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The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

theatlantic.com

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Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#81

Post by diminoten »

Sauer_Kraut wrote: post #74
diminoten wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're arguing that there is no evidence because the NSA is so good at what they do, they've successfully hidden all operational evidence from the public for their entire time of existence? Is Snowden the first mistake the NSA has ever made, in your eyes, then?

No, no. edit: Tried to respond below but have been "submitting too fast" while submitting nothing for far too long to care to wait more. I am not saying the NSA has flawless execution, you are the one repeating it for whatever reason. I'm saying the NSA/Administration when pushed had to put out something that showed the spying was 'working.' In response they said multiples of domestic plots were foiled. Given the lac…

Then what are you saying, if not that the lack of evidence is only because the NSA is flawless in its execution?

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#82

Post by rhizome »

jivatmanx wrote: post #54
rhizome wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black Hat Conference, a week and a half ago: "Terrorists driven by a desire to 'create a caliphate' of sharia law in the middle east continued to plot attacks. 'Terrorists live among us,' he said" GP conflates these statements to imply that those among us want to create Sharia or whatever among us , but Alexander did say the words. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-keith-alexa...

Thanks Rhizome. I'd like to add, The Gulf States are already under Sharia, and have been since their founding almost a century ago. The Taliban copied Saudi Arabia, even using the exact same names for bureaucracies. [2] Relations with them were excellent before 9/11. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Promotion_of_... . But, as Iraq showed, there's no need to understand elementary facts about their cu…

there's no need to understand elementary facts about their culture before you invade

I can guarantee you that the people who directed the Iraq Wars knew full well the elementary facts about their culture before invading and engaging in a (partially) global war on terror. They know that you can't win a war against a technique, and they know that going to war in these areas attracts terrorists who want to fight against you. The only question was where the game board was going to be placed, and that question was answered over 20 years ago.

It was only in the portrayal to the taxpayer and the invaded that these were left as unknowns.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#83

Post by drivingmenuts »

pessimizer wrote: post #66
ceol wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate your reasonable argument, but if the past few weeks have been any indication, there isn't any room for that here. HN has gone from interesting tech discussions to extremist, us-vs-them political rhetoric, and anyone who takes a different stance is jumped on and downvoted — as you can tell from your post having more replies than the entire rest of the thread. Of course, you won't see the story abou…

I am black and not rich, and I think that NSA/Lavabit stories are more relevant to HN than stop-and-frisk stories, because they are about techies and technology. Call me crazy.

For what it's worth, I agree from the perspective that HN is (I thought) primarily concerned with tech and innovation, etc.

The stop-and-frisk program doesn't really have anything to do with technology and is a social issue about race and expectation. Technology can't even begin to fix that one - it comes from some other place inside us.

It worries me that HN seems to be turning into more of a sub-reddit than anything.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#84

Post by jacquesm »

diminoten wrote: post #61
ledge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they certainly aren't on my side, and I don't want to be on their side. They aggregate and analyze data used to conduct drone strikes, spy on the world indiscriminately, and assist brutal agencies like the DEA in destroying the lives of millions of innocent Americans. Is it a paranoid delusion if you're a drug dealer to think that the NSA is out to get you? Not anymore. What about a drug user? What about a file-…

You'd argue that a child porn viewer isn't doing anything wrong? Your opinion officially doesn't matter any more. Sorry, I have a 10 yr old sister and I simply can't abide folks who won't even do the research to understand what it means when they say things.

I have a 3 year old and a 1 year old and I can't abide by folks who are so bad at statistics that they'd happily ruin the world for fear of some statistical implausibility to become true in their lives.

I understand that you're taking this position with the best of intentions but 'child porn is bad' does not equate with 'a surveilance state is good because it gets rid of child porn or its viewers'.

Fear is such a bad counsel.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#85

Post by [deleted] »

dwiel wrote: post #48
apalmer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I hope this is not the case. I am against the NSA monitoring program. I think powerful commercial interests colluding to purposefully break the rule of law is a huge negative. Lets disconnect this behavior from the specific instance's moral outrage: If Exxon, BP, Chevron, Shell simultaneously came out and ignored all EPA restrictions would their CEOs all go to jail, doing enormous damage to the stock market? Thi…

The point of civil disobedience is that those doing don't believe that the official methods for determine what a good thing is are working. Comparing this suggested action to oil companies and the EPA is like comparing Ghandi to the KKK.

