dguido

Q1: Can you respond to the following two statements?

David Kravitz, former senior technical adviser at the NSA, 1982–1993:

Now that the existence and scope of PRISM are public, the balance point between surveillance aimed at preventing & prosecuting against illegal acts and preservation of privacy rights may warrant reexamination, in that serious criminal and terrorist elements will attempt to bypass detection. To the extent that preemptive capture of data continues so as to enable later backwards tracking, perhaps a verifiably robust access control system that enforces cooperation of multiple authorized agents in order to conduct limited-scope search and retrieval can be implemented and maintained, so as to securely bridge the gap between collection and court-ordered use of data.

Randy S., former member of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate:

I proudly served my country in NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate in the early ‘90s. I believe the current controversy has been dominated by sensational but likely highly inaccurate rhetoric about the NSA’s activities. I believe terrorist acts have been prevented from information acquired by NSA, so simply terminating the programs doesn’t make sense. Proper oversight, however, may be necessary. Ultimately, in an era of rampant sharing of personal information via social networking, I believe outrage over the government carefully using personal information to protect our nation is misplaced and hypocritical. Balance is needed in this debate, as General Alexander testified.

source: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/former-nsa-employees-100-words.html

Q2: How do you reconcile the lack of outrage from the massive invasion of privacy by ordinary people enabled social media and consumer technology, like those on /r/findbostonbombers?

Q3: Are you making the claim that transport metadata is private information? Why? If yes, how do you expect to hold this information away from your service providers?