Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer • Hacker News Board

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#211

Post by wavefunction » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 5:06 AM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #151

ye wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it from the executives perspective: Option A: keep mouth shut, make a shit ton of money Option B: become a martyr, face prison time People like Snowden are rare.

>>People like Snowden are rare. In all honesty, Snowden is a 30 year old single dude, and as far as I know, he doesn't have kids. Do you think he would have done what he did if he had a family to look after? In my opinion a person's first responsibility is to their family. So yeah, if you're married (like these executives probably are) and you're facing the choice between option A and option B, you should absolutely…

Tim Cook could have easily mentioned something then, if the profiles I've read of him are true.

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#212

Post by mousefad » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 5:12 AM UTC

ihsw wrote: post #207

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USCC doesn't protect anyone either. They, like most of the Department of "Defense", are almost entirely offense in nature.

The best defence is a good offence.

A catchy sound byte, but in almost all practical situations, the best defence is avoiding conflict. In fights: flee. In international affairs: diplomacy.

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#213

Post by nilved » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 5:15 AM UTC

I don't know anything about RSA as a company. What does this say about RSA as an algorithm and the company's founders?

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#214

Post by mbrameld » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 5:15 AM UTC

> "RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers and under no circumstances does RSA design or enable any back doors in our products. Decisions about the features and functionality of RSA products are our own."

This means one of two things: Either this is a blatant lie by RSA, or RSA is not competent enough to evaluate cryptograpic algorithms. Neither possibility paints them in a favorable light.

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#215

Post by mrobot » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 5:21 AM UTC

I remember looking over EMC's acquisitions when all of this starting breaking. EMC acquisitions just read like someone building a surveillance system: RSA, multiple deep packet inspection companies, enterprise clustered postgres, elitigation, forensics and threat analysis, Government-risk-analysis... and if you google around you'll see they kept their investments as secret as they could.

https://angel.co/emc

EMC bought every single major corporate partner technology in 2009/2010. EMC is the private honeypot for the entire program. The corporate store is EMC and only EMC. EMC and EMC ventures can go to hell for building this, knowing about it, and continually profiting from it. Profit from investment in a partner of an illegal government program specifically designed to make illegal money from human rights violations should be considered illegal. All of the major money behind EMC knew what was going on. If you did a private benefit analysis, it would be all EMC. Thank you. =)

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#216

Post by bennyg » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 5:34 AM UTC

obstacle1 wrote: post #194

enraged_camel wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>People like Snowden are rare. In all honesty, Snowden is a 30 year old single dude, and as far as I know, he doesn't have kids. Do you think he would have done what he did if he had a family to look after? In my opinion a person's first responsibility is to their family. So yeah, if you're married (like these executives probably are) and you're facing the choice between option A and option B, you should absolutely…

So the nuclear family combined with a distributed economy is basically a convenient tool for justifying atrocities of all kinds. Just feeding the kids, right? Maybe not having kids is actually the morally correct choice, then?

Don't be a fool. You would let your children go hungry and live a worse life (directly because of your actions) out of principle? It's not simple. Having a family can be a beautiful thing. Not having one and spilling the beans on something morally reprehensible can be too.

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#217

Post by pdkl95 » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 5:50 AM UTC

jballanc wrote: post #121

suprgeek wrote: post #84

NSA invents weak (Back Door present) crypto algo. Pushes RSA to make it a Default in a key function (RNG) by giving them $10 Million. NSA points to RSA as an early adopter and gets NIST to certify it. Millions of systems are now protected by an RSA product that the NSA deliberately weakened. Any sufficiently skilled rogue actor can attack virtually any business that uses these RSA products - NSA (Cyber security Comma…

There's enough wrong with what the NSA has been doing, and enough reasons to encourage people to take an interest in how to curtail, or at least better police, their actions without resorting to tawdry conspiracy theories. The NSA doesn't "protect" anyone. They are an intelligence agency. Their mandate is to collect information. The group you're thinking of, the one that's actually supposed to "protect" the network,…

No conspiracy theory requried, as it does not require /intention/ on the part of the NSA. This can simply be Pavlov-style reinforcement: misguided ideas get amplified by rewarding the behaviour with budget increases.

