"the easiest war to swim"???? Copy-editing fail.
probably autocorrect from 'swin.' 'S' and 'w' are very close.
Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
71–79 of 79 posts
Re: Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh? Police do that routinely. How do you think they get evidence to prove a building was a meth lab or crack house? They get a warrant, bust down the door and go inside. How do you think they get internal business documents when prosecuting white collar fraud? They get a warrant or subpoena and force the potentially guilty parties to hand over documents. I'm not sure why this seems like a radical departure. "The clou…
The two situations aren't analogous - in both my cell phone example and your meth lab example the police need warrants, but they don't need the owner's permission to bust open the door to a meth lab, and they can't bust open the login screen on an encrypted iPhone without the owner voluntarily decrypting it. I linked to some case law examples in a previous comment[1], but basically the cops can't force you to decrypt…
The law is still developing here, but personally, I'd prefer that it develop in a way consistent with long standing principles.
The approach the police want is to be capable of spying on everyone, then making a mockery of the justice system by constructing a plausible case based on illegally gathered evidence.
I think that the NSA's has a national security responsibility that may justify the extraordinary power that they are invested with. The problem is that their close collaboration with law enforcement is causing their "ends justify the means" culture to leak into law enforcement. How can we expect law enforcement to enforce the law if we're ingraining contempt for the law into their operating process?
Re: Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh? Police do that routinely. How do you think they get evidence to prove a building was a meth lab or crack house? They get a warrant, bust down the door and go inside. How do you think they get internal business documents when prosecuting white collar fraud? They get a warrant or subpoena and force the potentially guilty parties to hand over documents. I'm not sure why this seems like a radical departure. "The clou…
The two situations aren't analogous - in both my cell phone example and your meth lab example the police need warrants, but they don't need the owner's permission to bust open the door to a meth lab, and they can't bust open the login screen on an encrypted iPhone without the owner voluntarily decrypting it. I linked to some case law examples in a previous comment[1], but basically the cops can't force you to decrypt…
> but basically the cops can't force you to decrypt an encrypted device
While true in the US, this isn't the case in all jurisdictions. For example refusing to decrypt or supply keys in the UK can land you up to two years in jail.
Good summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law
Re: Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to the delightful world of Washington, D.C. realpolitik! A third possibility is that he honestly believes his position is the correct one--or is holding out the possibility of returning to a .gov/.mil job in this or a future administration--and (a) is using the best arguments for his case, however weak or (b) is on a conference panel, not in a courtroom, and is aiming for entertaining one-liners rather than a…
"Welcome to the delightful world of Washington, D.C. realpolitik!" I don't understand how the people who play these games can motivate themselves to get up in the morning. Forget morality. I'm just talking about a sense that you're doing something worth doing at all. I just couldn't do it. No matter how hard I tried, eventually the realization that what I was doing was meaningless backbiting bullshit would sink in an…
>I don't understand how the people who play these games can motivate themselves to get up in the morning.
That's one reason I decamped to the SF bay area. I have friends still living in DC (or one of its inner 'burbs) who have been saying for over a decade that they want to escape the games and backbiting bullshit, but have never managed to do so. One reason is the compensation can be high: the DC area is home to the highest-income county in the nation[1]. Stewart is a senior partner at Steptoe, where the average partner income is approx. $1M[2]; as a very senior one he might be taking home $2M a year.
Plus housing prices are cheaper than SF or the peninsula, and if you're trained as a political fixer/policy wonk, where else do you go?
On a more HN-relevant point, working in DC means trying to get a bigger slice of a fixed pie. Silicon Valley companies and other startups around the world can make the pie bigger. For more realpolitik, check out this provocative essay on DC-Silicon Valley by San Jose-based Cypress Semiconductor cofounder/CEO TJ Rodgers (it's worth a read even if you disagree, I think): http://www.cypress.com/?rID=34975
[1] "The Washington region dominates the list of the most affluent places in the United States..." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/12/12/th...
[2] http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2013/02/steptoe-johnson-ll...
Re: Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Welcome to the delightful world of Washington, D.C. realpolitik!" I don't understand how the people who play these games can motivate themselves to get up in the morning. Forget morality. I'm just talking about a sense that you're doing something worth doing at all. I just couldn't do it. No matter how hard I tried, eventually the realization that what I was doing was meaningless backbiting bullshit would sink in an…
>I don't understand how the people who play these games can motivate themselves to get up in the morning. That's one reason I decamped to the SF bay area. I have friends still living in DC (or one of its inner 'burbs) who have been saying for over a decade that they want to escape the games and backbiting bullshit, but have never managed to do so. One reason is the compensation can be high: the DC area is home to the…
I agree with at least some of what TJ Rodgers has to say, though it's a tad too Randian for my taste.
