The whole PRISM scheme worked because people supposed the government respected their privacy. Now that it's been proven false, I expect people to use local encryption schemes, were third parties can't give a key they don't have. I expect people to become careful about which certification authority signed their SSL key, and to use self-signed certificates whenever practical. Targeted spying will remain possible, but indiscriminate surveillance PRISM-style would become impractical.
Unless they know how to crack TLS, but we have no reason to believe this as of today.
I agree with you, but I think you have far too much faith in ordinary Americans. I invented some widely used anti-phishing technology, and I can tell you that spending a few months analyzing actual incidents where otherwise intelligent people did ridiculously unsafe things on the Internet will give you a new perspective on the tech savvy of the general population. Unless we (the tech community) make strong security both transparent to the user and enabled by default, the feds will be seeing everything they do. Sadly, most of them seem OK with that.
Moreover, even if only the 10% best informed people use PRISM-proof communications, it's a safe bet that NSA's alleged targets (whatever the current definition of "terrorist" might be) are among them, so the argument that they're doing that to catch "terrorists" doesn't hold water anymore.
I believe the tech community is concerned about this, because it threatens the robustness of Internet. Today, nobody in the business can pretend with a straight face that top-level certification authorities are trustworthy; so I expect the next generation of security protocols, the successors of the (transparent and enabled by default) SSL, to treat governments as opponents.
I also believe that companies will change their security patterns, e.g. stop trusting American third parties such as Microsoft if they have competitors with political connections in Washington.
Yes, please do alert users that self-signed certificates are potentially sourced by nefarious organizations. But in most cases, they are used by small companies and individuals to simply encrypted content from trusted servers. So allow them to be permanently trusted.
Perhaps we will see an increase in interest in web-of-trust alternatives?
The point is, if what you do interest the US government, it can compel Verisign and the likes to betray your trust, so you shouldn't trust them. And what emerges progressively is that the threshold beyond which you're deemed "interesting" by US administrations is way lower than long believed.
If you're a company doing international business, you want to secure your strategic communications with your own root CA, not with that of a company who can't say no to the government.
I do think that the average joe, doesn't know what a certificate or CA is, should be protected from automatically trusting an unknown CA.
It is if you're targeted. But then, if the US government is after you, you're already screwed anyway.
The point is to impede generalized surveillance of everyone without probable cause. Even if MS-Windows and OSX are bugged, which is almost certain, the NSA can't siphon all your data through your routers inconspicuously. It can only grab selected data from the computers of high-value targets, at a considerable cost, which is fine.
It's not about preventing states from surveilling legitimate suspects, it's about forcing them to respect the privacy of average joes, and limiting their control on the Internet as a whole.
fixed that for you
My completely anecdotal experience is that when people want privacy, they're starting to avoid all manner of electronic communication.
Take me as an example. I am 8 years in US, married to US citizen. Green Card holder now and couple years ago our plan was for me to become a US Citizen and us to raise our kids on US soil. Not anymore.
With all the outcoming gov scandals, with government forcing you to vaccine your kids, with you or your children going to jail for drawing a gun, for swat team breaking into your house because you are selling raw milk, for all this growing nonsense and my personal disgust with president that calls death of 4 us officials in Bengazi a "phony scandal", I am genuinely sick and disgusted of this to my deeper core. And here comes important part: so you say to me in response: if you don't like it, move out! And you are damn right!
We made this decision recently and right now my wife is learning my native language while I am shifting more towards doing more remote programming gigs. Surprisingly after I moved here from the country of communism, now it seems safer and more sane back in Europe than here! Europe has its problems of course, but honestly I believe Europe will deteriorate much slower than US. Here everything is on fast forward and yes examples like Manning or Snowden revelations and lack of echo makes it hard to believe anything will change for better in the future.
I believe I am not the only one who draw this conclusion lately. I also think that many smart people coming to this country to live "american dream" are also smart enough to realize the economical situation become so unstable that its better to "wait and see" back home.
Anyhow, I'm in Canada right now, and am in the next few years probably looking to change careers. I have good contacts with several top-tier tech companies in the US, and also with the auto industry and big oil. I've never really had much of a desire to live in the US, but now more than ever I'm finding myself looking to other potentially less lucrative positions just because of my distaste, much like the post above.
