> “I haven’t lied to Congress,” Alexander responded And WTF was that, now? EDIT: I guess this is true because actually, he lied to the chairs in the room. Or some coffee mugs that were also present. Is that how one evades a lie detector, btw? It really can't get any sicker. We have now reached the bottom.
Last I checked he wasn't James Clapper (they guy who lied to Congress). But maybe I'm wrong.
NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
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Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#182> Alexander also noted the 6,000 NSA cryptologists who have deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, 20 of whom were killed in the line of duty according to Alexander. “Think about people willing to go forward to Iraq and Afghanistan, to make sure our soldiers, airmen and marines get the intelligence they need,” he said. “I believe these are the most noble people we have in this country.” Having lost a brother who deployed…
it always makes me cringe whenever they use forward-deployed soldiers as a defense of the higher-level states "nobility"
In another context they might be called human shields. Shields in the PR war.
I'm sorry for your loss.
Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"The microphones in every nook and cranny are merely filtering a public good, the air. You should know that when you vibrate the air with your vocal chords to make the sound of words, you're willingly broadcasting information patterns in quadrillions of particles in the air. It's not our fault you're so stupid about your security." Don't be dense. Letters are easily intercepted and read, but we still expect that the…
The proper analog is a letter v. a postcard. There is no reasonable expectation that the contents of a postcard will remain private -- the message is right there, and people will see it even accidentally. A typical plaintext packet is the same way. Stuffing your papers in a sealed envelope is analogous to passing your plaintext through an encryption algorithm. If you are "vibrating the air" in public, then yes, you s…
The problem is people don't necessarily know know they're sending a postcard when they think they're sending a sealed envelope.
Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#184This entire event was a staged press op. Keith Alexander is a ~30 year veteran of SIGINT, electronic warfare, and intelligence, and a Four-Star US Army General --- which is a bigger deal than you probably think it is. He's a spy chief in the truest sense and a master politician. Anyone who thinks he walked into that conference hall in Caesars without a near perfect forecast of the outcome of the speech is kidding the…
For being a "master politician" he was a surprisingly poor public speaker. He seemed unsure of himself and stumbled quite a bit.
(the whole keynote is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvVIZ4OyGnQ)
Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#185Hackers applauded Alexander? He really has played them like pipes. You can argue all you want, but in the end, some boundaries have to be set. What the NSA did (does actually) is way past that boundary for most people, and I think with reason, but that's another debate. He hasn't supplied any argument that would make us reconsider the boundaries. All this terrorist talk is bullshit.
Blackhat costs ~$2000 to attend. It's much more of the corporate security researcher crowd than Defcon.
Still, pretty disgraceful.
Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
They weren't applauding Alexander, they were applauding for the conference goers who were shouting out loud at him (and their messages).
Were you there? That would be a terrible reporting job by Andy Greenberg.
You be the judge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvVIZ4OyGnQ&feature=youtu.be...
Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious why you claim that a 4-star general would have a better knowledge of the Constitution than an average hacker? Especially one who seems to be running an illegal and unconstitutional program like Gen. Alexander.
For the same reason that an average hacker would have a much better knowledge of the code for various daemons than the sysadmins who administer them - they're reading critically and looking for vulnerabilities where the actual semantics differ from the purported ones. I've no doubt that what the NSA does actually is "constitutional" under the common corrupted interpretations of it - government programs are structured…
Certainly I agree with your perception of how the NSA and General Alexander believe that they are "conforming" to a proper interpretation of the Constitution, though I disagree with that particular interpretation they hew to.
I guess I feel that the average hacker has a better understanding of the platonic ideal or "most correct" interpretation of the Constitution than Gen. Alexander.
Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#188This entire event was a staged press op. Keith Alexander is a ~30 year veteran of SIGINT, electronic warfare, and intelligence, and a Four-Star US Army General --- which is a bigger deal than you probably think it is. He's a spy chief in the truest sense and a master politician. Anyone who thinks he walked into that conference hall in Caesars without a near perfect forecast of the outcome of the speech is kidding the…
Naturally.
Alexander didn't score any points for himself or his organization by coming off like he has something to defend besides American citizens.
0. The intros were more than courteous, they were gushing
1. "Holding questions to the end" was an obvious grinfuck
2. The 8 minutes of q&a seemed completely prepared
3. It also had a sense of "we're hiring"
Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#189This entire event was a staged press op. Keith Alexander is a ~30 year veteran of SIGINT, electronic warfare, and intelligence, and a Four-Star US Army General --- which is a bigger deal than you probably think it is. He's a spy chief in the truest sense and a master politician. Anyone who thinks he walked into that conference hall in Caesars without a near perfect forecast of the outcome of the speech is kidding the…
Naturally. Alexander didn't score any points for himself or his organization by coming off like he has something to defend besides American citizens. 0. The intros were more than courteous, they were gushing 1. "Holding questions to the end" was an obvious grinfuck 2. The 8 minutes of q&a seemed completely prepared 3. It also had a sense of "we're hiring" I don't know the guy, so I don't know where he actually stands…
For what it's worth: I don't the the NSA is at all interested in hiring Black Hat attendees. I don't mean "that's not why they're there at Black Hat, to recruit". I mean, "they don't want those people to begin with".
Re: NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe. The irritating thing about this is that most of us aren't taught ethics. Most people don't take philosophy courses. Most people don't take civics courses. We're expected to just figure it out through osmosis. It's not about pliability. Most people never actually develop their own approach to ethics.
Yeah. As much as a flaming atheist as I am, I regret that people aren't spending as much time getting an ethical education as they once did. I suspect that one could teach an excellent non-religious Sunday School class by only asking difficult questions. The only people who scare me more than people who have never thought much about ethics are the ones who think they know The Answer.
Absolutely. That's roughly what philosophy courses are meant to do. They fire a shotgun round into the air to show you as much variance and disagreement between cogent and prominent thinkers and then ask, "So... what do you think?" (Speaking solely in terms of American education,) Literature classes also do this to a smaller extent. In elementary schools, more so but it's supposed to be done in social studies... which converts into history class later on.
These are all huge opportunities to teach ethics. We don't take them, because ethics isn't a marketable skill and has always been an implicit lesson. So we wrote standards and tests and teach to those and now here we are. Most people who graduate from high school do so believing that democracy is a flawed-but-least-flawed model of government they just have to endure, that history consists of great figures who dwarf the capabilities of the little people, and that actually understanding the breadth of our social fabric is pretty much impossible.
Ethics? Ethics is whatever doesn't piss off your best friend and still gets you laid.