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Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

theguardian.com

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Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#51

Post by ganeumann »

luscious wrote: post #24
random42 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. This is a political fight. Technical means can drag the resistance longer, which is helpful, but the political system needs to be put in checks and balances against becoming a police state. There is no substitute of "taking roads and doing peaceful protests" as out of comfort zone they might be. We sometimes fall in love with our methods because that is what _we_ are good at, not what is necessarily the b…

This, this, this. You can't let yourselves lose a power war by wasting all your time losing tactical battles. It's a tragedy if we all spend any time trying to protect our LOLs and OMGs to-from each other. If you are working on means for tracking behavior and extracting value (monetary, political, etc.) you are doing something less good than you could be. Don't get caught by rope-a-dope when you could just cut fundin…

We need a plan B. It may be that the citizens have already lost this power war. Certainly the reaction of the UK police to the uproar (if it's that) of the Miranda detention and the snarkiness of the White House Dep. Press Secretary about being informed says to me that they don't really care what we think. And if they don't care it's either because they know they don't have to care (because we're not powerful enough), or they can't care because they are getting even more pressure from the other side, the intelligence community (who are thus more powerful than we are.)

Yes, political pressure. But what if that doesn't work?

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

I just want to say that everytime a site like Groklaw -- whose main work was revealing how broken the status quo is (mostly with regard to tech IP law, in Groklaw's case) and thereby creating pressure or exchange among interested parties to fix it -- shuts down, for whatever reason, the powers-that-be win.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#54

Post by saalweachter »

toyg wrote: post #6

This is a tragedy. We need to reboot email. Encrypt everything, including metadata -- given current hardware, the client can easily bruteforce it from a list of known keys. Build some sort of easy key distribution tool (connecting via p2p, dns, whatever, just build a goddamn UI). Ask existing transports to relax their restrictions enough to let fully-encrypted mail through, and build some intelligent webmail interfac…

I think we need to go one step further than encryption.

We need to encrypt all communications expensively. Make algorithms which can be tuned to be arbitrarily expensive, computation-wise. Tune them so that it takes as much time as we can bear to encrypt and decrypt an email. Seconds, ideally.

The goal is to make it so that some large fraction of our computational resources are taken up encrypting and decrypting communications. Say, 10 or 20%. For every day uses this will just show up as emails being slow to open, since most people's computers are idle most of the time. But if your goal is to intercept and process all communications, all of the time, you can't do it without having an absurd level of computational resources at your disposal, even if you have all of the secret keys. Ten or twenty Google's worth of data centers.

If this was done properly, it would kill (free) webmail search. It wouldn't prevent targeted snooping, except insomuch as normal encryption does, but it could make pervasive snooping too expensive to be feasible.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#55

Post by dragonwriter »

loceng wrote: post #43
toyg wrote: post #6

This is a tragedy. We need to reboot email. Encrypt everything, including metadata -- given current hardware, the client can easily bruteforce it from a list of known keys. Build some sort of easy key distribution tool (connecting via p2p, dns, whatever, just build a goddamn UI). Ask existing transports to relax their restrictions enough to let fully-encrypted mail through, and build some intelligent webmail interfac…

It makes me wonder - is the NSA "winning"? It seems so.

The NSA is the wrong unit of analysis. The NSA is a tool. The group of people that has disproportionate power over the government wins everytime anyone that opposes the status quo supported by that faction is intimidated into stopping a part of their work which focuses opposition to some piece of that status quo, though.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#57

Post by hga »

talmand wrote: post #46
alan_cx wrote: post #30

I hope those who treated me with scorn for suggesting the politicians and business people are effectively blackmailed by the mere existence of NSA type spying can now see it for real. No direct threat, not conversation, no deals. Just the fear of the knowledge that one is being comprehensively watched, and what "they" might have. This fear is enough to alter behavior, to conform. Again, at what stage can we describe…

This isn't new, this was why Hoover stayed in power for so long. He had files on everyone. Remember, information is power.

