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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

IMO, when the director of the NSA goes on-stage at DEFCON and the result is anything other than tomatoes being thrown and him being booed off the stage, something is wrong.

While it is true that hackers are not a single minded collective, and some hackers may have sympathy for the NSA, I'd hope that most hackers would see the NSA as what it is: just one more head of the Medusa that is the US government, in all it's civil liberty infringing, experimenting on it's own citizens program, illegal wiretapping, constitution ignoring glory. The NSA are not - so far as I'm concerned - the "good guys." Some individuals in the NSA may be "good guys" but the agency is just a tool of a government that is out of control.

"We don't keep files on every American citizen" Yeah, right... this guy would have had more credibility if he'd just said

"Yeah, of course we do. You know it, we know it, so why beat around the bush."

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I really don't understand the "tomatoes and booing" plan.

At the panel in the room immediately before the director of the NSA spoke ( https://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-20/dc-20-speakers.html#DA ), the point was made that cops, prosecutors, lawyers and the press have been invited to DEFCON since DEFCON 1.

These people exist all existed before they spoke at DEFCON, and do after, too. They have plans and goals, and to the extent that they want to explain them, I'm willing to listen. If I want opposing opinions, I can get them in at least four other tracks.

I don't have to believe him, but I feel honor-bound to let him say his piece without being an asshole about it.

I'd hope that most hackers would see the NSA as what it is: just one more head of the Medusa that is the US government, in all it's civil liberty infringing, experimenting on it's own citizens program, illegal wiretapping, constitution ignoring glory.

The NSA does some questionable stuff, but it also does some awesome stuff. The first thing that comes to mind is SELinux.

On a tangent, don't forget that we need an organization like the NSA (or at least like what the NSA should be). The more ubiquitous computing becomes, the more important that role will become. So, don't advocate chopping off a head of the Medusa; advocate fixing what you see as wrong.

> don't forget that we need an organization like the NSA

For those of us who have already forgotten or have never known the reason for its necessity, could you explain why? Internationally and historically, similar levels of state communications monitoring are correlated with the need for self-preservation by authoritarian regimes. There are also many modern day states which do not possess an agency directly analogous to the NSA.

One of the big problems with NSA is their dual mission of defense and offense. Dual mandates are really dangerous for bureaucracies -- the federal reserve has a similarly conflicted dual mandate of price stability and employment, no as a result it behaves a bit like a highly medicated insane person at times. NSA does the same thing -- releasing SELinux and trying to prevent the spread of encryption in protocols and operating systems simultaneously.

I believe that cyber-warfare, while fanciful-sounding in name, is going to be a part of the future whether we like it or not. In which case, the NSA seems the best positioned to conduct the USA's end of it.

If this is a justified belief rather than a faith-based belief, you'll need to offer a refutation of Thomas Rid's "Cyber War Will Not Take Place", which holds that cyber-war is contradictory because acts of cyber-war do not fulfill the definition of acts of war: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/01402390.2011.608...

Ok, so cyber-warfare is a shitty word. I know that, but people understand what it refers to, which is why I used it.

Would you be happier if I said I expect cyber-sabotage, cyber-espionage, and cyber-subversion to be important parts of future conflicts?

If you mean to suggest that the reason for the NSA is for the US government to act as an authoritarian regime (presumably meaning something like a totalitarian state or dictatorship or tyranny), why don't you just say so? And if you don't mean to suggest it, then what is the meaning of your purported correlation?

I don't; to negate the position that the existence of communication surveillance agencies can be considered both beneficial and necessary for an arbitrary population by assumption.

Who even uses SELinux besides government/defense contractors? Do you remember the Clipper chip? The list of horrible things the NSA has been involved with is long.

These days, most people who use Fedora...

It's part of the RHCE exam, to be honest i always disabled it before then. These days though i always use it (in targetted mode).

I'd imagine there are others like me.

We need it? Who is 'we'? The government? To what degree is that need necessary, and not merely contingent?

We absolutely need defense for government IT. That should still be smaller than what the government devotes to that task now, but at the NSA level, I get the feeling that most dollars and head count is not going to defense.

I think it is a legitimate question how much of an offensive information warfare standing capability a country needs when not at war, and what level of dirty tricks intelligence agencies should pull in peacetime to monitor adversaries. Particularly due to the non financial costs of this monitoring -- losing our moral standing as a free and fair country, incidentally monitoring citizens or those present in the USA, in violation of the constitution (especially due to the tortured "five eyes" sharing agreements, which, if they weren't governments, would be viewed as a conspiracy and some kind of constructive crime), etc. I judge all of this stuff by "does it make us safer", and at some point, it clearly goes the other way. I think that point is several hundred billion dollars a year less spending than what we have now (well in excess of a trillion). Maybe 50-75% less spending.

The real problem and danger to us, from the very demons that guard our country, is that they are not being properly restrained by a Congress controlled by primitivists, idiots, mentally deranged, corporate agents, the unprincipled, and psychopaths not suited for today's world and allow the security state instruments to operate extra-constitutionally with impunity.

Simply put; affection and trusting the NSA (or any other security state instrument) is trusting and making a deal with the devil. I wish you understood the gravity.

Sigh.

