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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with the statement that Secure Ideas makes; they are opting out because DEFCON is supposed to be an open collaboration place, but if the very netsec community doesn't have the balls to stand up to the extreme over-reach of the NSA, then we are farked.

Yes, most of us have known for years the extent of the spying the NSA/USG does -- and I believe it's time to take back some individual sovereignty -- the NSA has all but dissolved this.

For me, this is not a political issue, its a human rights issue. I have no respect for the NSA and its apologists, period.

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> but if the very netsec community doesn't have the balls to stand up to the extreme over-reach of the NSA, then we are farked.

I would agree with this much more if they had previously had a statement suggesting that feds from oppressive foreign regimes were not invited. As a non-US citizen, there is a sentiment of "it was OK when we thought they were just doing it to foreigners" about much of this debate.

However, this isn't about standing up to anyone, it's a PR move by DEF CON.

I'm sure this will just further your impression of the general sentiment, but I want to try to explain it as a US citizen. The biggest problem many people have with what the NSA has been revealed to be doing is that it breaks laws regarding the US government's ability to invade the privacy of its citizens, and it does so in secret, precluding real democratic oversight. While spying on foreigners may be unsavory, it does not fundamentally break our government the way (secretly) spying on citizens does.

I agree with your sentiment.

It's worthwhile to note that people have often stated that the Constitution is not a "suicide pact". We are free (as a people) do what needs to be done to preserve our union. Whatever your political persuasion, it cannot be denied that bad actors are trying to coordinate and plan attacks against "soft" targets inside the United States and abroad. This is not a theoretical problem. It's real.

What is extremely unsavory about this entire affair is that the entire citizenry has somehow become a suspect. Every snippet of our communiques, interests, and associations is now considered "fair game". This has been done without ANY meaningful discussion in the public sphere. We, as a people, have been misled and our desire to understand what our government has been doing has been ignored. This is wrong.

I don't agree with Snowden's actions. I think he handled it the wrong way if what he wanted was to bring attention to this state of affairs. There are many who feel like he might have done this for personal glory or with traitorous intent. I'm not convinced one way or another, but I'm not happy with how this has unfolded.

I'm glad that there are enough people paying attention to this devils bargain we've made in the pursuit of security and I hope we get some resolution before things go back to the status quo.

We need to have a national conversation about this. The sooner the better. If there is a silver lining in Snowden's actions, I hope this is it.

"The Constitution is not a suicide pact" is a quote from Abraham Lincoln, as the civil war really was an existential threat to the union itself.

Similarly, the cold war was clearly an existential threat to the union itself, the most obvious example being the hundreds of nuclear ICBM's in Cuba.

Terrorism of the Boston Marathon sort is now an unfortunate reality, but is in no way comparable to these two events, and I simply don't see how it poses any existential threat to the union at all.

It's important to put things into perspective by understanding the threats we have faced in the past, and all that has been sacrificed to bring us the freedom we have now, so that we don't throw it away due to overreacting.

I'm sorry but I don't agree.

Non-state terrorism is an evolving and emergent threat that's been amplified by the interconnected global world we live in.

9/11 spawned two wars and countless societal changes.

The geopolitical landscape has changed and we would be foolish to ignore it.

This isn't the first time the U.S. has faced a non-state organized group with worldwide ambitions killing innocents as a political tactic, the late 19th century anarchists were identical in all of these respects.

The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 didn't start two wars and introduce countless (bad) societal changes, we did those things in response to the terrorist attacks. The distinction is important. We made a choice.

Yes. We made a choice.

What I think you're ignoring is a prolonged, persistent, and increasing series of attacks against US persons and territories. 9/11 was just one of a series of attacks against us. Every previous attack was nearly ignored and forgotten here at home. I'm talking about the first World Trade Center bombing, the Cole Attack, and others.

And, honestly, it's easy for you to criticize. I lost three friends in the aftermath when our country went to war. This isn't an armchair argument for me.

I don't think it's fair to excuse the act of UBL and AQ only to denounce our response. I have little patience for pacifists.

