About a year ago, a disgruntled NSA contractor ran off with a bunch of classified documentation and released it to a bunch of news organizations before fleeing to Hong Kong and later Moscow. The files therein explained an ongoing campaign to systematically violate the privacy of American and non-American citizens, compromise the security of encryption standards, install malicious software onto the routers of arbitrarily selected "high-value targets", and generally make the world less secure because we can. While these are very important issues to discuss, I am frankly embarassed at the large number of individuals who take these revelations as a jumping-off point for their own pet theories.
Recently, Edward Snowden commented in passing that he had heard an NSA worker in TAO (the hack-the-world division of the NSA) was responsible for taking down Syria's internet connection. That is, all of it, during a time when everyone was of the opinion that Syria's dictator had done it to suppress social media. This may or may not be true. Even removing the possibility that Snowden may have enhanced the truth either to make his actions seem more important, or at the behest of the Russian government that is keeping him alive, we must acknowledge the possibility that some percentage of the Snowden files may be inaccurate, incorrect, outdated, or fabrications.
The US government has been adament that the Snowden leaks have harmed national security and that Snowden must face trial for violations of the Espionage Act. As a result we can at least conclude that some of the Snowden files are accurate enough to cause the US government to desire their destruction and suppression. But at the same time we must not fall to the fallacy that everything Snowden says is infalliable. He is not without his own self-interested desires and has surrounded himself (out of necessity) with people who have their own agenda that competes with our own. More specifically: Russia is keeping Snowden around specifically to spread more and more leaks.
Beyond simple accuracy of Snowden's own files, we should also be wary of making our own assertions beyond what Snowden has said. The NSA is not particularly interested in your cat blog servers. The kinds of dragnet survelliance they are engaging in is mainly being done for two reasons:
- Track a small number of high-value targets that switch through a large number of phone numbers
- Store large amounts of signals intelligence that can be queried after a high-value target has been identified (e.g. tap everyone and get permission for the ones you actually listen to)
It should be noted that the average person not engaging in the kinds of illegal activity the NSA cares about is probably not being listened to by the NSA. (You might be being listened to by the FBI, but they generally do get warrants before tapping people.)
The kinds of harms that NSA activities are generating are mainly due to the uncontrolled risk that NSA collection of content and metadata can be reused by other interests - either through insider attacks such as LOVEINT, or outsiders finding the backdoors the NSA made in everything. As a result, we must focus our criticism on that basis, and not on other, less founded ideas which may be more vivid or salient but less supported by the evidence in play. We should criticize the fact that the NSA makes the Internet less secure, not that the NSA is planning to sap our precious bodily fluids, insititute some new kind of authoritarian or Stalinist regime, or... gasp censor our misogynist comments on Reddit and take our precious internet points!