Using cigarette taxes as an example highlights an intrinsic problem with libertarianism: sometimes government is our only defense against "softer" forms of power. Cigarettes are chemically addictive, so selling them means essentially using mind control to generate repeat customers.
Some libertarians want to be free to create value, but others want to be free to con people. Typical Randians like TJ Rodgers don't see the difference, or they grossly overestimate the ability of free human beings to defend themselves against determined and clever con artistry. Much con artistry, such as financial swindling, is very sophisticated when compared with something as ham-fisted as addictive drug pushing. If humans were good enough to resist that kind of thing, there'd be no jobs for stage magicians. Everyone would spot their tricks.
If I were in government and were doing government's proper job, I'd feel good about my work. My feeling though is that quite a bit of government and its related business orbit isn't doing anything like that.
Re: Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't find his comments especially entertaining, and I don't think my sense of humour is faulty, so let's rule out the court jester theory. That leaves "using the best arguments for the case he truly believes in, however weak". This I think would correctly fall under the umbrella of incompetence. At some point, rational people are supposed to evaluate their own arguments and change their beliefs if they can't sust…
It can't be called incompetence if he makes the arguments he has been paid (and likely will again be paid) to make. The world is full of highly competent people who do exactly that, many of them lawyers. They're not called 'advocates' for nothing. But this begs the question why otherwise self-respecting panels so often give a soapbox to propagandists. Perhaps instead of using the mindless daily news formula of pittin…
That raises the question. Begging the question is arguing a point with the conclusion as evidence.
Re: Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
#77I've known Stewart Baker, the ex-NSA GC quoted in the linked article, for about 15 years--not incredibly well, but well enough that he'd show up at parties I held in my home when I was living in D.C. before moving to the SF bay area. Stewart is extremely smart, should not be underestimated, and HN comments in this thread calling him "incompetent" reflect badly on the person making the comment. He's likely the single…
How do you feel about the assertion that the NSA et al were getting something for free, and all this hubbub about privacy and encryption is simply a smokescreen -- the Google's of the world want their pound of flesh. They see a new and robust revenue stream where the product was being shoplifted, and they're correcting that business oversight. They will give the government what they want, but at a cost. Be it in a do…
Increasing the costs of an undesirable activity effectively lowers the incidence of that activity. It's probably easier than trying to prevent it unilaterally, too.
Re: Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
#78The disingenuity lies in the lack of context.
The emergence of the NSA as America's secret police did not happen as an aberration but within the phenomenon of shrinking rights that I've noticed since my political awareness began in 1980 or so.
Since then, I have not seen any expansion of rights for anyone, except maybe for those living in the former Warsaw Pact and non-humans (e.g. pets) in the US.
I have however seen a relaxation of controls for groups such as law enforcement.
It may have started with the belief that "criminals have more rights than victims" that found expression in movies such as Sudden Impact. Such sympathetic arguments missed the point that the power of the state doesn't target victims.
Regardless of origin, law enforcement lobbied for - and usually got - exception after exception to the bill of rights until we reached the point where an actual trial hardly matters.
While the rights of suspects and law-abiding people shrank, the scope of the term "national security" grew, fueled by another belief - that the survival of the state mattered more than its' intended purpose - the protection of the lives and liberties of its' inhabitants.
Re: Former NSA lawyer: the cyberwar is between tech firms and the US government
#79>"Baker said encrypting user data had been a bad business model for Blackberry, which has had to dramatically downsize its business and refocus on business customers. “Blackberry pioneered the same business model that Google and Apple are doing now - that has not ended well for Blackberry,” said Baker. Baker is incompetent. Blackberry's primary advantage was its encryption. It branded itself as a business device and…
Blackberry is suddenly the posterchild for encryption? I thought Blackberry is this service where all your mail and communication is routed in cleartext through their services, a workaround from the days of 1G that they simply never got around to get rid of before smartphones flattened their business. That is not encryption, if anything it is the direct opposite.
Also, their encryption had the key feature that it could be easily run on low powered devices. It was a big deal to run AES on a phone 10+ years ago, but apparently (I dont have a source) the eliptic curve crypto was more efficient.