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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel like the author sounds excessively credulous.

I had to stop reading after he wrote "I could tell something big was up and there simply wasn’t time to debate the merits of handing over my source code to the NSA", because at that point my eyes rolled so hard they fell right out the back of my head.

After I put them back in, I skipped down to the comments. I have a hard time not agreeing vehemently with the top comment on the post, which says:

"You took time off your vacation to help the shadiest government agency on the planet do God-knows-what, as well as give them your IP for free. In addition, your ignorance and glee motivated you write this propaganda post, helping their cause, all for the price of a mug with a fancy sticker on it."

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I'm also okay with the author's response, which is, for the record:

"I’ve seen a lot of commentary like this. It was a different time back then. Just one year later the Towers came down. If in 2002 I got that same call, people would hate me for not cooperating. I didn’t invent the ciphers — those are public. I gave up nothing important. I’m okay with my decisions."

I'm sorry but if you think the NSA is the shadiest government agency on the planet, then you live in an information bubble.

Do you think the NSA is shadier than the KGB? What about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard? Or even the CIA?

I know people are upset about the Snowden revelations but there are much graver sins that have been committed by other agencies.

Whataboutism

No, it's not whataboutism. His statement is that "the NSA is the shadiest agency". I am arguing that it is not the most shady.

If I tried to justify the NSA's behavior _because_ of what the GRU/IRA/CIA does, that is whataboutism. Hope this was a bit helpful.

I thought this was a really good example. I see the word, whataboutism, thrown around a lot and have a hard time understanding what is/isn't. So, thank you.

Not really, a comparison was implied. They didn't say "shady agency", they said "shadiest", which makes a claim and invites dispute about the others' relative shadiness.

I felt like “shadiest” was hyperbole meant to mean “very shady”. Also while the others mentioned might be bad, the NSA is probably the “best” at being covert and probably the most active of all of them. So they might truly be the “shadiest” by sheer volume of covert things they do.

This is definitely not a case of Whataboutism as it is literally about comparing one with others.

Please substantiate your claims.

It's not whataboutism if the claim is making a comparison against all other possibilities. "shadiest government agency on the planet" may be an objectively false statement as applied to the NSA. You can compare the NSA to other contenders for "most shady" using any number of metrics and create an ordered list. None of that is whataboutism.

When did the NSA last assassinate someone in public?

This is not a response in this "argument", but, please watch "Citizenfour" and/or Hollywood version "Snowden".

how would you even know? you can only judge them by what they mess up and get caught doing.

NSA might not be the shadiest, but it's definitely one of the shadiest. Doesn't change a thing about GP's comment.

KGB doesn't exist anymore - you might mean the FSB or GRU?

Anyways, plenty of countries have security agencies whose main job is to violently protect the local kleptocrats these days. China might be a better example to point to for even worse behavior, with their balkanized net and mass surveillance being used to carry out the mass internment and repression of ethnic minorities in regions like Xinjiang.

> KGB doesn't exist anymore - you might mean the FSB or GRU?

The Russians have definitely gone back to the old ways, I'm not sure the distinction between the old and new matters much any more (The GRU is the same organization, the FSB still reside in the Lubyanka - "the tallest building in Moscow")

> KGB doesn't exist anymore

it actually does [0] - at least in belarus and some of the russian-occupied pseudo-republics

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Security_Committee_of_th...

> I'm sorry but if you think the NSA is the shadiest

You're right about the detail (probably) and also very wrong to be focusing on that particular detail instead of interpreting it as just barely mild hyperbole.

You've gone to "it's not the absolute worst, therefore I dismiss the statement" instead of "it's not the absolute worst, but it's still really fucking bad so I'm going to recognize the premise and move on".

I would argue there is a wide gulf between the two.

You might be able to point to a regional power and say yes, these guys are pretty shady. What you have to remember though, is that the USA is a global power with global reach, so any shadiness is more scalable. Also, don't forget that the US often does stuff like hand people over to another agency knowing they'll be tortured.

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/20/cameroonian-troops-tortu...

EDIT: Don't forget that NSA acquires data to create actionable intelligence that can be passed onto another actor. Whatever you think about them, their work is being used in many cases ultimately by another agency or government.

Often?

What bubble is that? Which sources are you basing this on? Who owns them?

HN is so paranoid. All government is bad, anyone from a spy agency is some double/triple/quadruple agent who's actually a terrorist child soldier working for Facebook on the side.

Is that surprising? They do stuff that is rather paranoia-inducing, like: illegitimate dragnet spying on our populous, breaking into networks to eavesdrop and gather secret keys/intel, backdooring random number generators, etc.

Is it really paranoia if the evidence of mass surveillance and abuse of power is right in front of our eyes? It isn't 2012 anymore, Snowden kind of made it quite clear what's actually going on behind the curtain.

There is no foil on my head, but ... it is very reasonable to be paranoid, right?

They are not talking about the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs or the Office of the Comptroller of the currency... It is a comment on the NSA. From what we know, everything they do is a bit creepy. Far from "All government is bad" ... The comment is about an agency that Snowden warned us about.

Also, historically speaking the US government (various departments) has done a lot of really shady things.

"They" are not going to let us know all of the shenanigans they are up to. The list of mischievous things we are aware of surely isn't everything. Are we aware of 70%? 60%? I'm going to bet lower.

So you have a opaque organization with a fairly long list of misdeeds and (this is just my sense of things) a growing boldness. NSA programs, patriot act, etc - those are bold programs they have in place. Those are not the "top secret" things we don't get to know about.

It does not take a lot of imagination to make that leap.

> There is no foil on my head, but

Good thing, because this would amplify radio frequencies. This trope needs to die.

Doesn't that make the joke even better?

Would it?

I suppose thinking about it like an antenna, it would aplify. But I would think the bowl shape on my head would reflect my thoughts back into my head. Where a bowl upside-down on my head would act more like a dish to collect external waves.

Pretty sure anyone listening to my thoughts would get bored. Have the gold fishes song stuck in there since the 90's.

I love the fishes 'cause they're so delicious

Gotta go fishin'

I could eat them everyday

And my mom says that's ok

I love the fishes 'cause they're so delicious

Get Goldfishes!

Even all these years later, he doesn't even consider the possibility that he was manipulated. He betrayed all of his users at the drop of a hat, and all it cost the NSA was a single phone call. Crazy stuff.

Encryption as he implemented it does not rely on the secrecy of the algorithm. It relies on the secrecy of the key.

This is why he was asking about their ability to break 256 or 40 bit encryption.

So there was no trust broken in sharing the source code.

Assuming he implemented the cryptography correctly, but if he didn't then his users weren't secure anyway, and the source code would have just saved the NSA a little time.

That may depend on some specific knowledge of the code, which is of course why they were asking for it.

Kerckhoff's principle applies. Nowadays, all the good encryption software is open source anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle

> Kerckhoff's principle applies

That's true and yet unhelpful because all software has errors, some obvious, some not.

Cryptographic software is at the very least audited, at the very best formally verified (i.e. proven bug-free).

And now you can use proof assistants that are used to prove mathematical formulas to generate crypto code: https://github.com/mit-plv/fiat-crypto

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