61–70 of 395 posts
Realistically intelligence agencies have access to whatever information they want. If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't. You're compromised and you have no secrets and can't hide anything from them. The best thing we can do is stay safe from criminals.
Surely we can encode better behavior into our institutions.
>Intelligence professionals talk about how disorienting it is living on the inside. You read so much classified information about the world’s geopolitical events that you start seeing the world differently. You become convinced that only the insiders know what’s really going on, because the news media is so often wrong. Your family is ignorant. Your friends are ignorant. The world is ignorant. The only thing keeping…
Intercepting communications gives them a leg up, but that's about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I literally just posted a dismissal of your claims in a sibling comment. You owe it to yourself to think critically about what you think you want out of intelligence services, being secretive is one thing, not permitting any oversight is not ok and being in direct violation of the law is also not ok. It's not a hypothetical situation, people were using these tools to stalk women for crying out loud, you can't defend…
There isn't a system in the world which isn't subject to abuse, every police force in the world for example suffers from it. Some people such as yourself take that to mean they need to be torn down, the rest of us just think it means there needs to be more controls to minimize those abuses. It's not as though MOST of the activity of these agencies is stalking women, and it's profoundly disingenuous to pretend otherwi…
Secrecy and transparency and democracy just don't mix well, imo, if you want an absolute state that's fine.
I can also agree that some rare situations may require absolute secrecy for some services, but that then must be limited and fully disclosed for later oversight, control and consequences.. 10 years is already a lot, 20 years absolute max, in my opinion. But almost nothing ever is, except what's leaked, that is shocking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isn't a system in the world which isn't subject to abuse, every police force in the world for example suffers from it. Some people such as yourself take that to mean they need to be torn down, the rest of us just think it means there needs to be more controls to minimize those abuses. It's not as though MOST of the activity of these agencies is stalking women, and it's profoundly disingenuous to pretend otherwi…
How is anyone to say what most of the activity of these agencies are without any oversight. That’s why the leaks happened in the first place, it was the only way to say ‘hey we need more controls on this stuff’. Unless you’re suggesting that was going to happen anyway somehow?
When the Snowden docs came out, the main thing that surprised me wasn't the tech, it was the scale. I thought I had seen the tip of the iceberg doing security work for over 15y prior, but I had barely seen ripples in the surface. Most of what I saw would have been in the category of "BULLRUN," which I incorporate into client threat models today, but also some of the ISP interception equipment I saw at peering points…
See my other comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36097082#36098762
When I tell someone to use Signal app and they say "I'm not that important" all I can do is smile and nod: "no.. you are not that important".
I think “I’m not that important” is basically either the result of someone not thinking very hard, or it is a dishonest anti-encryption position. Embedded in it is the message that only certain types of people ought to be worried about the scrutiny of the state, and that the person holding the position is happy to take advantage of the fact that they aren’t that sort of person. Force them to face that position head-on, I think.
When the Snowden docs came out, the main thing that surprised me wasn't the tech, it was the scale. I thought I had seen the tip of the iceberg doing security work for over 15y prior, but I had barely seen ripples in the surface. Most of what I saw would have been in the category of "BULLRUN," which I incorporate into client threat models today, but also some of the ISP interception equipment I saw at peering points…
I don’t understand this. Can you elaborate on what untruths you mean? Who’s parroting these lies?
Realistically intelligence agencies have access to whatever information they want. If they can crack encryption they're not going to tell us and they will probably act like they can't. You're compromised and you have no secrets and can't hide anything from them. The best thing we can do is stay safe from criminals.
The thing that was pretty apparent from Snowden's leaks is primarily that they don't need to. This fear that "NSA can crack cryptography" is the wrong fear. First, as others have noted, there are legions of other researchers evaluating and attempting to break widely used crypto-systems. There is no reason to believe the NSA has some unique brilliant minds that aren't available elsewhere.
More importantly, though, why bother with a "frontal assault" on breaking crypto schemes when endpoint security is a million times more hackable. That is, usually at some point someone wants to view the encrypted data that is being sent, and at that point it needs to be decrypted, so why not just try to hack at that point (which is exactly what they do). As an example, just look at all the stolen cryptocurrency heists. All of these heists resulted from stolen keys or from implementation bugs, not from cracking the crypto schemes that protect cryptocurrency in the first place.
>Intelligence professionals talk about how disorienting it is living on the inside. You read so much classified information about the world’s geopolitical events that you start seeing the world differently. You become convinced that only the insiders know what’s really going on, because the news media is so often wrong. Your family is ignorant. Your friends are ignorant. The world is ignorant. The only thing keeping…