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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

#111

Post by anologwintermut »

damarquis wrote: post #108
anologwintermut wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the NSA stuff is really bad, what Groklaw is doing is absurd and should be called such.HN seems happy to point out that more people die from furniture than terrorism, but yet unwilling to correct people with similarly misguided opinions when it comes to this. 1)Groklaw doesnt' depend on anonymous tips. The site could simply put up a huge disclosure statement on a web form that THE NSA might get what you say. Or…

"So post a PGP key and say, if you really want anonymity, use this." PGP only provides confidentiality, not anonymity. To get anonymity as well would require TOR.

Yeah, I realized my mistake, but Tor is not very useful against the NSA since it doesn't protect against a global passive adversary.

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

#112

Post by Joeri »

anologwintermut wrote: post #98
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…

While the NSA stuff is really bad, what Groklaw is doing is absurd and should be called such.HN seems happy to point out that more people die from furniture than terrorism, but yet unwilling to correct people with similarly misguided opinions when it comes to this. 1)Groklaw doesnt' depend on anonymous tips. The site could simply put up a huge disclosure statement on a web form that THE NSA might get what you say. Or…

Maybe you should not so easily judge an operation you know nothing about. I will assume until proven otherwise by sufficient insight into the groklaw project that pj is an honest agent who sincerely feels that what groklaw does cannot be done with the nsa snooping in place.

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

#113

Post by cube13 »

anologwintermut wrote: post #98
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…

While the NSA stuff is really bad, what Groklaw is doing is absurd and should be called such.HN seems happy to point out that more people die from furniture than terrorism, but yet unwilling to correct people with similarly misguided opinions when it comes to this. 1)Groklaw doesnt' depend on anonymous tips. The site could simply put up a huge disclosure statement on a web form that THE NSA might get what you say. Or…

>1)Groklaw doesnt' depend on anonymous tips. The site could simply put up a huge disclosure statement on a web form that THE NSA might get what you say. Or not accept tips except via public comments but still operate.

That's what confuses me. The majority of Groklaw's content comes from PACER filings, which are public(at a cost). To my knowledge, they never posted anonymous rumors, and instead focused solely on the facts of the cases they cared about as presented on court. And honestly, if it's comments they are worried about... those are hardly private.

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

#114

Post by saalweachter »

superuser2 wrote: post #58
saalweachter wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

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.

Honestly I'm not sure who would win.

One estimate I found was that there 150 million iPhone 5's shipped in the first year, and each one was about 25 GFlops. If 1% of that CPU was spent encrypting & decrypting communications to and from the iPhones, that is about 37,500 TFlops, which is just over the Rmax listed for the top supercomputer, Tianhe-2. Some numbers for the cost of that supercomputer are around $100 million, but the estimated cost for the Xeon Phis alone could be as high as $250 million. Giving the defenders the advantage, let's round up to $1 billion.

So the NSA needs to spend $1 billion per year to counteract the top smartphone in the world. Their budget is estimated to be as high as $10 billion / year, so they could do it. But how much of the total pie are iPhone 5's? I think to be competitive we need to push the cost to the NSA up towards $30 or $100 billion per year. $1 billion is trivial, $10 billion Congress will swallow and move on. They still fund NASA to the tune of $16 billion, and no one in Congress even cares about NASA anymore. But $100 billion per year, then you're talking real money.

So what fraction of total personal computer sales are iPhone 5's? If they're 10%, we'll be hard-pressed to keep the NSA out of the game. If they're 1% of personal computer sales, I think we have a chance of keeping ahead of them.

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

#115

Post by Joeri »

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…

A different perspective is that we have never been as free as we are today, proven by the fact that we now know exactly to what degree we are not free, a luxury which is historically unique.

Not saying that's the case, just that i think we have never had a truly free society ever anywhere.

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

#116

Post by superuser2 »

[deleted] wrote: post #107
superuser2 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

I spoke imprecisely... I mean as far as spending. People had to die to continue fighting in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan; we determined that the death toll wasn't worth it. To break crypto, we have to fund STEM research, buy hardware, and create good middle-class jobs. Good luck creating a public outcry over that.

We're not winning the war on drugs, but there is no indication of giving up on it at the federal level. Law enforcement spending is not slowing down.

I was thinking more of the USSR. There didn't seem to be any amount of money we weren't willing to spend. Lives, yes, but not money.

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

#117

Post by mbreese »

dragonwriter wrote: post #52

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.

Groklaw's main work wasn't revealing how broken tech IP law was, it was revealing how stupid one company was for trying to manipulate the system. In the SCO vs. IBM case, I'd say that the system worked pretty well. Coverage of which didn't really include much (any?) help from confidential sources.

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

#118

Post by hyperventilator »

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…

If you think this is just an American problem you are deceiving yourself.

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

#119

Post by dragonwriter »

mbreese wrote: post #117
dragonwriter wrote: post #52

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.

Groklaw's main work wasn't revealing how broken tech IP law was, it was revealing how stupid one company was for trying to manipulate the system. In the SCO vs. IBM case, I'd say that the system worked pretty well. Coverage of which didn't really include much (any?) help from confidential sources.

> Groklaw's main work wasn't revealing how broken tech IP law was, it was revealing how stupid one company was for trying to manipulate the system.

That was its founding purpose, to be sure, but its main work had moved on from the "how stupid one company was" thing for quite some time.

> Coverage of which didn't really include much (any?) help from confidential sources.

I'm not sure why this is in your response to my comment, since it is completely irrelevant to it.

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

#120

Post by mpyne »

anologwintermut wrote: post #98
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…

While the NSA stuff is really bad, what Groklaw is doing is absurd and should be called such.HN seems happy to point out that more people die from furniture than terrorism, but yet unwilling to correct people with similarly misguided opinions when it comes to this. 1)Groklaw doesnt' depend on anonymous tips. The site could simply put up a huge disclosure statement on a web form that THE NSA might get what you say. Or…

I can say that pj has always been protective of her privacy, even when Groklaw was essentially focused only on the SCO vs. IBM drama playing out. She's also a paralegal by training with a tech interest (which explains her comments about the rule of law), but she was not necessarily an expert in technical infrastructure, protocols, etc. Typically she relied on experts and other collaborators for things which needed a hefty dose of technical know-how on her site.

So with that in mind I was quite shocked to read this morning that pj has abandoned the site, for the reasons you mention. But I can say that from what I've read of her over the years (I've had Groklaw on RSS for years now), it does kind of make sense if you look at it from her worldview; she values her privacy, geeks everywhere are saying that the NSA is literally reading every piece of mail sent by anyone to anyone, and the result is then not completely surprising...

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