Is the FBI dumb, evil, or just incompetent? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by bazillion » Sat, May 25, 2013, 4:58 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #17

I think people have the FBIs motivations misunderstood. And I don't mean in some evil conspiracy theory sort of way, but in one that is pretty consistent with their mission. Their main mission nowadays is to stop terrorism, etc... I I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations. The article theorizes that people with data to hide will use enc…

Working with the FBI folks at the TSC (Terrorist Screening Center), being dumb and incompetent doesn't even begin to describe what I saw. The FBI is the most backwards agency technologically -- the leadership is mostly composed of people who actively oppose innovation. At any other government agency, you can host user created applications that consolidate workflows and make peoples' lives much easier. Some even have teams that are dedicated to creating these one-off solutions that don't fit into a general commercial/OSS workflow program. The FBI, however, doesn't allow programming of any sort outside of the scope of their contracts, which mean that a regular analyst is storing data in an excel spreadsheet and trying to pass it around as a database.

I say actively oppose innovation, because I've seen people told to get in line and shut up when speaking out about how to make processes better. This attitude mostly comes from a culture of "special agents" who are their own cool kid club. Imagine a bunch of movie-stereotypical dumb jocks. Now imagine them in front of a computer. FBI.

The most egregious of technological sins I witnessed was when we told the FBI that if they appended a row id to the scattered data they were sending us, that it would literally save on the order of 10 million dollars a year in people not having to manually input things, but being able to parse the data out. Their engineers came back and told us that it was not technologically possible. I said that not knowing their systems, what languages they were using to program the database, or even the database structure itself, give me one hour in the code and I will make it happen. Let's just say that didn't go over well.

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

#62

Post by josefresco » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:03 PM UTC

ancarda wrote: post #60

brown9-2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true.

Can you cite any sources? I just find it implausible that anything other than petty crime would be discussed over social networks.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/01/10/tech-terr...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/27/world/rivers-social-media-terr...

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

#63

Post by fixxer » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:07 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #47

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.

Of course. I took it for granted that the audience here would know what I meant. My apologies.

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

#64

Post by kybernetyk » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:12 PM UTC

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.

>Many people are drawn to law enforcement out of the desire to help others and do good for the world.

Yeah right, and bittorrent is mainly used for distributing Debian ISOs.

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

#65

Post by venomsnake » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:16 PM UTC

stephen_g wrote: post #21

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…

Apparently FaceTime [1] and iMessage are end-to-end encrypted with unique session keys. Whether Apple has access to those keys is not known though (the key exchange isn't documented as far as I can tell). 1. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/facetime-calls-are-encrypted...

Any communication that you don't set the keys/are able to track them should be considered unencrypted in my opinion.

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

#66

Post by reeses » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:16 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #17

I think people have the FBIs motivations misunderstood. And I don't mean in some evil conspiracy theory sort of way, but in one that is pretty consistent with their mission. Their main mission nowadays is to stop terrorism, etc... I I think that when they look at this rationally they believe are better served by being able to access these conversations. The article theorizes that people with data to hide will use enc…

The thing I try to keep in mind is that 'the government' is the emergent behavior of millions of self-interested people of varying abilities, from people who just want a job for life to people who want to rule the world. There's a framework in place, and they all live within it. Some work to change the framework, but as with ant colonies, it's not as if all of the ants are designing and architecting the colony. Uncle Milton is a blind watchmaker.

That doesn't mean bad things won't happen, just that you have people "trying to do their jobs" who aren't thinking about fundamental liberties. Get a few million of these ants together and they end up in all aspects of your life, much like real ants. In most cases, the best you can hope for is benign mediocrity.

When counted as individuals, it's the infinitesimal minority that reach to greatness or descend to horror.

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

#67

Post by venomsnake » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:22 PM UTC

hondje wrote: post #45

nathan_long wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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

I do ... encryption back in the day was military stuff mostly. Nowadays it is everywhere and is much more mature field. And with the big internet companies siphoning the top talent I think they may have lost the edge a bit.

Much more cheaper and practical approach is for them than to try to outpace and outspend everyone else combined is to stockpile on zero day exploits which can be used when needed.

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

#68

Post by zeroexzeroone » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:25 PM UTC

betterunix wrote: post #44

andrewljohnson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

You can always quit if your morale compass is that damn good.

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

#69

Post by reeses » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:25 PM UTC

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.

Authority and power are not inherently evil, nor is the desire for authority or power.

Would you like the authority and power to prevent women from being raped? Would you like the power to vote to implement laws equalizing 'rights', such as same-sex marriages?

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

#70

Post by siculars » Sat, May 25, 2013, 5:27 PM UTC

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.

There are many ways "to do good for the world." I am incredibly suspect of law enforcement, especially at a national level. Not to say that local law enforcement is any less corrupt but it's the nationals that can influence laws like "show me all your messages" happen.

I would absolutely hate the USA to go the way of Russia, USSR, China or many others. Unfortunately we are headed in that direction.