What's the purpose of all the US spying? It obviously is not directed against 'terrists' since the only real terrorist out there are the american military sacks of shit and their accomplices. There are no 'foreign' terrorists who want to attack the US. If 'terrists' really existed, we'd be seeing real terrorist attacks in US cities every week. But there are none. So, are they spying on ordinary american subjects? What for? I mean, what actual benefit are they getting from that? They are the ones who caught DPR. But are they going to use their 'secret' information to put in jail every 'criminal' in the US? Or are they spying on behalf of american business, stealing industrial secrets and information from the competitors of american industries? Or are they mostly a useless bureaucracy that only steals and stores data, not doing anything else, at least for the time being? Preparing to transform the US from a covert totalitarian shithole into an overt totalitarian shithole? Or? J.
On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 04:23:52AM -0300, Juan Garofalo wrote:
Or are they mostly a useless bureaucracy that only steals and stores data, not doing anything else, at least for the time being? Preparing to transform the US from a covert totalitarian shithole into an overt totalitarian shithole?
I think you hit it on the risk on head there. Its like the stasi; stasi 2.0 - they are creating a risk to democracy, and even without exaggeration civilization itself with their actions. The Germans get it because they remember the Stasi. I expect they are doing it for geo-political influence to tap phones and internet equivalent of intersting people, and economic-espionage to the benefit of US companies, to exert political control, to be able to selectively leak inforamtion to law enforcement (they admit this now). Thats all internationally illegal, immoral, unethical etc, governments do stuff that their citizens would reject on a daily basis under cover of secrecy. Its a systemic problem with the worlds current goverments. They also dont that well control even their own spy apparatus, it has somewhat of a life and self-interest of its own, and inter-goverment allegiances independent of the political sphere. The risks are much worse however: Americans are traditionally ignorant of lessons of history, look at Bush junior. The Brits were furious with the mismanagement of Iraq. The Brits at least had some historically acquired wisdom and common sense of knowing how to run an imperially controlled government without enraging the locals more than strictly necessary. As the Iraqis said they had more freedom and independence of political rule under British colonial rule than after american "liberation". (ps I am against imperialism whether former overt British imperialism or current American disguised-imperialism). If the Americans get an even worse government (and the Bush/Obama government is pretty damn bad - drone assasinations, internationall illegal strikes, wars, torture, rendition, guantanamo, persecution of whistleblowers on these illegal activities, and suppression of press via legal threats). They've shown the world their democratic system is very vulnerable to Reichstag fire like events, they have too much military power amassed, and stasi 2.0 dossiers on most people of interest on the planet. I think the solution is encryption, privacy tech; lots of it, soon, widely deployed. You have rights - if you dont exercise them, illegal government and/or spy organizations will remove those rights, regardless of what law says, domestically, and certainly internationally. The spy apparatus has shown a strong willingness to bend rules, eg reciprocal arrangements, Brits or Israelis spy on Americans and then provide the DB query engine to Americans etc. Or require the telcos to retain the information, and then require them to provide an unmonitored DB query interface, or have NSA mole telco "employees" be the only employees authorized to maintain and use the system. New US domestic laws will just result in the latter. Its time to use encryption. Its a use it or lose it situation, and its important to civilization. The law says you have rights of freedom of speech, freedom of association, but you arent really exercising them unless you're using cryptographically assured free speech (which means privacy networks, encrypted emails, unobservable encrypted emails (hiding who is sending to who) etc. Subpoenas still work if individuals and businesses have their own records. But people have to stop using centralized large business services; use p2p or end2end security and privacy sytems, cloud to the extent you use it should be blind to your data and communication patterns. Subpoenas still work in the sense that targetted investigatins succeed as now: present a subpoena to a car rental company and their business recors will tell you who rented the car, even if the email confirmation is identifiable only to the renter and the car company, etc. This drives cryptographically enforced law: they can only do targetted subpoenas, by getting a court to approve a warrant based on reasonable suspicion, not drag net if there are no central