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Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

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Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#41

Post by rayiner »

betterunix wrote: post #35
nathan_long wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most of us here are privacy advocates, and I think society needs our voice. However, we're only one side of the coin. Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible. There are many kinds of dystopias. Big Brother is one. Rule by…

"Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible." So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses? What does communication privacy have to do with that? There was once a time in this country…

> There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access.

Federal authorities always had wiretapping powers pursuant to a warrant. If you mean before that, it was also a time when limited communications forced more visible means of coordination. Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications, even pursuant to a warrant.

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#42

Post by [deleted] »

betterunix wrote: post #35
nathan_long wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Most of us here are privacy advocates, and I think society needs our voice. However, we're only one side of the coin. Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible. There are many kinds of dystopias. Big Brother is one. Rule by…

"Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible." So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses? What does communication privacy have to do with that? There was once a time in this country…

[deleted]

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#43

Post by Chronic24 »

tomjen3 wrote: post #37
nathan_long wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> failing to prevent the Boston bombing OK, you're in charge of the FBI now. There are tens of thousands of public events today in tens of thousand of venues. Protect them all. Go.

No I am not. I can't protect them so I wouldn't try to become the leader of the FBI. I also can't do surgery but if I come in to have some work done on my hand and leave with a foot chopped of I am going to sue the doctor.

Exactly. The FBI was unable to perform their job properly. Then they ask the public for help. What, the bomber didn't leave behind any Facebook conversations to track? Boo hoo.

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#44

Post by betterunix »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #23
siculars wrote: post #20

I say all of the above. There's basically one reason to work for law enforcement: Authority and its slutty sister, Power. People who are attracted to these things are susceptible to logic failures in pursuit of their interest in exerting Authority and Power.

Many people are drawn to law enforcement out of the desire to help others and do good for the world. Being an FBI agent is a very honorable and well-respected profession, especially outside of an internet forum. Your comment pisses on every person who ever went to school to study criminal law, many of whom did so for noble or at least neutral reasons.

"Being an FBI agent is a very honorable and well-respected profession"

Unless you are doing this:

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/01/secret_government...

It is not as though this is some kind of new, unprecedented behavior either:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/31/mlk.fbi.conspiracy/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover

So let's say a young man is thinking about joining the FBI; he wants to do good for the world, maybe help catch a serial killer or take down a child abuse group. How does he know he will not be asked to conduct surveillance on an anti-war group? How does he know he will not be asked to dig up some dirt on a civil rights leader?

This "honorable profession" you are defending has always had a dark side.

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#45

Post by hondje »

nathan_long wrote: post #26
kenjackson wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes, right Depends on what you mean by this... There are no practical systems which will do so. But the reason why quantum computing became interesting was because of Shor's work showing that they can factor large primes quickly (in theory).

>> There are no practical systems which will do so. ... that we know of . The intelligence community has secretly outpaced the rest of the world in computing, cryptography and cryptanalysis before.

Historically they are consistently about 10 years ahead of the curve per Bruce schneiers Applied Cryptography. I have no reason to not believe this to still be true

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#46

Post by gweinberg »

fixxer wrote: post #18

I've read that quantum computing is picking up, so please correct me if I'm wrong... it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes, right? This push to "stop terror" via reading the general public's email/chats/etc. seems more like Big Bro and less like a viable method to stop the next 9-11. Sure, the bros from Boston weren't exactly sophisticated, but I find it hard to believe nobody in Al Qaeda knows how to u…

You mean numbers which are the product of two large primes.

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#47

Post by arethuza »

fixxer wrote: post #18

I've read that quantum computing is picking up, so please correct me if I'm wrong... it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes, right? This push to "stop terror" via reading the general public's email/chats/etc. seems more like Big Bro and less like a viable method to stop the next 9-11. Sure, the bros from Boston weren't exactly sophisticated, but I find it hard to believe nobody in Al Qaeda knows how to u…

"it IS still pretty hard to factor very large primes"

I think you mean that it is hard to factor the product of two primes, factoring primes is pretty easy regardless their size.

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#48

Post by vy8vWJlco »

Cieplak wrote: post #6

Are there any video chat clients with end-to-end encryption? I was trying to do this by piping the output of my webcam to openssl and then to netcat, which sends the packets to a publicly addressable server (Amazon instance) that relays the encrypted packets to another computer behind a firewall, that decrypts the video stream and plays it in MPlayer. It works, but the latency is about 10 seconds. To reduce the laten…

"Are there any video chat clients with end-to-end encryption?"

Jitsi claims to. ( http://www.jitsi.org )

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#49

Post by betterunix »

rayiner wrote: post #41
betterunix wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Imagine a world where every phone call, email, chat, forum post, etc is fully anonymous or indecipherable to law enforcement. And imagine your loved one has been abducted and law enforcement has no tools for finding those responsible." So somehow, these abductors managed to leave no physical evidence at all and no witnesses? What does communication privacy have to do with that? There was once a time in this country…

> There was once a time in this country when communications could be anonymous -- when law enforcement agencies did not have easy wiretapping access. Federal authorities always had wiretapping powers pursuant to a warrant. If you mean before that, it was also a time when limited communications forced more visible means of coordination. Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant…

"Consider the difference between planning a crime in a shady corner of a restaurant, with potential witnesses, versus doing the same in an electronic chat room with no ability to capture the communications"

I am not sure I see the difference. On the one hand, you have two people who likely have a legitimate reason to meet at a restaurant speaking quietly to each other. On the other, you have two people with a legitimate reason to have an Internet connection using it to communicate. There is a matter of distance I suppose, but so what? Postal mail has always allowed people to communicate at a distance, and it has always allowed anonymous senders.

Why not require all restaurants to record their customers' conversations, just in case the FBI needs to investigate it later on (with a requirement for a warrant, of course)? The same reasoning applies to this FBI push for expanded wiretapping power.

Re: Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent?

#50

Post by bediger4000 »

I vote a little dumb, a little evil (you know, the banality kind) and pretty incompetent.

Anecdotal, but the FBI's first web site was hosted by a NASA machine. I think the FBI was traditionally an IBM shop, and mainframes and the web didn't work well together at first.

In more verifiable evidence of incompetence, there's the Virtual Case File epic fail (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08... just one of many articles about it) followed by a minor debacle in Sentinel (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2407922,00.asp)

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