NSA - What for.

Adam Back adam at cypherspace.org
Mon Nov 4 02:02:23 PST 2013


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



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