501–510 of 614 posts
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Sure, one would more realistically use any standard encryption scheme. Agreed on homomorphic encryption as mentioned in my previous comment. But "impractical" is a far cry from "fundamentally impossible".
Impractical is in sense "nobody can actually it, only the papers are written about it." Practically impossible to use.
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Citation for that? Seems plausible but I'm interested in any details.
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/mmp/jimmy-carter.htm Apparently the procedure is to position the USS Jimmy Carter over the cable, send out a remote vehicle to grab the cable and pull it up to the sub, splice in tapping equipment, and then drop the cable. Intercontinental cables are less than one inch in diameter in deep water. If the sub plants the tap in deep water, it's extremely unlikely that anyone would ever discove…
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No. Sorry. The President does bear full responsibility. That's the nature of the job. If he wants to claim he wasn't aware, OK. But he is now and it's his responsibility to fix it. Again, that's the nature of the job. If the President wanted to eliminate these programs, they'd get eliminated. It would require the exercise of political will, but it absolutely could be done. The problem, actually, is right here, when p…
Maybe I'm not being clear. My assertion is that trust has broken down. And therefore the ability to validate has broken down. Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the President and the Congress eliminate these programs... How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that? How would I, in good faith, tell a foreign person, or even another citizen, that their communications are no longer being monitore…
> How would you or I... or any foreign person validate that?
How would the President validate that?
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I'm a US citizen. Born and bred. And, at this point, I can't in good faith say that I would blame you. I think it's pretty safe to say that getting rid of a President is no longer enough. My sense is that the people who make these policies really are "Beyond Elections". They are constants in our government. And appear unassailable. I doubt very much that we, the American People, could even IDENTIFY the people setting…
No. Sorry. The President does bear full responsibility. That's the nature of the job. If he wants to claim he wasn't aware, OK. But he is now and it's his responsibility to fix it. Again, that's the nature of the job. If the President wanted to eliminate these programs, they'd get eliminated. It would require the exercise of political will, but it absolutely could be done. The problem, actually, is right here, when p…
At the end of the day, the presidency is the only position that is beyond the reproach of anyone behind the scenes that may be using their powers to pull strings. If he has ever been coerced by hidden powers, he alone could unveil them and be believed by all the non-believers. Alternatively, he could choose to promise exercise his pardon rights for people who want to expose wrongdoing but are afraid. He had the power to protect people from jail. That's the power to allow people to expose wrongdoing without fear of retaliation (unless we've gone so far down the rabbit hole that someone can make the whistleblower just disappear.)
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No. Sorry. The President does bear full responsibility. That's the nature of the job. If he wants to claim he wasn't aware, OK. But he is now and it's his responsibility to fix it. Again, that's the nature of the job. If the President wanted to eliminate these programs, they'd get eliminated. It would require the exercise of political will, but it absolutely could be done. The problem, actually, is right here, when p…
This. I secretly harbor this fantasy that the next Edward Snowden will be a future American president. They do everything right, cross all the t's, dot all the i's, the perfect politician, then after their first 100 days in office, they come out and publicly address all the ways that the US is hypocritical and could be the model World citizen it pretends to be. At the end of the day, the presidency is the only positi…
Wow. Years ago, I remember reading Richard Stallman's "How I do my computing"[1], an essay in which he explains why he usually does not connect to any websites from his own machine, downloads web pages from a headless browser running in some server, does not have any user accounts for any web applications, does not buy anything over the Internet ever, does not use any social networking sites, and otherwise abstains f…
Indeed, maybe moreso then we think. I remember hearing he didn't have a cell phone either.
Now wait... It isn't surprising that inside the datacenters most traffic flows unencrypted, but not encrypting links between datacenters? Well...
It makes like a bit more complex, but PGP can be used for mail and here's how to protect GDrive files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6644888
Remember these revelations date from a year or two ago, who knows what they're up to now?
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> If the President wanted to eliminate these programs, they'd get eliminated. Just like Guantanamo Bay, right?
Exactly like that. If Obama believed these programs (and Guantanamo Bay) were "wrong" with the same conviction Snowden believes – he'd do what it takes to shut them down, with the same career/livelihood risks that Snowden accepted. It's precisely the sort of moral compromises that Obama has made to allow Guantanamo Bay to stay operating, that have allowed the NSA to grab so much extraordinary power amd avoid any sort…
Right now, it's continued operation relies entirely on state secrecy laws. If Obama or some future president realizes that it is that one provision that is protecting illegal actions, he can promise to pardon anyone of the laws they have to break to expose those illegal actions.
One of the biggest problems with our whistleblowing laws is that if you have to break laws to make things right, you may be seen as righteous, but you'll still be prosecuted for the laws you had to break to accomplish that. We're still a nation of laws and the only laws that can overturn that is the constitutional power to pardon. The only crime the president cannot pardon is impeachment. Any individual that isn't in an impeachable position could expose wrongdoing if the president had their back.
If that graphic - that taunting smiley face, drawn when it was assumed that no one was watching - isn't enough to outrage the general public, I don't know what it will take. This is not super technical - it's easily explained and should be easily understood by the masses. And it should cause outrage.
Where you see a taunting smiley, I see a developer who's just happy to have made a breakthrough on his project.