[deleted]

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#86

Post by diminoten »

dictum wrote: post #80
diminoten wrote: post #3

Commandeering implies control, and the NSA does not have control. No one has "control" over the Internet. I also don't like this, "us vs. them" rhetoric that this story has turned some people towards, where the NSA are the unequivocal bad guys and we, the "little people", are the unequivocal good guys. That's a great way to get absolutely nothing done. The NSA is, despite everything we're being told by some people (B…

>us vs. them bullshit Surely not an appropriate point to raise when defending an agency whose raison d'etre is to acquire and analyze all foreign communications. Its existence comes from a us vs. them mentality. What's happening is that for the USG, "them" now includes not only foreigner suspects; it includes all foreigners and many Americans—probably all Americans. I don't expect the intelligence agencies of a dicta…

Okay so you're not in a dictatorship, and the NSA isn't "out to get" you.

If you're a US citizen, then the NSA is trying, at least, to prevent you from being harmed by foreign threats by gathering data on those threats and alerting other US government agencies. That's what they do. As long as the US exists, someone will have to do this.

If you're not a US citizen, then the NSA will take a look at you. Period. That's what they do, and your government will be taking a look at me in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons. Neither of our respective intel groups are assuming either of us are enemies, but that doesn't mean these intelligence groups aren't going to look at us. Being investigated does not mean you're an enemy. You're not a "them" just because someone looks at you, I don't know why people think this is how it is.

So no, if you're not a US citizen, the NSA is no more on your side than the British NHS will pay for my appendix removal.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#87

Post by diminoten »

Sauer_Kraut wrote: post #76
diminoten wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't much care what Alexander judges himself to be, I'm talking about his actions and motivations for those actions. He's not trying to destroy the US, he's trying to keep it safe. He is possibly misguided or flat out wrong about how to do that, but it's not as if he's actively working to harm US citizens, as many people here would claim.

Why do you keep stating such things as "he's trying to keep it safe" or "NSA is trying to help the citizens of the US." Do you have information on this or do you keep on stating your opinion as fact?

Do I really need to show you the NSA's charter?

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Key_escrow/Clipper/nsa.charter

I'm not interested in getting into an emotional mud-slinging contest with you.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#88

Post by diminoten »

Sauer_Kraut wrote: post #39
diminoten wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know in the epistemological sense, but there's just no reason to believe such a thing to be true.

Aside from the details that show the NSA having employees in companies install monitoring hardware worldwide? Or those that assist in providing data in return for some themselves? None of that counts to you because "there's just no reason to believe such a thing." You are essentially saying you don't believe anything you may have read in the past few years counts as control. What IS control then, other than the abili…

Did you just ask "What is control, other than the ability to control others"? Do you honestly not recognize the shell-game you're playing with that question?

You're responding to all of the things I said with tricks and games. You don't want to talk facts, so I don't want to talk with you. I'm done, unless you want to stop drawing conclusions and start painting a real picture.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#89

Post by nostrademons »

ihsw wrote: post #65
danenania wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, the NSA is on very thin ice right now and they know it. It's the perfect time to stand up to them. Large tech companies can do more than just release statistics. They can take principled stands against these disgusting programs in their entirety. Executives who are still playing along at this point are just cowards.

The stock market is a fickle thing. Despite the government-collusion revelations, top tech companies' shares haven't moved an inch in response. It stands to reason that share prices would decrease in the event of a revolt against the US Government, one could even take it a step further and argue that -- through a variety of strategically-placed and secretive investments -- the USG holds stocks in these companies. Thr…

Google and Facebook both have dual-class stock structures that make them essentially indifferent to public stock ownership, since their founders have majority voting control. Push the stock price down and the companies take it as an opportunity for stock buybacks.

Re: The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet

#90

Post by Sauer_Kraut »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #75
ge0rg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they could shut down all of these niche secure email businesses, what option will people have but to use less private alternatives? I think Ladar Levison answered that question, implicitly, in his shutdown announcement: "I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States." It is high time to provide secure services hosted in countries withou…

Great if you live outside the US, but if you're inside the US, would not the very act of connecting to a foreign secure service automatically make you suspect? There is a much deeper issue here: as Americans, we need to decide how much protection we actually want. One group says everyone is responsible for their own protection, another says everyone needs protecting from everyone else, yet another group says we'll pr…

While I wouldn't consider the comment down-vote worth as someone else deemed it, I find one part I have to respond to.

"if you're not from the US, I feel like you should have known that was a possibility."

Known exactly what was a possibility? In another comment I brought up Endgame Systems, here is some of their offerings:

'There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies. Maui (product names tend toward alluring warm-weather locales) is a package of 25 zero-day exploits that runs clients $2.5 million a year. The Cayman botnet-analytics package gets you access to a database of Internet addresses, organization names, and worm types for hundreds of millions of infected computers, and costs $1.5 million.'

When you say 'foreigners' should have known the NSA "doing their thing" so to speak is a possibility, does that include them being exploited, or their stolen financial/personal information on botnets being used by the NSA?

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