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#218

Post by Spooky23 » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 6:04 AM UTC

fragsworth wrote: post #43

The NSA's story about how they need to secretly do these things to fight the war on terror makes less sense with each new revelation. Terrorists don't use VPN dongles. What is really going on here?

How do you know?

Even if you're right, Airbus does.

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#219

Post by obstacle1 » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 6:04 AM UTC

bennyg wrote: post #216

obstacle1 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the nuclear family combined with a distributed economy is basically a convenient tool for justifying atrocities of all kinds. Just feeding the kids, right? Maybe not having kids is actually the morally correct choice, then?

Don't be a fool. You would let your children go hungry and live a worse life (directly because of your actions) out of principle? It's not simple. Having a family can be a beautiful thing. Not having one and spilling the beans on something morally reprehensible can be too.

>Don't be a fool.

Classy.

>You would let your children go hungry and live a worse life

No. Read what I wrote. The words are right there.

If the choice is "have children and commit evil to feed them" and "don't have children and don't commit evil", I choose the former. As should, I think, any right-thinking person.

The question is probabilistic. What are the chances that the former happens? What are the chances that the latter happens?

Choose accordingly.

The question is also systemic. There exists the possibility that forces larger than the individual have decided to normalize the nuclear family (and also romanticize the vision of having said family) in order to serve evil ends. What is the probability that that is the case? As time goes on, it looks far more probable than we once thought. People like you think families are in themselves beautiful. Any means justify the ends of preserving them. Seems like an excellent tool for keeping a population right where you want them.

Look up the history of the nuclear family. Notice it didn't exist pre-industrialization. Why's that?

You're taking humans -> have children for granted. I'm arguing against that dogma. Because as paradoxical as it may sound, it is trite dogma at this point in wealthy societies. We don't need these additional people, we don't need this extravagant life. It's not a matter of survival anymore. So what is it all accomplishing? What's the end?

>Having a family can be a beautiful thing.

For my morality, concerns of beauty don't trump concerns of humanity. If my having children perpetuates a cycle of exploitation, murder, pain, suffering, etc. etc. etc, then I don't have children. Regardless of how "beautiful" my experience of those children may be. It really is that simple.

And if a (wo)man tells me "I just did it to feed my kids" after committing some reprehensible act, I sympathize, because (s)he made a terrible decision in having children to start with. But I still condemn him/her.

Re: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

#220

Post by tptacek » Sat, Dec 21, 2013, 6:08 AM UTC

wavefunction wrote: post #206

majke wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally curious about this. I have no idea how to judge Nacchio's career. Can you point some facts proving this point of view? Or maybe: How was his position any different than yours, if you had a request from the NSA that you wouldn't want to fulfil, knowing that rejecting it could destroy your company, what would you do?

The issue is, imo, very murky but as I understand it: NSA approached Nacchio and Qwest to do what they were doing with AT&T and Verizon. Qwest had previously helped the NSA intercept all comms in Salt Lake City during the Olympics but told the NSA they weren't interested in cooperating. Nacchio sells some stock. Qwest is suddenly dropped as the favored vendor for a huge government contract leading to a drop in Qwest'…

Read the indictment. Nacchio was convicted along with several other executives of running a pump and dump scam.

Despite being specifically prohibited from trading based on insider information, Nacchio first became aware that their earnings guidance was "a huge stretch", that to meet them would involve growing revenue from a line of business that had been failing to grow revenue and that had actually been underperforming that year, that they had (apparently) lost important contracts, and that it had become essentially impossible for them to hit their numbers. Then, after learning all that, but before any of it was disclosed to investors, Nacchio dumped over $100MM worth of his stock.

Nacchio controlled the earnings targets for Qwest. He set them dishonestly high and allowed them to be released to the public over the objections of many of his own executives. The stock performed as a result. Then, when it became obvious that the public would soon learn that those projections were impossible to meet, he sold his stock for $100MM.

Nacchio went down within a year of Enron and just a few years after Worldcom. It was the end of an era in which the big accounting firms had conspired with large corporations to swindle the public out of billions of dollars. Nacchio was a crook, not a Fourth Amendment hero.

Are the executives at JPMC crooks? I don't know. If they are, which is not outside the realm of possibility, they should go down too. But what JPMC people do has nothing at all to do with the fact that Qwest's executives defrauded the public to the tune of over $100MM.