about the effectiveness of its domestic spying. jay carney, the president's personal PR flak, claims that david headley and najibullah zazi were caught because of it. and,
Top U.S. intelligence officials said Saturday that information gleaned from two controversial data-collection programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries [...]there's one problem with these claims: they're untestable. how do we know that the bulk interceptions had anything to do with them?
the ABC news piece mentions that head spook keith alexander claims that the details on those attacks will be partially declassified, but will that tell us anything? i think not.
my usual sources and methods dug up the public records for headley's and zazi's cases. (i can put the files online if anybody wants, but i'm running late today...) both of them vaguely mention that they used secret FISA evidence, but neither set of documents mentions mass interception orders. the evidence referred to indicates some sort of government eavesdropping on phone calls and email, but it's not clear if that's by mass-interception, specific warrants, or recordings/copies from a friendly double agent.
i expect the same will be revealed in the other cases: vague references, heavily censored, with no clear connections to mass intercepts. if the government wanted to be open about the nature of its spying on us, they wouldn't have waited for snowden to blow their secret operation.
two other curious bits:
1) the ABC news story (and several others) say that the government actually looked at the phone traffic data for only 300 domestic phone numbers last year. question: since the government admits its used only a vanishingly small fraction of the data it collects (there are ~100 million verizon customers), why are they collecting it? it seems like it would be simpler and have a greater respect for our privacy to simply mandate that the telcos keep phone logs for a year or two, and the government can request it by specific warrant. cynical minds minds might suspect that the 300 phone numbers claim is bogus, and/or that the government makes other use of the data, such as generalized clique analysis. (geeky minds might point out that clique determination is NP-hard, but i imagine the spooks have fancy heuristics and lots of hardware.)
2) the tribune papers ran a story that we may get very rapid judicial review of the constitutionality of mass intercepts. a defense attorney in a criminal case has requested his client's phone logs in order to exonerate him. the judge in the case may determine if they're admissible (ie, constitutional) evidence. ah, hope for the republic!