I am not a pacifist. I do not excuse the actions of the terrorists, I denounce them in the strongest possible terms. There can never be any justification for what they have done. But I have less standing to criticize their actions than to criticize those of my government. Part of my job as a citizen of this country to hold opinions on its behavior, and my opinion is that since 9/11 we have been largely fighting the wrong people, and that the fight has been expensive in cost and in civil liberties. I believe the cure has been worse than the disease, and that the severity of the disease has been, and continues to be, overstated.

You are, of course, right that it's easy to criticize from an armchair, but representative democracy is all about finding a balance between the opinions of the experts with the most skin in the game and the wider populace, of which I am a part. I don't need to be a direct participant in the struggle against terrorism to be entitled to an opinion on it.

I'm very sorry about your friends.

"I believe the cure has been worse than the disease, and that the severity of the disease has been, and continues to be, overstated."

I don't agree with you. Specifically, the threat of radicalized Islam is real and present. Downplaying that threat when it was still confined to overseas military targets led directly to 9/11. We (the US) missed several opportunities to effectively neutralize UBL and AQ in the decade before 9/11.

Where I think you're going wrong is to dismiss or de-emphasize the complete shift of military power away from large nation-states towards small non-state actors. Terrorism is winning as a strategy.

If we do not find some way to stem this threat, the world is going to get a whole lot more unstable and unsafe for everyone. And I'm not talking about just the USA. I'm talking about most of Europe and Asia as well.

I know some people look at the Arab Spring as a promising development, but history shows that there is a high likelihood of further bloodshed and tyranny taking root where there is a power vacuum. (n/b Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt)

I'm fine with you disagreeing with me, but I'd prefer you to disagree with my actual belief. I believe that the threat has been overstated, not that there is no threat. There is an extremely wide band between "no threat" and "such an enormous threat that our society must be fundamentally altered in order to meet it". The former would be a vast understatement, but I believe the latter is a (much less vast) overstatement. Of course I have no hard data to base any of these beliefs on, because any such data is secret, these are merely the conclusions I've drawn from what I'm allowed to know.

I completely agree with you that terrorism is winning as a strategy. The goal of terrorism is to make us afraid, and we are afraid. I do think it warrants a strategic realignment. I'm not against all new strategies, just the ones that appear to me to be illegal or outside what I believe to be the spirit of the law.

I totally get your argument though. It is a dangerous world. I think we are just willing to make different trade-offs in the mitigation of that danger.

Please unpack "radicalized islam" for me. It sounds a lot like "africanized honey bees".

I'm not going to respond to a sock puppet account created an hour ago to specifically down vote my posts.

And you're wrong about the quote sourcing.

Yes, looks like it's commonly but wrong attributed to him.

It's more interesting in the context of Lincoln's suspension of Habeus corpus in the Civil War than as an unpopular dissenting opinion in a free speech case, though.

Thank you for taking the time to respond. I can certainly understand the feelings of betrayal and injustice that comes from a government breaking the law to spy on its own citizens.

I have been working in the information security industry for just shy of a decade and while I have been openly accepted to attend/participate/speak at events, I have always felt that it is a US-centric industry. I had assumed that this is because of the huge amount of government money invested in to corporations and individuals that make up the community.

One of the things that I love about DEF CON is that it is big enough to make it truly international, when teamed with Black Hat it makes that week in Vegas unmissable. This stance on feds, by many people who I would call friends, gives the impression that they were happy to work/contract for the US gov while they knew they were targeting foreigners but not citizens.

> I have no respect for the NSA and its apologists, period.

Do you lack respect for those people, or their arguments?

I have no respect for the NSA and those who work there who perpetrate this surveillance state. So those people who have built this.

Exactly the right point!

This needs to be personal - especially because we are not talking about some exploited minimal wage earners who have no other options.

But instead about professionals who have made the intentional choice to dedicate 8h+ a day to organizations that set out to destroy privacy and private communication across the world.

Your comment made me think of something.. Let me ask you:

THe NSA in specific and the intelligence community in general clearly believes that the information about, opinions of and actions by equate to "a person" -- if they did not, they would not be surveilling what they are.

