On Fri, Apr 4, 2014 at 5:28 AM, <[1]shelley@misanthropia.info> wrote:

   On Thu, Apr 3, 2014, at 09:25 PM, Dan Geer wrote:
   >you can take my word, if you like

     No offense meant to you personally Dan, because I don't know you,
     but- I
     don't trust the word of anyone from In-Q-Tel in matters such as
     these.
     -Shelley

   and a constitutional lawyer is in the fucking white house murdering no
   strike that assassinating us citizens on foreign soil with drone
   strikes and he is a fucking supposed scholar - the upper echelon just
   makes itself more and more illegitimate every second
   just think if all that brain power had wisdom and ethics and were
   building instead of destroying or exploiting others
   your qualifications for legitimacy is at question dan

   > Responding to various,
   >
   > Google up Geoff Stone; he's a Constitutional lawyer, clerked for
   > Brennan, was Dean of the Law School and then Provost of U Chicago.
   > His relationship with President Obama may well result in Obama's
   > Presidential Library coming to U Chicago. Maybe that is comforting.
   > Maybe that feeds your conclusions about how broad The Conspiracy is.
   >
   > All of which is irrelevant except that you can take my word, if you
   > like, that he is neither a pushover nor a hired hand. The same,
   > of course, can be said for all the members of Obama's special
   > commission. In my view, the question on the table is means and
   > ends. I observe an American public that is trending toward ever
   > more risk aversion. If my observation is correct, then you know
   > well that it will concentrate power because risk aversion begets a
   > demand for absolute safety requires absolute power and absolute
   > power corrupts absolutely.
   >
   > If I may quote another man I hold in personal regard, Joel Brenner's
   > (Google him, too) insight is this:
   >
   > During the Cold War, our enemies were few and we knew who they
   > were. The technologies used by Soviet military and intelligence
   > agencies were invented by those agencies. Today, our adversaries
   > are less awesomely powerful than the Soviet Union, but they are
   > many and often hidden. That means we must find them before we
   > can listen to them. Equally important, virtually every government
   > on Earth, including our own, has abandoned the practice of relying
   > on government-developed technologies. Instead they rely on
   > commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, technologies. They do it
   > because no government can compete with the head-spinning advances
   > emerging from the private sector, and no government can afford
   > to try. When NSA wanted to collect intelligence on the Soviet
   > government and military, the agency had to steal or break the
   > encryption used by them and nobody else. The migration to COTS
   > changed that. If NSA now wants to collect against a foreign
   > general's or terorist's communications, it must break the same
   > encryption you and I use on our own devices... That's why NSA
   > would want to break the encryption used on every one of those
   > media. If it couldn't, any terrorist in Chicago, Kabul, or
   > Cologne would simply use a Blackberry or send messages on Yahoo!
   > But therein lies a policy dilemma, because NSA could decrypt
   > almost any private conversation. The distinction between
   > capabilities and actual practices is more critical than ever...
   > Like it or not, the dilemma can be resolved only through oversight
   > mechanisms that are publicly understood and trusted -- but are
   > not themselves ... transparent.
   >
   > I fear we are on the edge of a rat-hole here. I forwarded Geoff's
   > remarks as they are relevant, timely, and speak to the absence of
   > simplistic nostrums in such matters, both because of the rising
   > popular / political demand for comfort-and-safety and because the
   > technologies that those charged with delivering comfort and safety
   > use are COTS technologies. And dual use. Personally, I think of
   > surveillance as just another tax, which you may safely assume is
   > said through clenched libertarian cum Tea Party teeth.
   >
   > --dan
   >

   --
   Cari Machet
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References

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   2. mailto:carimachet@gmail.com
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