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Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
351–360 of 393 posts
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#352This is the sentence I was looking for: > While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013. Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
How close are we to “bypassing” a lot of this spying when some of the most popular communications platforms (e.g. WhatsApp) are end to end encrypted? Will the tech eventually solve the problem in a convenient way, at least for those who care?
Not at all. They are one bill away (look at the UK).
We cannot solve political problems by ignoring them and retreating into code.
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#353This is the sentence I was looking for: > While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013. Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
How close are we to “bypassing” a lot of this spying when some of the most popular communications platforms (e.g. WhatsApp) are end to end encrypted? Will the tech eventually solve the problem in a convenient way, at least for those who care?
Pegasus suggests no, and the UK already killed this with BlackBerry years ago.
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or a real democracy with voters either deeply apathetic about being watched or deeply anxious about what happens if nobody's watching.
this comment would make sense if this was the only issue where this was true instead of one amongst almost an uncountable number
Vectors pointing in all directions can sum to zero. If people are generally dissatisfied, but can't find common ground to coalesce their dissatisfaction into action, movement, or party, the status quo vibrates but does not move.
Broadly speaking, on one side of the aisle in the US I see people who refuse to coalesce, spend more time tearing at each other than figuring out how to work together, and find the entire idea of touching the system, let alone changing it, distasteful...And, sadly, on the other side I see a very successful coalition of surface-incompatible causes who figured out how to work together anyway and got their men elected.
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#355This is the sentence I was looking for: > While we were able to use his evidence to make some change, both EFF and Mark were ultimately let down by Congress and the Courts, which have refused to take the steps necessary to end the mass spying even after Edward Snowden provided even more evidence of it in 2013. Do you have to be a cynic to pretty much have expected this?
How close are we to “bypassing” a lot of this spying when some of the most popular communications platforms (e.g. WhatsApp) are end to end encrypted? Will the tech eventually solve the problem in a convenient way, at least for those who care?
WhatsApp is end-to-end-to-server encryption.
They have a nicely implemented E2E protocol. This is operationally convenient: Meta can accurately say that they don't store WhatsApp messages, so fewer access requests go to them. And I'm sure it's nice for engineer morale, too.
However, the app makes it semi-mandatory to turn on backups. If you say no, it keeps nagging you. If you always say no, you are in the 0.1% and everyone you talk to has backups enabled, so all of your conversations are helpfully backed up anyway, just not for you :)
These backups go to Google Drive or iCloud. You can draw your own conclusions about who has access and who handles the LE/IC requests.
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate. The United States has elevated voter suppression to an art form. Last minute polling relocations, inadequate polling locations, unreasonable ID requirements, unreasonable registration requirements, “accidental” voter roll purges. It’s not easy to vote here. And it’s especially hard if you are in a group the incumbents don’t like. See https://en.wikipedia…
While these things happen, they are not the bulk of the explanation for the lack of voters showing up. The bulk of it is that voters don't show up. We had the most turnout for any Presidential election in 2020, when people were literally quarantining to escape a plague... Turnout was around 66%. Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't…
> Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day.
In 2020 voting by mail was widely expanded because of the pandemic. In 2024 it was rolled back. It was easier to vote in 2020 than it was in 2024.
I wouldn’t describe voting in 2020 as constrained. More like enabled. It’s the closest we’ve ever been to a voting holiday.
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#357Where's the best overview of this whole NSA mass spying story, starting from 9/11 era and the beginning of the dotcom boom? Any good books or documentaries?
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
While these things happen, they are not the bulk of the explanation for the lack of voters showing up. The bulk of it is that voters don't show up. We had the most turnout for any Presidential election in 2020, when people were literally quarantining to escape a plague... Turnout was around 66%. Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't…
> Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day. In 2020 voting by mail was widely expanded because of the pandemic. In 2024 it was rolled back. It was easier to vote in 2020 than it was in 2024. I wouldn’t describe voting in 2020 as constrained. More like enabled. It’s the closest we’ve ever…
Oh, agreed---the voting wasn't constrained. The people were. You had to make the people so bored that they bothered to fill out the damn ballot and put a stamp on it.
Americans get distracted. That's the big secret. We're such a generally satisfied, busy, and entertained group of humans that we literally can't be arsed to go pull the one lever that is most politically powerful every time we get a chance to pull it. Some people are actively marginalized. Most of us just don't bother to read the one-pager on the county website and then show up in the fourteen-ish hours set aside to do the thing (let alone try to, say, actively study the candidates or the on-ballot issues).
I literally had a young man confide in me day of election in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he liked him on the TV show. That's your American voter, when they show up at all.
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
not only was there not "definitive evidence"; if you said that the companies did that sort of thing you were called a conspiracy theorist whackaloon. oddly 85% of the general public suddenly was like "well of course they spy on email" after all this came out.
That's not the general sentiment I recall. There was a general sense of 'the government's probably watching' (along with who knows who else: early internet protocols like email really aren't resistant to snooping by more or less anyone), just no public info on specifically how (and you might get some disapproving looks if you claimed any specific approach without evidence).
It depends. If you were a hacker who'd read Bamford and the news from whistleblowers like Klein, talking with other hackers, that general sense was common knowledge. But if the topic came up in conversation with, like, the guy you're subletting a room from in NYC, you could get a very skeptical look.
(I wonder if these people remembered those conversations after Snowden.)
Re: Mark Klein, AT&T whistleblower who revealed NSA mass spying, has died
#360I expect there were 10,000 who knew, and he’s the only one who spoke up. Now, the other 9,999 likely believed it was to thwart terrorism, as this was post 9/11. Maybe those who had visibility into who was being surveyed were checking to ensure the spying didn’t cross their ethical boundaries. Interesting to think of what each individual in the system was considering.
>he’s the only one who spoke up. Not true. (1) Russ Tice: USAF intelligence analyst (2) William Binney: NSA Technical Director. (3) Thomas Tamm: DOJ lawyer (4) Thomas A. Drake: senior executive at NSA Each of them had a senior position relative Klein and Snowden and all these cases were shut down and you seemingly never knew about them.
So what was different with Klein? He surfaced the information so widely that it couldn’t be contained by the “machine”?