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An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

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Re: An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

#21

Post by suprgeek »

jorde wrote: post #20
suprgeek wrote: post #17

Excellent principled stand by Mikko. Minor problem ".... In fact, I'm not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are american anyway – why would they care about surveillance that’s not targeted at them but at non-americans." Incorrect - NSA surveillance most definitely HAS targeted Americans in America. That is precisely what the Snowden disclosures show - leaving aside all the contortio…

I'm 100% Mikko knows this and he is just being sarcastic.

Hmm ...complete Sarcasm fail on my part then. Getting harder and harder to tell.

Re: An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

#22

Post by coldtea »

Goopplesoft wrote: post #13
wreegab wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "NSA is a intelligence agency: spying on foreigners seems to me like it'd be their objective, regardless of the revelations ... Other foreign intelligence agencies do their share of spying on foreigners too" I don't know why we should find this more acceptable, whether NSA or foreign agencies. If it is supposed to be acceptable, than give every single person even greater power of surveillance of powerful government…

Whether or not it should be acceptable (aside: I'd agree it shouldn't), no one (few) was complaining until very recently. I mean why else have they been hiring the best mathematicians, cryptographers, & programmers with their billion dollar budgets? Acting like we didn't know it was to spy on foreigners until now is a bit disingenuous to me.

>Whether or not it should be acceptable (aside: I'd agree it shouldn't), no one (few) was complaining until very recently.

That's also a flawed argument. So what? Awareness has to built up for complaining to happen first -- and sometimes it doesn't even build up that much. Sometimes the complaining only happens after much damage has been done.

The existence or not of complaints against something doesn't justify it. People didn't complaint about slavery much back in the day either.

Re: An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

#23

Post by coldtea »

Goopplesoft wrote: post #6
wavefunction wrote: post #3

I'm an american and I care about widespread surveillance of foreigners.

Yeah, that honestly almost felt like a challenge to his fellow presenters and show caring by boycotting the conference as well. EDIT, Also NSA is a intelligence agency: spying on foreigners seems to me like it'd be their objective, regardless of the revelations... Lets not act surprised about this now. Other foreign intelligence agencies do their share of spying on foreigners too (again, their objective). Unless you'…

>NSA is a intelligence agency: spying on foreigners seems to me like it'd be their objective, regardless of the revelations...

And the objective of the KKK was to spread fear on certain parts of the population. That doesn't make it OK. Objectives, even obvious ones, can be shitty too.

Also, spying on elect foreigners, doing targeted work to get intelligence data on terrorism etc is one thing. Spying on almost everybody on the world, and especially targetting politicians, allies, officials involved in trade deals, etc, is not what it should be doing. The German chancellor is not bloody Osama, and helping some major corporation get a stronghold in some country is not about "national security".

Re: An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

#24

Post by gruseom »

Mass surveillance of foreigners vs. citizens is a red herring anyway, since the national agencies can easily get around such restrictions by swapping data, or by declaring data "foreign" when it travels over international networks. And those are just the workarounds we've heard about.

Re: An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

#26

Post by jbergstroem »

jorde wrote: post #20
suprgeek wrote: post #17

Excellent principled stand by Mikko. Minor problem ".... In fact, I'm not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are american anyway – why would they care about surveillance that’s not targeted at them but at non-americans." Incorrect - NSA surveillance most definitely HAS targeted Americans in America. That is precisely what the Snowden disclosures show - leaving aside all the contortio…

I'm 100% Mikko knows this and he is just being sarcastic.

It's most likely a response to the 60 minutes feature episode on their (the NSA's) actions where they abstained from spying on Americans. If they were, they'd only target non-Americans.

Re: An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

#28

Post by lvs »

Goopplesoft wrote: post #5

Knew his name was familiar. Mikko Hypponen has some great Ted talks as well: http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed... http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_onlin... http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_fighting_viruses_def...

In the first of these talks, he correctly predicts (~8:30 in the video) on October 28 that US companies first eyeballed on the PRISM slides had been hacked by the NSA, two days before those revelations were made public on Oct 30 in the Washington Post [1].

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...

Re: An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

#30

Post by SkynetSystems »

There needs to be more shunning of NSA collaborators in the tech community. The NSA has only been able to achieve this Orwellian level of surveillance through the cooperation of big tech companies and considers them crucial to their operations. If caving to the NSA has social consequences among the tech community, there will be a lot more resistance against their future demands.
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