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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