welp http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57614604-94/president-obama... now we know why
The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
171–180 of 212 posts
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't even think you need to go that far, with extreme examples of totalitarianism. I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on it is that the US is not under any meaningful threat of terrorism. 9/11 was big, but on the scale of decades it is still far down the likelihood list of violent ways an American may be harmed. Murder, Rape and other assaults are a reality too, a far more likely…
Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN’s Samuel Burke. http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-kill...
Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument.
Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizations. There are tens of thousands of people being killed every year in Syria, for example, at the hands of al qaeda or other terrorist aligned soldiers. There have been about ten thousand people killed every year in Mexico at the hands of drug cartels in what is effectively a weird kind of civil war happening there. During the Iraq war and during the war in Chechnya terrorists and terrorist aligned fighters killed tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians.
Moreover, very few people die every year from jet crashes. However, that low figure is due to a truly enormous amount of effort and resources put forth, probably in the trillions of dollars per year range, to keep air travel safe and reliable.
That's the danger of using naive statistics and straight death-toll comparisons the way you are doing. Sure, more people are going to die from cheeseburgers than likely will ever die from terrorism. But A: overall that's a good thing, and B: it's not necessarily meaningful.
More importantly, there are much more direct and more substantive attacks against NSA surveillance effectiveness, TSA screening, etc.
For example, with regard to TSA screening it's notable that the TSA has not thwarted even one terrorist attack on a plane since 9/11. However, there are many documented accounts of TSA failures to prevent weapons of various sorts (knives, guns, even bombs) from getting on planes. And there have been attempted attacks on planes which the TSA did not stop but which passengers did.
The case with regard to the ineffectuality of the NSA's surveillance efforts is even stronger. They put out a list of foiled plots where the NSA surveillance had some role and it is wall to wall bullshit. Most of the "plots" are little more than entrapment, and there appears to be no case at all where surveillance was the lynchpin that made the difference between shutting down a plot when that plot would have gone undetected without the surveillance data. Worse yet, there are several examples of cases, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, of outright incompetence where the FBI/NSA et al had a case handed to them on a golden platter and they screwed the pooch and let someone they were warned about end up murdering American civilians. And one has to wonder if those sorts of failures, which vastly outweigh the vast majority of phony "successes", happened because federal law enforcement agencies were too focused on this high-tech bullshit instead of actually doing their fucking jobs.
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone borne in the USSR, I am sad that Stalin lived to an old age and died without suffering. If there is hell, I hope he is in it right now. I would further never trust any statistics from the old USSR. For instance, the communists were able to dramatically "reduce" infant mortality by simply not recording births until the first birthday, when the child became one. If you think Stalin was good for USSR you are…
While this might be true, as a European I'm eternally thankful for USSR saving us from the claws of nazi tyranny.
As a West European I presume. Because as a East European you would have ended up in the claws of Soviet tyranny for 50+ years and they made the nazis look like amateurs when it came to abuses and persecution.
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
First off, I don't think anyone except "tinfoil hats" really imagined the scale of NSA spying. Who really thought the NSA would try to subvert the cryptographic standards they pretend to create to "secure systems"? Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors for them? Also, there's a big difference between letting NSA protect US against Real Threats - real nat…
"Who really thought the NSA would try to subvert the cryptographic standards they pretend to create" I first encountered speculation that this was the case in a textbook from 1986, in a chapter discussing encryption algorithms in wide use that were contributed to by the NSA. "Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors" The fascinating book The Puzzle Palace ,…
None of this is surprising to an extremely small subset of the global population, those who have had the means to study computer science and cryptography, and the history(ies) of government sanctioned spy agencies for a long enough period to be able to glean insights into the future behaviour of said agencies.
Since not everyone who reads this site meets those criteria, I suspect that it is even a not-insignificant subset on hacker news as well.
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#175Not only is the slide from 2008, but it also says it requires "close access methods" and "remote installation will be pursued for a future release." In other words, they need physical access to your device. If we think that the NSA can't compromise a device after gaining physical access, well then I think we should be scared about the competence of the NSA. I don't have the patience to watch Appelbaum's hour long tal…
> I don't have the patience to watch Appelbaum's hour long talk, but unless he has something far more impressive than these documents then he's just another activist who will willfully mislead in order to advance his cause. The fact that you cherry picked a obvious example, and even downplayed its singificance -- plus fact that you were quick to call him an "activist" (nay, "another activist", how their pesky multitu…
I didn't cherry pick any example. I just used the example that the article was written about.
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Let's put the threat of terrorism in perceptive: In 2010, 13,186 people died in terrorist attacks worldwide, while 31,672 people were killed with firearms in America alone, reports CNN’s Samuel Burke. http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/15/more-americans-kill...
Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument. Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizat…
You're right of course. And even the label 'terrorist' can vary. I think if we ask the people living under the threat of predator-strikes they'd say it's the US thats causing a lot of the terror there.
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? i'm guessing most people thought that spying of US agencies was an activity that was carried out abroad, and aimed at real threats.
Indeed. But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way. In contrast to PRISM a lot of the techniques Jacob presented seem like they would only be useful for targeted work. The crucial question of where those targets are located and how many there actually are is left open. That is what makes me uncomfortable about this sort of presentation. I'm concerned that it does real harm to legitimate…
> But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way.
that's true of course. but i'm afraid that the revelations of the past months have almost turned "jumping to conclusions" into a legitimate response to this kind of information.
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
He also gave Communism a bad name, and, by proxy, Socialism. These systems of government did not have all of the answers, however we now have free market economics everywhere with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo. We have not a lot of diversity in government, government is nowadays about managing a country rather than anything ideological. Some diversity is better even if other systems are not how on…
with anything vaguely socialist being absolutely taboo This is not true, at least not in Europe. Most countries have some form of universal health care, and there are benefits for people who do not work, etc. That is more than vaguely socialist, and is definitely not taboo.
Those things are not inherently socialist, which is why you see capitalist countries embracing them. Socialism isn't a group of government policies, it's an economic system where there is not a profit motive and generally implies public or cooperative ownership. What you see in Scandinavia is not socialism, it's capitalism with welfare.
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#179"one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? " I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not. Giving total control to Stalin meant hundred of millions of Russians got murdered in terror, giving total power to Hitler or Mussolini from demo…
I don't even think you need to go that far, with extreme examples of totalitarianism. I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on it is that the US is not under any meaningful threat of terrorism. 9/11 was big, but on the scale of decades it is still far down the likelihood list of violent ways an American may be harmed. Murder, Rape and other assaults are a reality too, a far more likely…
I have never understood how rarely attacks occur. I think of the places I visit in London, and the volume of people, and I conclude that there is simply no shortage of opportunity to create casualties of at least 3 figures.
So my question becomes, do the supposed large swathes of angry terrorists not want to damage it in traditional terrorist attacks, or are they being prevented from doing so by the security services, surveillance and border controls etc.
I genuinely believe that some attacks are being foiled though whether it's 1 a year or 1000 a year is extremely unclear.
Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? i'm guessing most people thought that spying of US agencies was an activity that was carried out abroad, and aimed at real threats.
When terrorism in the big concern, droid strikes are used against real threats. General espionage is used to figure out what the real threats are. I guess they'd still be hoovering up everything they could, just in case, if it weren't for the threat of terrorism. Public opinion is strategically important (if a foreign power starts a war, how will their people react?), but it wouldn't be so important.
true, but as we've come to see, a big proportion of the spying efforts of the NSA are being directed towards information gathering, for various other reasons than threat assessment. e.g. i don't think many people would have believed the NSA to be spying on US allies, or being involved in industrial espionage.