Ummm, no. I'm sure he didn't have files on my parents (well, perhaps aside from a pro-forma one on my father, who as an USNavy officer for 4 years in the '50s would I believe have gotten a Secret clearance as all officers do today), he had files on everyone "important". And e.g. the fruits of bugging Goldwater's campaign airplane, as ordered by LBJ. About the latter he said something to the effect of "If the President orders it...."

There's a qualitative difference between "The government has its eye on 'important' people" and "The government is spying on every phone call everyone makes" etc. (the metatdata collection we're pretty sure is happening from the Snowden leaks which included a blanket writ for all of Verizon Businesses' metadata).

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#58

Post by superuser2 »

saalweachter wrote: post #54
toyg wrote: post #6

This is a tragedy. We need to reboot email. Encrypt everything, including metadata -- given current hardware, the client can easily bruteforce it from a list of known keys. Build some sort of easy key distribution tool (connecting via p2p, dns, whatever, just build a goddamn UI). Ask existing transports to relax their restrictions enough to let fully-encrypted mail through, and build some intelligent webmail interfac…

I think we need to go one step further than encryption. We need to encrypt all communications expensively . Make algorithms which can be tuned to be arbitrarily expensive, computation-wise. Tune them so that it takes as much time as we can bear to encrypt and decrypt an email. Seconds, ideally. The goal is to make it so that some large fraction of our computational resources are taken up encrypting and decrypting com…

Historically speaking, the US Government is pretty damn good at winning wars of attrition. Don't think you're going to find any amount of money that Congress won't happily hand to the military-industrial complex. They'll spend whatever it takes.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#59

Post by tbrownaw »

derefr wrote: post #22
itsallbs wrote: post #4

We are at an interesting juncture of history. It seems like Snowden has accomplished what he set out do to: raise awareness of government abuse and bring about positive change. Initial fears after the NSA leaks seemed to be that the public would become outraged and then forget about it. Clearly, this is not happening. A more secure Internet is needed, and instances like this highlight that necessity.

> It seems like Snowden has accomplished what he set out do to: raise awareness of government abuse and bring about positive change. On a tangent--I have to say, this has been a weird era. It was started by a small group of people who decided to kick Americans into a state of fear and panic--Bin Laden et al--and they succeeded, wildly. And it might be ended by one man, who decided to kick Americans into a state of su…

With Bin Laden some of the fear and panic did come from our not being used to such things, but a lot of it also came from our government's overreaction. Which seems to have been at least partly pre-planned and just waiting for an opportunity.

With Snowden, things have been getting more and more absurd and someone was bound to point it out with credible evidence sooner or later.

Politics isn't supposed to be this neat and tidy, is it? Things like this are only supposed to exist when you revise history to make the lines less muddy.

World War I was set off by one guy assassinating one other guy. But, it wouldn't have really mattered if everyone wasn't already this -->.Politics isn't neat and tidy, and there will always be events that hit at the right time to have outsized effects. And a lot of times, those events will have some visible individual playing a key role.

Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping

#60

Post by hga »

monsterix wrote: post #49
talmand wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't new, this was why Hoover stayed in power for so long. He had files on everyone. Remember, information is power.

Is there a way for people to initiate impeachment of Obama / get rid of scumbags from the Government given the number of lies and mess that's already out there? Like it or not but a lot of non-American users see these actions like a bid to take over the Internet. It is a sort of waging a war against the rest of the world. Treating ordinary citizens from outside America default as terrorists and subjecting 'em to roun…

The remedies are the power of the purse, which won't necessarily be followed but which we are attempting and got very close in the first vote in the House, and/or impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate, which is an inherently political act. In practice, as the political lay of the land is today, I'm not even sure Obama would be impeached and convicted if he were "caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy" (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edwin_Edwards).

Touching on the Jews in Europe before and during WWII, first they were stripped of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (e.g. see this in two months: http://www.amazon.com/Gun-Control-Third-Reich-Disarming/dp/1...). As you may have heard, the US is going in the opposite direction outside of what we're taking to calling "slave states" like New York and Maryland, and probably California soon. We have options, please see here for previous discussion before you dismiss this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6155921

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