It really doesn't feel like a good time to be living in the US as a foreigner with an engineering degree, a very foreign sounding name and very liberal views. :-/
All other points aside for a moment: the government should force each and every parent to vaccinate their children. Herd immunity is a key factor in protecting most of the population from many awful diseases, and herd immunity is only effective if the vast majority are vaccinated. There's no credible evidence that vaccination causes autism or any other malady.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/199...
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/03/1...
http://www.mercola.com/article/vaccines/neurological_damage....
http://vactruth.com/2013/02/23/17-examples-of-vaccine-failur...
I could go on and on here like the vaccines business is create problem & offer solution infinite loop, but I hope you can do a research on your own.
Except that we know the backstory to this particular chicken/egg problem, and we know that in this case vaccines came last, after the problem they were meant to solve (and, substantially speaking, have solved).
America's longest-serving President was crippled no less than 100 years ago by a disease which vaccination can now prevent, and you're blaming Big Pharma for that???
> its perfectly logic you need to get shots against other peoples diseases BUT at the same time those who don't become a danger to you
You don't understand herd immunity. It amplifies a weak individual immune boost (say, a 40% effictive vaccine) into a dramatic effect on the actual number of people who get sick.
Here's how it works: consider the average number of new people an infected person will infect (call this number k). If k>1 (1.01 even), the disease very likely explodes across the face of the earth and turns into an epidemic or pandemic. If k<1 (.99 even), it fizzles and only a few get sick (do a stochastic simulation if you must). Point is, we care a lot about making k<1 by any means possible.
Vaccines are hard to make and not very effective in the sense that there is only maybe a 40% chance they will stop you from getting sick if others around you are sick. But that 40% success rate dramatically effects k so long as everyone gets vaccinated: if k<1.6 pre-vaccination, our hypothetical vaccine turns a pandemic into a fizzle.
If you're one of the assholes who spoil the whole thing by not getting vaccinated, your peers have every right to get angry with you. I wish you could be collectively sued for your effect on an outbreak, but I'll settle for a bit of government incentive.
> vaccines do not kill people
The FDA and EMA are dramatically overcautious when it comes to this kind of thing (they minimize the number of lives lost to drugs and vaccines even at the expense of not minimizing total lives lost). If you think otherwise, safety and efficacy studies are public. Start with primary sources, avoid hokey nonsense like what you posted. The FDA site is a mess but google can usually find specific studies with filetype:pdf.
> the vaccines business is create problem & offer solution
Pretty sure it's evolution (of bacteria and viruses) creating the problem, not drug companies. Or do you not believe in evolution either?
I wasn't clear in my first post. I am not against major vaccines, the problem is that today by age 8 you have many more shoot than those you had only 20 years ago. I fail to believe life on Earth change soo much that we all need so many more shots to survive.
Like with any other business, pharma sees opportunity to oversell and creates tons of unnecessarily shots that your local CSV loves to advertise. I also personally know an example of an older man who got a shot and 2 weeks later got sick exactly on something he was getting shot against. It doesnt make sense.
Oh, good :)
> today by age 8 you have many more shoot than those you had only 20 years ago
There are two factors at play. One is evolution: there's a new flu every year (bacteria and virii can meaningfully evolve in less than a year, even). The other is that we are finding ways to vaccinate against more and more diseases. The diseases always existed, but your odds of catching them were higher then than they are now even if you don't vaccinate yourself because of herd immunity. There are still plenty of diseases we don't know how to vaccinate against, so expect the trend to continue.
> pharma sees opportunity to oversell
Yeah, and the US system is particularly vulnerable to those pressures. There are still protections: you couldn't get a placebo approved, even a well designed one. But single-payer systems are much better at focusing on efficacy. The other side to that is the US gets drugs first and sometimes exclusively. Just because a vaccine falls below the threshold of what the EU is willing to pay doesn't mean it won't save hundreds or thousands of lives in the US. We pay twice as much for health care and this is one of the (very) few extra privileges we enjoy as a result. Best take advantage of it :)
> older man who got a shot and 2 weeks later got sick exactly on something he was getting shot against
I still don't think you grok herd immunity. Vaccines do very little to protect the individual. If you would have gotten sick before the vaccine, you would probably still get sick after the vaccine. But if everyone gets vaccinated, the disease dies away.
