Geoff Stone, Obama's Review Group

[dan at geer.org]

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