Geoff Stone, Obama's Review Group
shelley at misanthropia.info
shelley at misanthropia.info
Thu Apr 3 22:28:08 PDT 2014
On Thu, Apr 3, 2014, at 09:25 PM, Dan Geer wrote:
>you can take my word, if you like
No offense meant to you personally Dan, because I don't know you, but- I
don't trust the word of anyone from In-Q-Tel in matters such as these.
-Shelley
> 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
>
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