NSA - What for.

[anonred]

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
>