entities to coerce, tap, put moles into etc, because its too expensive to do it to every computer. They never give up, so like with clipper, the former export laws, and their 15 year diversion into hacking everything, and subverting laws; they will continue. Probably their next step beyond requiring telcos to keep records, will be to up the ante on pre-emptive hardware hacking - requiring hardware companies to put remote triggerable hardware backdoors in processors, chipsets, firmware etc. Time to buy chinese probably. Pick your vendor depending on your use-case. If you're a big US business guy buy US, if you're a US citizen probably buy chinese. Hardware arbitrage. They might have a go at requiring licenses to write and publish code as Stallman warns about. I dont think that can flies in a notionally free society, but they had a go at clipper, and export laws also. I hope that common sense prevails and that also fails. Interesting times. Adam
I think Adam really hit the nail on the head, here. One of the most significant, growing concerns people have had about the activities of the NSA et al has been that it presents a great deal of risk. No security is perfect, and there's always a way in. Given enough time, some foreign threat (Chinese hackers?) will, almost certainly, find their way into a datacenter and have access to an overwhelming amount of information. I think that point makes for a strong case for regulating spying programs. The fact that this activity is so detrimental to privacy rights is a much deeper and more important issue, in my mind, but both are worth arguing for the sake of regaining control. I also agree that, at the end of the day, the technology we use has to do the job of keeping users secure- it's always been that way. Adequate legislation is also necessary, of course, but as others such as Richard Stallman have recently said, laws have and will be ignored when they're inconvenient for powerful parties such as the NSA. Interesting times, indeed. I for one am very excited about how technology has and continues to change(d). On 11/4/2013, 6:32 AM, Adam Back wrote:
On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 04:23:52AM -0300, Juan Garofalo wrote:
Or are they mostly a useless bureaucracy that only steals and stores data, not doing anything else, at least for the time being? Preparing to transform the US from a covert totalitarian shithole into an overt totalitarian shithole?
I think you hit it on the risk on head there. Its like the stasi; stasi 2.0 - they are creating a risk to democracy, and even without exaggeration civilization itself with their actions. The Germans get it because they remember the Stasi.
I expect they are doing it for geo-political influence to tap phones and internet equivalent of intersting people, and economic-espionage to the benefit of US companies, to exert political control, to be able to selectively leak inforamtion to law enforcement (they admit this now).
Thats all internationally illegal, immoral, unethical etc, governments do stuff that their citizens would reject on a daily basis under cover of secrecy. Its a systemic problem with the worlds current goverments. They also dont that well control even their own spy apparatus, it has somewhat of a life and self-interest of its own, and inter-goverment allegiances independent of the political sphere.
The risks are much worse however: Americans are traditionally ignorant of lessons of history, look at Bush junior. The Brits were furious with the mismanagement of Iraq. The Brits at least had some historically acquired wisdom and common sense of knowing how to run an imperially controlled government without enraging the locals more than strictly necessary. As the Iraqis said they had more freedom and independence of political rule under British colonial rule than after american "liberation". (ps I am against imperialism whether former overt British imperialism or current American disguised-imperialism).
If the Americans get an even worse government (and the Bush/Obama government is pretty damn bad - drone assasinations, internationall illegal strikes, wars, torture, rendition, guantanamo, persecution of whistleblowers on these illegal activities, and suppression of press via legal threats). They've shown the world their democratic system is very vulnerable to Reichstag fire like events, they have too much military power amassed, and stasi 2.0 dossiers on most people of interest on the planet.
I think the solution is encryption, privacy tech; lots of it, soon, widely deployed. You have rights - if you dont exercise them, illegal government and/or spy organizations will remove those rights, regardless of what law says, domestically, and certainly internationally. The spy apparatus has shown a strong willingness to bend rules, eg reciprocal arrangements, Brits or Israelis spy on Americans and then provide the DB query engine to Americans etc. Or require the telcos to retain the information, and then require them to provide an unmonitored DB query interface, or have NSA mole telco "employees" be the only employees authorized to maintain and use the system. New US domestic laws will just result in the latter.
