NSA good guys

[Lodewijk andré de la porte]

>
> I noticed something interesting in digital 'security' circles. People who
> deal with 'security' are, at first sight, technical people and are
> concerned with issues such as factoring integers,  permutations, routing
> protocols, etc. etc. etc.
>
> However, all their technical expertise exists to achieve some political
> goals. And when you look at the political beliefs of these people, you see
> that they suck big time. As engineers they may be competent, but there's a
> step above engineering, and there, they fail.
>

A statement like this is trollbait. It might not be intentional, you might
even have a valid point, but presenting it like this will not help.

If you're talking about a step above pure technical you're usually talking
about a software's purpose. Then that purpose can be influenced by a
political believe as vague as anarchy, democracy, communism, capitalism,
liberty, etc. which are words that should be used sparingly and in a way
that acknowledges how terribly vague they are.

I think it's not right to say their technical expertise exists to serve
certain goals, many are doing it just for the hell of it. For the puzzles,
the challenges.

And then we have angry Juan

> And what I'm getting at is that there are people in the 'security'
>  industry who either consider politicians and the state to be a 'necessary
> evil', or worse, think that politicians and the political system they
> serve, are A Good Thing.
>

Inpersonal, unclear, unmotivated. Where do you live Juan? America? Or
somewhere lawless like Nigeria? There's an evolutionary system to
governments, where the system rises or falls based on its fitness. Why
doesn't your ideal system exist yet, and if it's stable but hard to reach,
how will you create it?

There's constructive ways to deal with this.


> In a nearby mailing list, there are a bunch of people who are funded by
> the american military(psycho killers) to create a so called 'anomity
> network'. Regardless of how good they are at writing code, their political
> beliefs are sick garbage. They operate on the laughable premise that they
> are the 'good guys'
>

Calling a person psycho is very relative, they have a model of reality.
IMHO it holds well enough for them not to be "psycho". They're definitely
killers, but that's what the military is supposed to be. So afaics
everything is okay.

The (US) government on one angle performing mass surveillance and on the
other hand preventing surveillance makes perfect sense to me. They're
different agencies, different people, different incentives, so the
conclusions (doing/preventing mass surveillance) are the correct ones in
both cases. The government working against itself is extremely common,
sometimes intentional, and a symbol of what's wrong with it.

Sadly it's also a symbol of what's wrong with capitalism. And anarchy (as
you usually advocate) implies capitalism, although it might not be about
capital. Just the struggle for ownership and control and an evolutionary
process of "consumer selection" to find the optimal situation or product.
Sounds idealistic? Now look upon anarchy again.

Same people who, when called out on the source of their funding  have one
> argument : "you're a tinfoil conspiracy theorist!" (Wait, of course, that's
> not an argument, just puerile name-calling)
>

I still think tinfoil hats are underrated. Van Eck phreaking of neural
network interference patterns is fiction now, but the radiation is there.
More on topic, you sound like you are indeed a conspiracy theorist. You
throw around little to no evidence in an emotional manner, and jump to
conclusions.

Do the Tor guys get US GOV funding? Yes.
Does that mean they're biased? It could, but it doesn't guarantee it.
Does it imply they're biased? Kinda, yeah.
Does that mean you can't trust them? Well, I honestly don't know. In some
cases it does.
Does that mean Tor is backdoored? It probably is, and would've been without
USGOV funding. If it wasn't backdoored it's almost certainly (at some
level) exploited, Heartbleed is here to prove that.

Which makes me wonder, why didn't Snowden disclose Heartbleed? I'll make a
thread about that.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/html
Size: 5201 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20140415/b8ca7375/attachment-0001.txt>