It's like a nuclear bomb. Below critical mass, it's just moderately radioactive. Above critical mass, you get a huge explosion. Vaccines keep a disease from getting to critical mass. They don't stop individuals from getting sick very well (they don't stop the radioactivity) but they reduce it just enough to prevent pandemics (nulear explosions).
When they regurgitate the content of a government press release or briefing without challenging both its basic premises and noteworthy claims, which they all do every single day, many times a day, the popular news media perfectly inhabits the role of "government mouthpiece". This includes the many instances of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other press-release ping-pong between the two allegedly opposed narratives provided by our two allegedly opposed political parties.
"to be the first to broadcast or distribute the story of an event."[1]
Snowden provided the information, the media absolutely broke the story.
Aware and concerned tech-heads are trying to protect a drunken fool (the public) from a hungry bear (whoever it is that actually runs the intelligence networks). Either one is dangerous enough on its own, trying to save one from the other is like trying to settle a domestic dispute... not sure it can happen.
I don't have an answer, just an analysis.
What self-important, self-aggrandizing bullshit.
Of course if it was just to feel good about calling out idiocy then it's not necessary to put in much effort countering it.
Nobody is guilty.
Nobody did anything wrong.
And money to the program continues to flow.
>Nobody did anything wrong.
True and true. If I am not mistaken, What we've witnessed from James Clapper and General Alexander, it is legal for representatives from our federal surveillance agencies to openly lie in a Congressional oversight hearing.
This of course, if fact, is insane, and will only lead into extralegal catastrophe. Learn to read and reread `Clapperspeak'. When you look for it and know a little context, we see how entrenched and truthfully revealing it is:
"And Ye Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Shall Make You Free"
- John 8:32, and the entrances of NSA, Fort Meade, Maryland, and the CIA HQ, Langley, VA
"Arbeit macht frei"
-Auschwitz, and the entrances of other Nazi slave labor camps during World War II
The law is now "in your face" optional, depending on how much money and/or power is involved. Power has always had undue influence, it is just flagrant now.
From what I read, this is fairly common among many countries, so I take it as part of the "human condition."
Tens of thousands of people called their congresspeople on a day's notice to express their support for the Amash Amendement. That amendment lost by only 12 votes. A large majority of people polled think that the NSA dragnet is infringing on privacy rights. I think that's pretty good for a notoriously apathetic populace. This issue is far from over.
The fact that Snowden may be a larger-than-normal individual news story doesn't change the fact that the story doesn't capture public attention in the face of the multitudes of other news stories continually cropping up and then going away again.
Look, if you hang with the hipsters who "consume" better media, then sure, you won't have any clue what the vast majority of the public cares about. It's not surveillance. It's whatever mass opiate has been focus-grouped out for the week.
In the meantime, though, that mass opiate is mainlined into every public space in the land on countless television monitors in essentially every place where a person has to spend more than 30 seconds. They've got no time to think about the future - they've got to be outraged about this week's 15-minute hate, or admire this week's baby, or fear this week's terrorist.
You may simply not visit those downscale places. Good on you. But Washington really doesn't care, except to the extent that you earn more money they can extract or possibly build more centralized data processing services they can mine.
Depending on what polls you read, a majority of Americans think the NSA policy is acceptable: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/most-americans-suppor.... ("Overall, 56 percent of Americans consider the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders 'acceptable,' while 41 percent call the practice 'unacceptable.')
The real news here is that Congress reacted more strongly than the public!
In fact, people don't "do something" because they estimate, rightly or wrongly, that they can't do anything that would make a difference. Millions worldwide protested the current US wars when they were getting started, but they went ahead on schedule. What, exactly, can citizens do to effectively influence their government anymore? If people perceive that rule of law is gone, the rational reaction is to "lie low" and hope to get thru these times unnoticed. Those still contacting congress may be old enough to remember a different USA and naive enough to not realize it is gone.
Snowden has gotten a lot more international coverage.