We need a whistleblower law. A good one, like one that is embedded in the consitution that protects people from speaking out.
Against a lawless executive, this would accomplish exactly what???
Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
71–80 of 237 posts
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Agreed. But since this is about catching everyone else in bed on the planet it gets far more serious than a ... say a Monica Lewinsky episode. I believe breach of privacy globally is a very serious offence and it should be measured as such. You and I bearing licensable firearms from the pop and mom stores is absolutely no parallel to the capability that the agencies possess. Strength of gun laws seems suspect in the…
The Monica Lewinsky based impeachment that wasn't followed by a real trial in the Senate was about perjury, not catching someone in bed (if the latter it was the worst kept secret in US history, do a search on bimbo eruptions). We (used to) expect better from our Presidents.
"licensable" firearms? I don't know what benighted jurisdiction you live in, but in mine we don't need no stinking licenses to buy or own them. We do need one to carry concealed (only a handful of states don't), but that's in part a different thing, but it still makes certain acts of terror more difficult and expensive. Please read the discussion I linked to which touches on that, and don't doubt for a second that the more forward thinking/paranoid or whatever members of the RKBA community aren't working through how to operate in an era of pervasive surveillance.
As SF authors and readers have for decades and decades, I'm checking now and the first story I read on this theme was "The Hunting Lodge" by Randall Garret, first published in 1954 in Astounding, I read it in the early '70s in a superb 1968 Robert Silverberg collection Men and Machines.
And pay attention to the maxim "Professionals discuss logistics".
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Which is funny, because that's the idea behind bitcoin, you get 'money' because you did work. The weird thing of course is that the work is completely 'useless'
The purpose of the hashing work in bitcoin is to solve the Two Generals Problem. The purpose of widespread expensive encryption of emails is to make routine decryption impractical. Two different problems, which don't have much in common besides having a solution involving computers doing work.
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#74Earlier 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…
The two fights don't conflict. In fact, they complement each other. When all email is getting stored in plaintext on NSA computers, it's going to be hard to get the government to give up all that juicy data. Reduce the value of the data they're getting, and it's easier to reach a point where the political heat just isn't worth it to them. At the same time, the political effort helps prevent new laws that make the tec…
This is exactly it, the government is waging a war of technological means just as fervently as one of political means. There's no reason at all to limit our confrontations to the political arenas.
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#75I 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…
As a UK resident, I feel like I can speak to the question of whether we can describe the UK (I pass no judgement on the US) as oppressive or a police state, so here's my take on it.
I don't necessarily agree that GCHQ or the NSA spying on UK subjects is a great idea, I don't like the idea that all of my communications are collected and available to analyse should I ever blow anything up or should someone in GCHQ take a disliking to me, but if I consider issue at hand, ie, do I feel oppressed or do I live under a police state, I'd say the answer is categorically no, I do not.
I do not live in fear of the police kicking down my door because I voiced an anti-government view online. I do not believe that if I openly start supporting the wrong party I'll "disappear" as happens in other countries. I believe that elections in the UK are free and fair (for the most part) and I also believe that if a party came along that tried to turn the UK into the kind of country where those things were a reality then they would be sharply booted out of office.
I also, incidentally, believe that if a party came along whose main policy was that they'd fiercely protect everyone's privacy they'd get precisely nowhere in the polls. Not because of any big conspiracy, but because people care more about their taxes and wheely bin collection rota's than about whether GCHQ knows who they email and why. Everyone I've spoken to on the subject already assumed they knew that anyway due to the fact that they are a spy agency. The tech-crowd's collective anger over the Snowden revelations isn't mirrored amongst the general population - at least in my experience. If it were, then no doubt things would change. That's how democracy works.
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#76This 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…
Any centralized service can be ordered to hand over encrypted material or to implement a backdoor, similar to Lavabit case. Bitmessage could be one possible type of solution. That way the only way to compromise the message (assuming it is as safe as bitcoin, not claiming bitmessage is) would be to compromise the sender or the receiver, both is much more secure than any email service. And they could not make any backd…
The problem with P2P is that you need "Ps" online at the same time in order to exchange data. One of the elements that allowed for the email revolution was the asynchronous nature of exchanges: I'll send an email now and you'll receive it whenever you're online. Requiring coordination is a non-starter.
Personally, as long as the encryption was entirely done client-side with opensource tools, and done properly (i.e. not involving keys stored on the actual server), I wouldn't mind making my messages go through hostile servers. Of course the NSA might be able to dedicate enough resources to break them, but they wouldn't have enough to break everyone's messages at the same time. If global surveillance were only possible with a two/three-year timelapse, that'd be a good enough window in most cases.
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#77Just out of curiosity: What interest could the NSA possibly have in Groklaw mails?
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#78well, if this keeps up, the NSA won't have much internet to snoop. I think that these politicians need to stop taking months off and get some shit done.
The masses will always use the internet, and they're the real targets. Google, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter won't be shutting down anytime soon.
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#79will this also lead to a mass exodus in HN users? given the ferocious posting in these threads will all those now also go offline?
will yc now only finance startups that deal with encryption and freedom rather than the next social/local/sticker thing? will elon musk create the hyperloop for freedom?
Re: Groklaw legal site shuts over fears of NSA email snooping
#80This 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 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…
So what are the political/social solutions? And particularly, what are those solutions that might be actionable by this audience?
Let's take a few things off the table first. Voting is out for obvious reasons. Same goes for holding up signs in an approved free speech area. The occupy protests were a bit more effective at least in raising awareness but didn't upset the system much. Violence is a no for me personally on ethical grounds and also because history has shown violent revolution to achieve nothing but swap one form of tyranny for another.
What has actually worked in the past? Some examples that come to mind are the fight for Indian independence, the US labor movement and the US civil rights movement. These were mostly non-violent movements that deeply disrupted the status quo and created somewhat lasting change. They offer lots of practical examples.
Basically, we need to organize and act in a way that makes it impossible for bully governments and corporations to transact business as usual. Until that happens, there is no leverage, no opening for change.
Here's an idea: let's start a tech workers union. Imagine what a large scale tech worker strike would do to the economy. Now imagine if we were to participate in a general strike with industrial workers.
It would be most advantageous to organize now, while we still have a privileged status within the system. Let's not rest on that status and accept it as the bribe it is.
Any takers?