Feds have been an integral part since DEF CON 1. They're welcome, and booing them of the stage is just childish. Again, I'm pretty sure the majority of hackers don't agree with them, and may even think they're a bunch of morons, but it's still interesting to hear what they have to say. People do get booed of the stage, but for entirely different reasons, e.g. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9755135-7.html (and watch the video, it's hilarious).

(Also, talking about security-people-hackers on a site primarily focused on programming-startup-hackers confuses the crap out of me.)

Again, I'm pretty sure the majority of hackers don't agree with them, and may even think they're a bunch of morons, but it's still interesting to hear what they have to say.

So, "keep your friends close, and your enemies closer?" :-)

Anyway, you make a good point, and there are good reasons to let the NSA guy have his say. But when you look at the abuses perpetrated by the US government over the years, it's hard to feel good about hanging around and listening to more propaganda from their representatives. And chucking tomatoes at him would send a strong message "don't assume that we are on the same side, or that we are going to support your agenda" or whatever.

> (Also, talking about security-people-hackers on a site primarily focused on programming-startup-hackers confuses the crap out of me.)

From the Hacker News Guidelines: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting."

The folks at DEF CON are some of the best hackers out there. Have you seen any of the presentations?

The point is not that security-people-hackers are off-topic, but that they are not the ones usually meant when talking about hackers on this site.

Booing is a bit mean-spirited. I think the appropriate disruption is everyone saying "rabble rabble rabble rabble" together.

Back in the days, there was actually a game called "Spot the Fed".

> Basically the contest goes like this: If you see some shady MIB (Men in Black) earphone penny loafer sunglass wearing Clint Eastwood to live and die in LA type lurking about, point him out. Just get my attention and claim out loud you think you have spotted a fed. The people around at the time will then (I bet) start to discuss the possibility of whether or not a real fed has been spotted. Once enough people have decided that a fed has been spotted, and the Identified Fed (I.F.) has had a say, and informal vote takes place, and if enough people think it's a true fed, or fed wanna-be, or other nefarious style character, you win a "I spotted the fed!" shirt, and the I.F. gets an "I am the fed!" shirt.

http://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-13/dc13-spotthefed.html

edit: Oops, should have read the article first, it is mentioned there :/

Doesn't that make posing as a fed a game as well? It should up your false positive rate.

Yup, that's part of the game.

(Shameless advertising: go to DEF CON. Seriously. It's more fun than Disneyland!)

>It's more fun than Disneyland!

That's not a high bar to clear when Disneyland is so congested that you can't get on all of the rides.

(Or any without waiting an eternity in line.)

Fully agree, when the NSA says "secure cyberspace and protect civil liberties", they mean, put Julian Assange behind bars and ensure the government is at liberty to withhold information from the people.

If the US government is somehow by definition the bad guys and wholly evil, who (would you lead me to believe) are the good guys?

Arguing that the US government in entirety is evil may be a difficult case, but arguing that an agency that spies on law abiding citizens is evil is easier.

The citizens.

Which includes many, many, many rat bastards, from the CEO of Goldman Sachs to the guy putting a skimmer on the ATM you often use.

The problem is that the NSA (and USG in general) views security in terms of perpetuating the status quo, rather than letting broken institutions fail so that better approaches can take their place. It's akin to how the guy putting a skimmer on ATMs is at worst a red herring - the banks are the actual culprit by still using info-only cards with plaintext account numbers, 36 years after D-H! In order to actually move forward, at some point ATM impersonation should stop being considered fraud as the banks have had plenty of time to understand that their assumptions are utterly faulty and that they actually know nothing about the identity of an ATM user (and therefore under the current system have no authorization for withdrawals). But instead of secure user-based tokens with explicit capability limits, we get ever more feel good patches on a fundamentally unsolvable problem.

And the NSA has what to do with that?

My point is that the government aren't the only people trying to fuck us. The private sector, big and small, is trying to do so as well.

'The citizens' is referencing the group uniformly. 'Citizens' and 'USG' clearly have a large intersection, but the point is that importance should be distributed throughout the former. That some citizens are bad actors doesn't change this.

I was drawing a parallel with bank security as the same institution-based priorities apply to the NSA. Their version of 'security' primarily involves securing the position of USG and its subsidiaries by monitoring everyone to gain intelligence against possible threats (including the non-criminal threats). This makes the citizens, who should be the most important, less secure.

The citizens are the ones responsible for the actions and state of the government, especially in a democratic system.

Nonsense. Often the case is you vote someone in, and then they turn around and do things they were not voted in to do, or do things they campaigned on not doing or vice versa.

One is responsible for their own actions.

Canadians

It's always worth seeing a counterpoint - seeing what truly evil entities (such as drug cartels) are doing with technology, to see why a discussion between the NSA and hackers might be a good thing. To that end, I recommend the following Ted talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/marc_goodman_a_vision_of_crimes_in_...

What the NSA is doing is frightening. What the cartels and other criminals is doing is the stuff of nightmares. One doesn't necessairly justify the other, but it's good to think about.

It's interesting that you use that TED talk to support your view, when the speaker is advocating not leaving security up to the professionals and instead approaching the challenges as a group in a very open fashion (he even mentions openly publishing the DNA of world leaders).

OK, I thought about it. I concluded that the smart thing to do is to end the War on Some Drugs and stop the escalation between the immovable, inevitable rocks on one side and the forces with infinite Federal funding on the other side.

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