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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

#131

Post by mpyne »

walshemj wrote: post #82
lmickh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is pretty much the definition of freedom of speech universally applied. You are free to say what you want and your employer is free to say things like "you're fired." Freedom of speech != speech without consequence.

You would be fine with the Government throwing you in jail for what you said then. By that argument the Weiße Rose in ww2 Germany had free speech but they still got beheaded for it. the UNHC defination is "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless…

It's funny you should mention the Nazis... have you ever tried to deny the Holocaust in Germany? Maybe publish anything glorifying the Nazi Party? If so, how did the German Government treat you?

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

#132

Post by samstave »

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…

Oppression 2.0 - it is unevenly distributed.

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

#133

Post by hyperventilator »

s_q_b wrote: post #47
toyg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

weirdly enough, I think the public would have forgotten about it, but establishment leaders seem bent on doing everything they can to keep the story alive (lying to Congress, grounding Morales' plane, forcing Snowden to defect to Russia, harassing journalists, now even attacking their families...).

That's the most bizarre part. First, Snowden steals his information from a Microsoft Sharepoint server? What are classified documents doing on a Sharepoint server? What is a Sharepoint server doing inside the network boundary at NSA? Next, they blew the recovery. If they negotiated with Snowden when he was in Hong Kong, they could have had him stand trial in Hawaii and won easily. Or alternatively, they could have do…

Virtually everything run by the government is to some extent botched. I can't think of a single department that is run properly, yet so many people claim the NSA knows everything. Sure they do.

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

#134

Post by damarquis »

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…

I agree this is a good idea but I think using the words "encrypt" and "decrypt" confuses the goal a little bit as this idea is still useful even if the message aren't required to be confidential form anyone. I think "encapsule" and "release" describe it better. These operations can be used in combination with encrypt and decrypt if encryption is needed.

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

#135

Post by wonderyak »

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…

It worked for Hoover and Nixon. We're on a continuum here. Its not like all of the sudden the government decided to start spying on its citizens.

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

#136

Post by jlgreco »

cLeEOGPw wrote: post #40
DennisP wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's not the value of data should be reduced, it's the cost of access to the data should be increased. If it would be too expensive to watch everyone, they would naturally stop doing that.

They would just find more contractors eager to bill the increased expenses.

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

#137

Post by gosub »

samstave wrote: post #132
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…

Oppression 2.0 - it is unevenly distributed.

Misquoting William Gibson:

"The fascism is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

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

#138

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

Groklaw isn't an organization, its a personal project, and its not shutting down because of the impact of the NSA revelations on Groklaw's mission, but because of the personal impact on the site operator.

Groklaw is shutting down because Pamela Jones, in the wake of the NSA revelations, has made a "personal decision [...] to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible".

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

#139

Post by samstave »

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…

>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.

This logic is broken.

While more people may die from furniture than terrorism, what the NSA is doing is ensure that ZERO people are free. Period. You are not free when you simpl cannot communicate with another human being via electronic means without the government's ability to actually be party to that comm.

While I cannot comment on any of these decisions to shut down their businesses - the fact that they are doing so shows that we are in a really really REALLY bad place with respect to any level of trust in the government.

America is dead.

So where do we live? Every single thing that the US stood for has literally been murdered in the last 13 years.

We are not the land of the free. We are not a home for the brave. We have zero moral standing on any issue. We are 100% completely corrupt and destroyed as any nation we were raised to believe in.

I believe this all leads to one place. A world war - but not between nations. Between humans and their governments.

The systems of control will be stamping out any resistance to their control in the next few years. It doesnt get better from here.

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

#140

Post by jlgreco »

mattw1810 wrote: post #102
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…

This seems like a legitimate use case for an FPGA in every PC. Implement a set of expensive algorithms in Verilog, put it up on Github and set up some slick distribution mechanism that updates the logic when needed without bothering non-technical users with it. This would prevent the crypto from using up too much general purpose processing resources, cause it to be acceptably fast and provide a mechanism for updating…

> set up some slick distribution mechanism that updates the logic when needed without bothering non-technical users with it.

You'll need to make sure that those responsible to signing the updates are resistant to coercion. The best bet there is probably a moderately large number of somewhat anonymous signers. Have a large and diverse pool of signers and require every update to have some portion of the signers sign off on it before the releases are accepted. With any luck if doors start getting kicked in and signers start getting hit with wrenches, at least one of them will be able to warn the public.

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