FORNSAT could potentially be iffy, but OVERHEAD and GHOSTHUNTER is exactly the kind of programmes that the NSA and any other national SIGINT agency is supposed to run.
Geographically confined and directed at specific adversaries to achieve clear military goals.
Governments are not supposed to do as much as they want to do. Governments should be smaller and protect their country. The reputation the US has as the "police of the world" is a negative one because getting into other nation's affairs is ridiculous. If it isn't an imminent threat, it shouldn't be worried about as much. The reason the US should stay in areas such as the middle east right now is because they are the ones that caused the issue. Governments need to get out of each other's hair and worry strictly about their own actions.
Governments are just supposed to act as if there aren't other countries in the world? Something tells me this principle wouldn't result in the peaceful, logical decisions you're hoping for.
When you say those are the programs that they're "supposed to run", I ask, who gave them that mandate?
Specifically ... Who gets to determine which programs the NSA is allowed to run? And who gets to determine what civilian data they are permitted to retain? And who gets to determine the "acceptable" number of civilian casualties when they bomb in Yemen?
"When you say those are the programs that they're "supposed to run", I ask, who gave them that mandate?"
Congress, elected by the people.
Most Americans are supportive of the USA's actions as it relates to spying on Putin etc.
As far as snooping on Americans, it depends on the type.
If Snowden is a 'whistleblower' - he should be talking about things that are clearly out of bounds. When he talks about normal espionage activity - he's committing a pretty serious crime.
The 'whistle blower' who blew the lid in the Abu Garib prison scandal was well protected by the US.
The majority of Americans do NOT support broad NSA spying activities. [1]
More than three-quarters of likely voters the poll interviewed opposed related aspects of current surveillance authorities and operations. Eighty-two percent are “concerned” about government collection and retention of their personal data. Eighty-three percent are concerned about government access to data stored by businesses without judicial orders, and 84% want the same judicial protections on their virtual data as exist for physical records on their property. The same percentage is concerned about government use of that data for non-counter-terrorism purposes.
The poster above you is correct the US public at large supports the mission of the NSA and other intelligence agencies as far as gathering information on foreign targets including allies goes.
The US public opposes the collection of information on Americans quite strongly, but things get iffy once you include Americans who have committed or have stated the intent to commit acts of violence against the US or multi-nationals who hold an american citizenship.
I clearly indicated that most Americans are fine with spying it's more classical forms, i.e. directed at Putin and terrorists, and of course are weary of domestic kinds of surveillance.
Your tactic is similar to those trying to confuse 'immigration' and 'illegal immigration' - and those trying to conflate Snowden revelations related to 'domestic surveillance' to those that having nothing to do with domestic surveillance at all - which potentially constitute an actual crime.
To wit, why don't you consider what they response would be to the question: "Do you support NSA spying on Putin and known terrorists" - and consider what the answer would be?
Good and bad are silly and childish terms, a modern military needs the capability to intercept enemy signals, a nation state needs signal intelligence capabilities to facilitate it's own national interests and security.
This doesn't mean that the NSA should capture every email, facebook post and tweet and store it for future use.
But that doesn't mean that a signal intelligence agency running a SIGINT/ELINT missions in direct support of a military activity is inherently bad it isn't anything, it just is, as this is a capability that any modern military complex has to posses.
This is one of those cases where the prisoner's dilemma actually is applicable. All it takes is one defector for everybody to be screwed, and the advantage outweighs the penalty, so someone is guaranteed to defect. Anyone who does not remains screwed, so everyone defects soon after.
Whoever called economics the dismal science obviously knew nothing of realpolitik. But we must face the world as it is.
20-odd years ago I lived a few miles from Menwith and drove past it on the way to work. A few years before that I had worked on hardware for massively parallel systems, much of which ended up in black projects. As I drove by, I would muse as to how much of my gear was whirring away in that place..
fwiw everyone in the local tech industry knew the real mission for the base in 1993 so I'm also not sure how much of the article is "new news".
In those days I would frequent a village pub close to the base that run a quiz one night every week. The pub had a public bar and a smaller back dining room / saloon bar. I quickly learned that only certain people were allowed to frequent the back room on quiz night (I never saw them); that they were very very good at quizzes; and by custom the pub banned any questions specific to the USA in the quiz.
A pub that was probably really easy to spot as a haunt of Menwith Hill by having a car park full of US cars.
Used to surprise me driving past at how many big US cars you'd see driving on and off base. I'd wonder how it was worth shipping them across the pond instead of using something local for duration of their posting.
The most puzzling example of a shipped car I saw was a Geo Prizm going in to the USAF airbase at RAF Lakenheath.
I could understand the big Crown Vics imported by the USAF police to patrol the nearby roads, but to import a small car based on the Toyota Corolla that was common on UK roads...?
One of the interesting things from the slide shown in the article is that they're extracting the azimuth and elevation of roof based satellite dishes from aerial imagery presumably to cross correlate with the satellite orbits and whatever comms they're eavesdropping on.
Which is, of course, the reason the dishes at Menwith are in radomes in the first place. (So other intelligence agencies can't tell which satellites the NSA is snooping on) Kinda funny the article didn't bring it up.
There was a time when this would have been leaked on Wikileaks and sensationalized for weeks. Snowden seems to be able to maintain his composure, grace, and professionalism while in exile in Russia, he's still an inspiration.
Snowden handed over those documents to journalists back when he was in Hong Kong. Ever since he has no direct control over what gets published (or when).
