NSA is a signals intelligence agency, so it makes sense that they would be known for cyber espionage.
The founding fathers didn’t have any conception for our information society. Extra judicial activity, With the corresponding regulatory body, is necessary to maintain parity with a morphing technological society
Ethically, I disagree with your argument. See: unlawful asset theft by police departments, which the supreme Court recently confirmed is illegal.
But from a legal standpoint your argument doesn't hold water. The Constitution is THE binding legal document of the USA, from which literally every aspect of the US government, and thus justice system, derives authority. There is nothing but strict adherence to the Constitution, trying to work outside it might work for a bit but will end up with someone standing before the supreme Court to answer for it.
I disagree that common people should have perfectly secure comm technology.
I disagree with Snowden actions and politics.
Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every comment or two you post? This is in the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but should have some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. There are legit uses for throwaways, just not routinely.
Lots more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
You could grow the notion of comparmentalized information in such a society to create a kind of decentralized system of checks and balances. Eg you see footage with faces hidden and review the morals, vote etc
Could even crowd source such a thing. Surely, related AI efforts are in progress, for better or worse, e.g. FBIC (Facebook intelligence community) info gathering mechanisms
The law itself could eventually evolve to be more dynamic, decentralized
The math problem is why it’s imperative to indoctrinate our best and brightest to fight for the greater good, and in regard to the power vacuum surrounding that unavoidable math reality
I also support our government going after people making secure communication devices intended to circumvent government controls, too much at stake
Sure you cannot stop evil person with textbook and initiative but you can do the best you can
related: Lack of Forfeiture mechanism is one instance of a deficiency with mainstream cryptocurrencies
Your "best and brightest" paragraph makes no sense to me, but strongly reminds me of the BS spewing out of the mouth of James Comey while he tried to convince the members of Congress that you can have a crypto system that is both secure against hackers, but has a backdoor for government surveillance, which is a mathematical impossibility. Pretty sure he said "best and brightest" as well, as if silicon valley can magic away mathematical reality.
I also think that for nearly the entire history of mankind, barring the last few decades, governments have been unable to observe a vast majority of communication of their populace. Not sure what you mean by "too much at stake"... I've never heard of a major, nonmilitary attack that could have been prevented if only we'd had a backdoor into the communications; however I have heard of many, many crimes occuring because we THOUGHT we had secure crypto.
Too bad you met some snooty NSA employees. You could report them if you think they aren’t trustworthy to do sigint.
No, you’re right. I’m not an expert and maybe I’m wrong. Just seems possible to build a better mouse trap here. I couldn’t build it, you’re right. Wish I had such skills. But I’ve looked into the topic and bit and noodled with crypto as a user and in principle it should be possible to build a skeleton key crypto system that isn’t much less secure. Just seems that way to me. Non expert guess.
I’m sure such tech could be evolved to solve the spof key issue (wouldn’t want your skeleton key leaking) for instance
My response was in consideration of the points here.
Snowden, one of his goals, besides defecting to Russia, was to “start the conversation”. The rumor is that have been involved with shadow brokers btw
If your boss came to you and said, by law, we need to build crypto with an evolved key escrow system that overcomes the security problems noted by IEEE and others, could you do it? Would you do it? Easy to say “no way, it can’t be done” with or without some type of bias towards a desire for perfectly strong encryption, but again I suspect that it is possible to build such a thing, if it doesn’t exist already.
Do you think such a thing is possible?
Also may I ask your view on Ed Snowden’s actions?
Stop assuming what I do or don’t know or can do, have done etc. Have you identified me?
The issue of making crypto “less secure” isn’t anywhere near the deal that some academics are making it out to be.
I’m just a user, not going to implement crypto. Someone else can solve such problems. Make crypto that has a secure skeleton key system that respects privacy without reducing security. “Make up for it” by making it twice as slow maybe, just an idea
You’re plainly biased against my position and ventured towards an attack. Let’s not, please.
The stuff I was reading made it clear that current skeleton key systems don’t suffer from greatly reduced security by any stretch. but still have a chain of custody system / spof issues. I’m sure something much more clever that respects privacy and solves those issues is possible
Since I’m the one out of your league, can you and your colleagues work on it
Putting down people you perceive as beneath you intellectually isn’t good manners, and is usually counterproductive.
Is this paranoid/conspiracy-theory-esque? Maybe a little, but I honestly think it's reasonable to consider this in-character for the NSA.
This is easy to verify by asking the phone companies.
> Is this paranoid/conspiracy-theory-esque?
Yes. It's absolutely conspiracy theory nonsense.
Yeah, because nobody at the NSA would know about NDAs.