Its time to use encryption. Its a use it or lose it situation, and its important to civilization. The law says you have rights of freedom of speech, freedom of association, but you arent really exercising them unless you're using cryptographically assured free speech (which means privacy networks, encrypted emails, unobservable encrypted emails (hiding who is sending to who) etc. Subpoenas still work if individuals and businesses have their own records. But people have to stop using centralized large business services; use p2p or end2end security and privacy sytems, cloud to the extent you use it should be blind to your data and communication patterns. Subpoenas still work in the sense that targetted investigatins succeed as now: present a subpoena to a car rental company and their business recors will tell you who rented the car, even if the email confirmation is identifiable only to the renter and the car company, etc. This drives cryptographically enforced law: they can only do targetted subpoenas, by getting a court to approve a warrant based on reasonable suspicion, not drag net if there are no central entities to coerce, tap, put moles into etc, because its too expensive to do it to every computer.
They never give up, so like with clipper, the former export laws, and their 15 year diversion into hacking everything, and subverting laws; they will continue. Probably their next step beyond requiring telcos to keep records, will be to up the ante on pre-emptive hardware hacking - requiring hardware companies to put remote triggerable hardware backdoors in processors, chipsets, firmware etc. Time to buy chinese probably. Pick your vendor depending on your use-case. If you're a big US business guy buy US, if you're a US citizen probably buy chinese. Hardware arbitrage. They might have a go at requiring licenses to write and publish code as Stallman warns about. I dont think that can flies in a notionally free society, but they had a go at clipper, and export laws also. I hope that common sense prevails and that also fails.
Interesting times.
Adam
On Monday, November 4, 2013, Juan Garofalo wrote: What's the purpose of all the US spying? It obviously is not
directed
against 'terrists' since the only real terrorist out there are the american
military sacks of shit and their accomplices. There are no 'foreign' terrorists who want to attack the US. If 'terrists' really existed, we'd be seeing real terrorist attacks in US cities every week. But there are none.
One word: power. A power-damaged brain is an incurable disease whose owners have ceased to be human. Bill
If you are the observer there are numerous reasons that it is good to see more. Even when you're on the observer's side you get a plenty of advantages.
On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 04:23 -0300, Juan Garofalo wrote:
What's the purpose of all the US spying? It obviously is not directed against 'terrists' <snip>
Or are they spying on behalf of american business,<snip>
Or are they mostly a useless bureaucracy that only steals and stores data,<snip>
Are any of these humanly realistic? The people working at the NSA are the heroes of their own stories. Do you think they tell any of these stories to themselves? I think it's most likely that: * It's always safer from a managerial perspective to have more data than less, because * if there's ever *really* an attack, and you didn't have the data, you'd be fucked, both from a personal standpoint (you, the NSA manager, would know that people died because of you) and from a career standpoint (shit flows downhill). * The people who run these systems are selected, not primarily, but in large part for, patriotism and loyalty. They think America is maybe flawed, but still the greatest country in the world, the last bastion of freedom and free enterprise and McDonald's and apple pie. They care about keeping it safe, and there's some amount of mission creep that's inevitable. This is actually a much worse situation than any of the storybook villians you've sketched out. It's not universal (LOVEINT is a thing after all) but it's probably the main reason.
So, are they spying on ordinary american subjects? What for? I mean, what actual benefit are they getting from that? They are the ones who caught DPR.
This is almost certainly not the case. DPR posted his personal email address in the clear on a public forum. He was caught with old-fashioned detective work. Municipal cops could have done it. But this is an aside. -- Sent from Ubuntu
participants (6)
-
Adam Back -
anonred -
Bill St. Clair -
Juan Garofalo -
Lodewijk andré de la porte -
Ted Smith