Meso 's Techdirt Comments
Latest Comments (30)
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Snowden Ran A Major Tor Exit Relay, Hosted CryptoParty In Hawaii While Waiting For Greenwald To Reply
Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
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Snowden Ran A Major Tor Exit Relay, Hosted CryptoParty In Hawaii While Waiting For Greenwald To Reply
Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
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Snowden Ran A Major Tor Exit Relay, Hosted CryptoParty In Hawaii While Waiting For Greenwald To Reply
Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
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Snowden Ran A Major Tor Exit Relay, Hosted CryptoParty In Hawaii While Waiting For Greenwald To Reply
Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
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Snowden Ran A Major Tor Exit Relay, Hosted CryptoParty In Hawaii While Waiting For Greenwald To Reply
Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
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Snowden Ran A Major Tor Exit Relay, Hosted CryptoParty In Hawaii While Waiting For Greenwald To Reply
Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
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Snowden Ran A Major Tor Exit Relay, Hosted CryptoParty In Hawaii While Waiting For Greenwald To Reply
It doesn't matter what his motivations were
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Keith Alexander: We Need More Spying In The Future Because All Of Our Previous Spying Has Only Increased The Number Of Terrorist Attacks
This article is just wrong
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FBI Paid Off Wikileaks Insider To Be An Informant: Imagine If It Was The NY Times
Journalist? Foreigner
Re: Re: Re: Re: It doesn't matter what his motivations were
I think you are seeking perfection in a field, intelligence, where that doesn't happen. The NSA tries its best, and for a government operation, it has been historically remarkably good - compared to, say, the CIA or FBI. I have a lot of respect for NSA, and the few professional and other encounters I have had with NSA folks have been impressive.
As to the stories... I lived those years. I had a copy of the original public key paper while the NSA was still embargoing its publishing. I remember the Clipper chip. So I do have a bit of a background here.
NSA originally didn't want to prevent encryption - they wanted a back door into it. Public pressure prevented that (perhaps that was good, but it's arguable).
For many years, people thought the NSA had intentionally weakened DES encryption, when NSA insisted that the key be 56 bits (plus 8 bit parity) when the original developers at IBM wanted 112 bits. Much later, academic cryptology researchers discovered that DES, counter-intuitively, was stronger at 56 bits than 112! Apparently NSA was decades ahead in this regard, and used their knowledge to improve publicly available encryption.
The increasing potential of Islamist terrorism was apparent to those of us paying attention in the 1990's. But, civil libertarians were doing their best to defeat our CI capabilities. 9-11 would have been prevented if the Gorelick rule had not been promulgated in the '90s. This was a civil liberties rule keeping FBI CI and criminal investigations separate.
But, once the real threat was demonstrated - with 3000 civilian casualties - more than the death toll at Pearl Harbo - NSA used many techniques. Too many (maybe all) of which have now been revealed by Snowden, which increases the threat and empowers our adversaries.
They are not making up stories - the threats and attempts are real. Does anyone imagine that the Islamists no longer want to kill American civilians in large numbers?
Also, before 9/11, the US indeed has a history of terrorist attacks. My former residence, Lawrence, KS, had all of its male residents killed by terrorists during the civil war. Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the US several times, including an attack in the Capitol building. There have been plenty of other incidents. But, nothing as lethal as 9-11.
Modern times have made the potential damage from a terrorist attack much more serious, while at the same time making it easier for foreigners to attack. Air transport, the internet, and the modern telephone system all enable adversaries. American adversaries, whether foreign governments or ideological groups like Islamists, represent a far greater danger than they did in the past, so just looking at history is missing a bigger picture. These days, genetic engineering applied to pathogens can make them more lethal. And, you no longer need a big institution to do it. A member of my family learned, and used the techniques as an undergraduate at a good US university. We did a business plan for some GE products, and the cost was surprisingly low - well within the budget of terrorists. And... Al Qaeda employed an Islamist scientist for this purpose - who had a doctorate in neuroscience from MIT (or was it Harvard... whatever). We captured her.
America has a long history of retreating into isolationism. Our geographical isolation has allowed us to get away with not worrying about foreign threats, with a few exceptions like Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center. We can no longer afford that luxury.
We need to make rational tradeoffs between civil liberties and protection. I believe NSA did a darned good job of it, based on what has been revealed so far. They had procedures to limit the scope of actual use of the vast data they gathered. They had approval of both houses of congress, who were regularly briefed, and approval of the FISA courts.
Obviously once can disagree. But too many people are just assuming that NSA is evil, that the programs are gigantic conspiracies to deprive us of our rights, and that the threats are minimal. Our deadly serious, evil and dedicated adversaries are quite happy about this.