Your question of whether I respect the "people" or their "arguments", appears to me, to be loaded.

It's as if you're attempting to determine if I make a distinction between the people in the positions of NSA staff vs. the actions they take as a willing person under employ.

I respect people: human beings. As a human being I see myself as a part of a singular species on a, thus far, singular planet in our universe. I am not an enemy of humanity - I am an advocate of it. The opinions arguments and actions of planetary governments though appear to actually be at odds with humanity and its longevity.

So, on the one hand we have an agencies actions which distill a person to their digital DNA; analyses, evaluates and judges it coming to a conclusion in whole as to what that person "is" and a schism in our culture that you appear to be attempting to exploit: your question is attempting to play to my "humanity" with these being people who are just making decisions and arguments in line with the "orders and directives" of an institutional body such as the NSA/USG.

Let me be very clear; I don't care who anyone works for, if you are attempting to control, oppress, exploit or succeed at the expense of people as a whole - you are an enemy to humanity.

You could be an individual, a group, a corporation or a government. I stand for both my individual sovereignty and the collective well being of my species and civilization.

This is what sets us apart from the insects; we are capable of thriving as collective individuals as opposed to hive-minded slaves.

So the mathematician at NSA who developed the SHA-1 algorithm that underlies a lot of higher-level crypto primitives... is he an oppressor or an individual making a positive contribution to the collective good?

How about the janitor who sweeps the bathroom floor at the NSA? Is he or she an enemy of humanity?

Hopefully you would conclude otherwise for both, but now you run into the situation where you have to judge individual actions and not just collective membership when assessing who is, or is not, an enemy of humanity. Note that I haven't even had to try to stick up for those 'just following orders'.

By all means, judge people on what they do; judge ideas on their own merits; that's all I've ever asked for myself. Just remember that sometimes good work may come from organizations that you consider evil. Imagine how we would have thought of the infamous Nazi Oskar Schindler, before we knew the real story of his factory.

Likewise, good people may have bad ideas, and those with good ideas are not necessarily good people trying to lead you to a good goal.

If you retread my comment, I specifically said I have no respect for the people at the NSA (and USG in general) who have worked to create a global surveillance state.

Your question about the "janitor" is ridiculous. While he's the lowest on the pawn totem, I am specifically talking a out those who know that they have created the systems designed to spy on every man woman and child on the planet.

If you cannot separate these people from those in a janitorial position, then you're clearly attempting to sideline the discussion.

> If you retread my comment, I specifically said I have no respect for the people at the NSA (and USG in general) who have worked to create a global surveillance state

Well all I ask is that you keep that in mind next time you decry someone for working at NSA, or FBI, or any of a number of other agencies, unless you actually know what they've done.

People are all too willing to offload rational thought to the simple act of labeling. The Bush-style logic of "You're either with us or against us" was wrong when talking about terrorism, and it's still wrong when you're talking about the NSA, or even government in general.

Let people be evaluated for what they actually do, not merely for where they showed up for work. In case you're wondering, this does mean that I don't support excluding Feds from a conference just because they're Feds, arrest powers or otherwise... though you could ask the agency not to send their employees on official duty since we oppose the agency's actions itself.

this is rank hypocrisy. The NSA is simply using what "security researchers" have been talking about at Defcon for years. One lone hacker gets into a telecom's system and he makes a name for himself (or herself). A government agency does it and everyone gets on their sanctimonious high horse when all the NSA is doing is taking hacking to its next logical step, government weaponization of hacking. .

We the People don't take kindly to our elected and appointed Public Servants openly lying to us with impunity about programs which are most definitely against the spirit and intent of the Bill of Rights.

There's no comparison between some "lone hacker" and our own government entities.

The idea that we should accept what the NSA et al have been doing in our name simply because it might be the next logical step is preposterous!

The next logical step is extermination camps, and the parallels between our current IC & that of Nazi Germany are too numerous to ignore.

That our government wastes so much on these spy programs while simultaneously neglecting our own people is unforgivable.

Hypocrisy has no place in our government, but that's exactly what we have now.

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