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Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

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Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#331

Post by rfnslyr »

largehotcoffee wrote: post #316
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a claim. Right now the NSA holds privileged information for millions of Americans. What happens if one of those people becomes some populist political entity. It would be trivial for the NSA to leak dirt of any kind (sexual fetishes, hangups, private emails to wife, other private things that when taken to the public would look bad, trash talking others, etc) to help discredit this person. Imagine that th…

That's quite a claim.

It would have also been "quite a claim" awhile back about the NSA collecting anything and everything about citizens. I don't get your comment.

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#332

Post by pnathan »

Joeri wrote: post #309
pnathan wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'vw been thinking about this pretty hard this summer - I've been involved in some local tech activist stuff. My take on it is as runs: Fundamentally, what's needed here is the ability to have confidence that the intelligence system is not overstepping its bounds. The US founders' framework for building that confidence is to have multiple parts of power, whose interest is roughly aligned with countering each other. S…

It's wrong to portray this as a trade-off between more risk or less risk. In reality it's a trade-off between two kinds of risk. Without the NSA snooping there is a higher risk of terrorist attacks, but with the NSA snooping there is more risk of attacks on democracy. Imagine j. edgar hoover or richard nixon able to use all that NSA data for illegitimate purposes. How easy would it have been to supress dissenting pol…

That's a fair point. There are an array of risks that less (or more) intelligence shifts the balance around on.

N.b., I don't really like to frame it as "attacks on democracy". That is (1) hyperbolic and (2) not obviously true. Words must be chosen very carefully in this debate (and it is a debate!) in order to not mislead or scare people away. I would argue that TLA snooping leads to the "Chilling effects" idea, where debate and discussion are chilled from freedom due to awareness of snooping. Obviously there are follow-on and side effects as well, as well as long-term risk of political persecution. But let's focus on the visible problem today without speculating on the worse potential problems.

Further point with respect to word choice and bringing the mainstream awareness up: tinfoil hatters do not speak for me, and they don't speak for the mainstream. They poison discourse by being radical and not bothering to look at conventional reality. Same for conspiracy theorists. Reasonable and respectable people can move the needle, infowars/alex jones/coast to coast types really are no ally in the effort to make this a real issue.

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#333

Post by davidw »

dragonwriter wrote: post #317
rza wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting is not working. As far as the media is concerned, there are always going to be only two candidates, both of which are in bed with corporate lobbyists. Without every voter doing significant research on their own to make meaningful third-party voting blocs, that will not change. Money determines the primary candidates, and that money comes from the same places year after year.

The fundamental problem is not the media (for all the problems the media has and produces), it is the electoral system, as is demonstrated by the comparison with the greater number of competitive parties in all the democracies that also have profit-oriented corporate media but do not a national legislature elected by plurality or majority/runoff elections.

Italy has one of those proportional parliaments. It's not exactly a utopia.

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#334

Post by rfnslyr »

justin66 wrote: post #48
thex86 wrote: post #9

Appreciate Mike speaking up like this. We need more people within the industry to speak up. Not just hackers. (People within these companies are also hackers, but they have more effect when they speak because they are part of a company)

I agree, but I do wonder what is going to happen when people start speaking up to say something quite the opposite. "I don't speak for my employer, but I think the NSA is quite awesome and I don't mind that they've been listening to us at all." Or something to that effect. The clash might be interesting to watch.

Anybody who praises the NSA should be blacklisted from existence in this solar system.

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#335

Post by rmc »

snowwrestler wrote: post #259
rayiner wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legislative fixes aren't going to buy you a lot, though they'll buy you something. The fundamental problem is structural: there are a lot of things the NSA is totally allowed to do, especially when it acts as an agency of the executive outside of the U.S. Technologists tend to ignore national and jurisdictional borders because networks cross those borders, but the powers of the NSA are defined in terms of those borde…

U.S. law follows U.S. citizens around the world. For example if a U.S. citizen rob a bank in the U.S. and then flees to the UK, when the UK police catch him, he will be extradited and prosecuted in a U.S. court. He's not stuck into a UK jail without a trial. That's the minimum issue here--Google ships the data of U.S. citizens around the world, and the NSA knows it. They are trying to play a cute game by pretending t…

It depends. Extradition is complicated and often has conditions, like requiring that the act was illegal both countries. Some countries will not extradite a citizen of the theirs (dual nationality comes into play here), and countries in Europe will not extradite to the usa if the death penalty is an option.

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#336

Post by rmc »

sinak wrote: post #89

I think it's pretty clear that we need both technical and legislative fixes to NSA surveillance. Just one of the two isn't enough: to get be even vaguely confident that surveillance ends, we need both. The technical fixes I can't speak to, but the legislative ones I've been thinking about for a while. In the last week, there have been two prominent bills announced to deal with surveillance: - Bill 1: The FISA Improve…

You'll need to change the us constitution so that us foreigners are covered by the 4th amendment ban on warentless searches.

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#337

Post by dragonwriter »

davidw wrote: post #333
dragonwriter wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental problem is not the media (for all the problems the media has and produces), it is the electoral system, as is demonstrated by the comparison with the greater number of competitive parties in all the democracies that also have profit-oriented corporate media but do not a national legislature elected by plurality or majority/runoff elections.

Italy has one of those proportional parliaments. It's not exactly a utopia.

No place is "exactly a utopia", but the issue was the media being blamed as the root cause of the partisan duopoly in the US, which is pretty clearly not the case.

OTOH, systems with greater proportionality in representation also tend to have higher public opinion of how well the local government works, which is probably not coincidental; for a good general survey, see Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#338

Post by rallison »

jlgreco wrote: post #321
largehotcoffee wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a claim.

US Government agencies using "dirt" to smear and/or blackmail populist political figures is a historic fact .

Exactly. See Martin Luther King Jr [0] as an example. Private information obtained through surveillance was leaked by government agencies in an attempt to discredit him.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#FBI_an...

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#339

Post by moocowduckquack »

davidw wrote: post #171
serge2k wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to find a fix for the ridiculously broken system that is the US government?

It definitely won't get fixed if all people do is bitch about how it's totally impossible to fix on internet forums.

If you can get exactly the right people to bitch about how it is impossible to fix on internet forums, then they won't be around during the planning stages and you may then be in with a chance.

Re: Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

#340

Post by drzaiusapelord »

largehotcoffee wrote: post #316
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a claim. Right now the NSA holds privileged information for millions of Americans. What happens if one of those people becomes some populist political entity. It would be trivial for the NSA to leak dirt of any kind (sexual fetishes, hangups, private emails to wife, other private things that when taken to the public would look bad, trash talking others, etc) to help discredit this person. Imagine that th…

That's quite a claim.

I know a lot of Snowden's and Assanges' sex life and many, many personal details. I've never actively seeked out that information.

Also, the US has proven experience in smearing political characters. Heck, even John fucking Lennon had an FBI file full of personal information.

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