Re: [liberationtech] NYTimes and Guardian on NSA

----- Forwarded message from Shava Nerad ----- Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 16:54:45 -0400 From: Shava Nerad To: railmeat@gmail.com, liberationtech Subject: Re: [liberationtech] NYTimes and Guardian on NSA Reply-To: liberationtech http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2013/04/dsclea.html Basically the regulation says, in keeping with new DHS structures, if the governor is taking a bath and can't be disturbed, and there's an emergent situation, we get to just use any DHS chain of command and communications structure to call in reinforcements however we like, so WHEE! DRONE STRIKE! Or whatever. In Massachusetts, we're actually having to pass a *law* forbidding the SWAT teams in MA from deploying drone strikes. No kidding. They at least had the good graces to ask permission rather than forgiveness. Not sure if it was directly related, but it came up in June of this year. So we're turning them down in code. No toyz, boyz. It's the implicit, not explicit, issues that are disturbing. There have been a number of issues in the US having to do with energy, food security, border security and other converging simulation scenarios that are not necessarily overlapping with cybersecurity that have been used to wedge "reforms" out of civil liberties and LE/military/prison industry/border patrol practice in recent years by waving nightmare/doomsday scenarios in front of executive and congressional folks in the same way we see "children on the Internet" used over and over again. The same sort of erosion of rights, and the same asshattery. It's not all our military, or LE, or whomever. But there does seem to be (forgive me gentlemen) a lot of unbridled testosterone out there, who think that the wargames on counters or on computers are the same things as life on the ground. They are "protecting our precious bodily fluids" as it were, and some few of the beltway companies and various contracting interests are making serious money off of all this I'm more than sure. I had a lovely chat with the head of the MA ACLU last year, when Bill Binney came to speak at MIT. I told her that conspiracy theories were just made-for-TV-drama versions of history -- all the bits resolve too neatly, and really, they make people feel safer, because they are more understandable than studying real history, which is never a finite game. Conspiracy theories are chaff thrown against the sort of thing that happens like these NSA things, which are real conspiracies, which then seem unbelievable, and people deny, and decline to take action against. Likewise, when boring Brazil-like executive orders float by tearing down checks and balances, or when folks like Binney & Co with their officerly demeaner telling us that the sky is falling in calm words respecting the Constitution and the dignity of the corps, it misses the public's conditioned response to expect excitement and bread and circuses with their conspiracies. Why did Snowden get press when Binney did not? Because Snowden was a brave, disproportional, total dumbass, and exposed himself to be assassinated and called a traitor or as Ron Paul said -- have Obama send a drone up his ass. He stole government documents, he committed espionage, he exposed things that compromised government programs. In all likelihood in most cases, deserved every bit of it, but I cringe here and there too that it came to this rather than internal and Congressional accountability -- please understand this is catastrophic that it had to come to this as an *external* reveal and is a failure of OVERSIGHT as well as internal common freaking sense -- and now it's criminal. Snowden broke the law, committed civil disobedience in such a flamboyant way we may never be able to clear it up regardless of how much the wound needed to be cleansed. And there are people here who are going to say I am a bad person for saying that. I'm not judging him (I might have made the same decisions -- it's hard to know -- God, I hope I would never ever ever be in that position! I think I'd turn inside out...). It's an assessment. It would take full on whole culture truth and reconciliation in DC to sort this out. And although I would love to see that happen, I can hardly imagine such a thing in the current climate. It's like Watergate. Should never have happened. But there really is starting to feel like some systemic rot, and we need to start laying in more and more support to the folks we know who are working on the bolstering side of this... I haven't talked to Ron Wyden for a while...hmm... Not much I can do from here though... yrs, On Fri, Sep 6, 2013 at 1:28 PM, Matt Johnson wrote:

Hello Shava,

You wrote: "...the president essentially struck down posse comitatus in May, they won't know what you are talking about..." I don't know what you are talking about either, but I am curious. Could you send a link or two.

Thanks -- Matt Johnson

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Part of the tone is also adopted in order to wake the sleeping baby anti-intellectual giants either side of the pond. The smart magazines can publish smart crypto articles, but mass market newspapers have to bring their audiences along, even the Times and Guardian.

Very few stories even bother to explain what the NSA does or what its function in government is, which actually rather stuns me, because I find that when I ask the general public that question I find that most of them don't know what the NSA does for the government. Most of them assume it works for the executive branch, but for the DOJ as part of the whole civilian/State/FBI sort of DHS bits, because those lines are so muddied. (And yes, I am conflating Justice and State on purpose there because it's been done in conversation with The (Wo)Man on the Street.).

People don't know basic civics. At all. If you tell them they should be upset because the military is conducting domestic surveillance, they look at you like "what?" "East Germany?" you say. "Stasi?" you say. Blank looks. No history. Those who do not learn from history, etc.

If you tell them that they should be upset because the president essentially struck down posse comitatus in May, they won't know what you are talking about, but if you say, "Basically, if a local SWAT team decides they need backup in some kind of emergency situation and they can't get hold of the governor to call for National Guard? They can call a local military airbase for an airstrike if they want to." Then the people will decide you are cold stoned mad and a total tin hat. "Sherman?" you say. And if

On Thu, Sep 5, 2013 at 5:00 PM, Shava Nerad wrote: they're

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from the south, they might go off in a rant, but they still won't relate it to current affairs or do anything. But that is literally what the law says in the US now. That's a bit beyond elementary civics, but it's a bit beyond what the press is reporting on here too. Because the press doesn't really have much literacy in elementary civics or history either. They seem to be drawing mostly on marcom majors these days.

This is what the "attention economy" has done to us. Our culture is a deep, nutrient rich ocean, full of wonders and cthonic monsters that can eat us. And we all surf. Nothing below the surf-ace is important anymore.

Yay.

SN

On Sep 5, 2013 3:31 PM, "Richard Brooks" wrote:

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Latest articles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?emc=edit_na_20130905&_r=0&pagewanted=print

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-secur...

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I find most of this (if not all) silly. They seem shocked that the NSA does cryptanalysis. It would be nice if the newspapers had people with some knowledge of the domain writing articles.

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-- Shava Nerad shava23@gmail.com -- Liberationtech is a public list whose archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at companys@stanford.edu. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5