NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference
forbes.com
forbes.com
Heckling Alexander played right into the strategy. It gave him an opportunity to look reasonable compared to his detractors, and, more generally (and alarmingly), to have the NSA look more reasonable compared to opponents of NSA surveillance. It allowed him to "split the vote" with audience reactions, getting people who probably have serious misgivings about NSA programs to applaud his calm and graceful handling of shouted insults; many of those people probably applauded simply to protest the hecklers, who after all were making it harder for them to follow what Alexander was trying to say.
There was no serious Q&A on offer at the keynote. The questions were pre-screened; all attendees could do was vote on them. There was no possibility that anything would come of this speech other than an effectively unchallenged full-throated defense of the NSA's programs.
Even the premise of the keynote was calculated to wrong-foot NSA opponents. However much you might want to hear Alexander account for the activities of the NSA, the NSA itself is not the real oversight mechanism for the NSA! My guess is that no pol with meaningful oversight over NSA would have consented to address a room full of technology professionals about NSA's programs; they were happy to send NSA's own supremely well-trained figurehead to do that for them.
I think a walkout might have been effective, had it been organized well enough in advance (perhaps with some of the same aplomb as the [I think misguided] opposition to CISPA); at least you'd get some stinging photos.
Now, if he had a full blown press conference with civilian attendees, then, well...
He was recruiting. Don't let the tattoos and black shirts worn by the crowd fool you, many work and/or consult for the government.
Your write-up of Alexander is spot on. He has been referred to both the most powerful and the most feared man in the world.
Again, the truth is simple: it was a press op. The event was corporate enough that nobody was going to throw pies at him, but just countercultural enough that he could be assured that someone would make him look better by heckling.
It was said, which is basically confirmed with this latest revelation, that he has all the information on everyone and can blackmail anyone....
I am trying to recall where I heard that though, originally.
"I’ve been tough on Spitzer, but we can’t forget that the reason he got in trouble was because of the new NSA domestic surveillance apparatus that was so brilliantly depicted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Here’s the Lede.
Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon
anti-terrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data
about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious
patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on
Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks.
But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National
Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance,
has been building essentially the same system.
I haven't actually seen the Black Hat talk yet, but I can imagine the audience does not compare favorably to another recent PR event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fawN4OZEt-Y
This kind of thing helps build up the conscious and unconscious associations in the minds of many that favor the NSA a great deal.
To the extent that this audience has any engagement with public policy, that engagement is likely to take a Ron Paul-ish flavor.
Notice how he wore his uniform this year instead of something more casual like he did at last year's Def Con. I agree, this was very carefully orchestrated to help discredit his detractors.
Given the nature of the technical problems they face, they would have to be pretty incompetent to not be good at recruiting from engineering universities.
"Would you rather build yet another CRUD app, or build systems that trawl through 20+ TB of data every day?"
Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe.
The irritating thing about this is that most of us aren't taught ethics. Most people don't take philosophy courses. Most people don't take civics courses. We're expected to just figure it out through osmosis.
It's not about pliability. Most people never actually develop their own approach to ethics.
I suspect that one could teach an excellent non-religious Sunday School class by only asking difficult questions. The only people who scare me more than people who have never thought much about ethics are the ones who think they know The Answer.
These are all huge opportunities to teach ethics. We don't take them, because ethics isn't a marketable skill and has always been an implicit lesson. So we wrote standards and tests and teach to those and now here we are. Most people who graduate from high school do so believing that democracy is a flawed-but-least-flawed model of government they just have to endure, that history consists of great figures who dwarf the capabilities of the little people, and that actually understanding the breadth of our social fabric is pretty much impossible.
Ethics? Ethics is whatever doesn't piss off your best friend and still gets you laid.
I took Ethics as an elective during my C.S. undergrad and I think it's still in the top 3 of the most-formative individual courses of study I've ever undertaken. I'd highly highly recommend people take ethics or philosophy classes, if only to see how even the simplest scenarios can have complex dilemmas.
E.g., the nice person at the mortgage issuer said the loan was good for them, so they just signed what he told them. And the mortgage guy was just doing what his boss told him. And that boss was just following the incentive plan set up. And the people buying the mortgages in bulk seemed happy with them, as did the ratings agencies. But in my view, most or all of them acted unethically; one can't swim in the mud and come out clean.
Or take a look at the content of a medical ethics class: http://web.missouri.edu/~bondesonw/MedicalEthicsSyllabus.htm...
Even if everybody wants to do the right thing, what the right thing is hard to figure out. Ethics classes force people to think things through. They can't make a sociopath healthy, but they can help everybody else to sort out right from wrong in complicated situations.
To draw an analogy, most programmers can write code. But programming class isn't really about teaching a language's order of operations or explaining its particular grammar: the value of a programming class has to do with its explanations of modularity and data encapsulation, of structuring flow and conceptualizing objects. Then examples are provided that exercise these explanations so that you can apply them in future situations.
Those young people look strongly to the culture defined in large part by conferences like Defcon and BlackHat in order to make their choices. For many of them, the trip to LV is the highlight of their year. If the culture of those events changes to be substantially hostile to the NSA and its employees, I can believe that young people in that demographic would at least think twice about joining the NSA.
Basically, I think keynotes like this are part of a cultural war for this community, and I think it's an important one.
Wow. That's really above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks for being one of the good guys. Sometimes it doesn't feel like there are any left.
I also wish that Good Will Hunting were required viewing, if only for the NSA monologue.
I think it's also worth mentioning that while sometimes indistinguishable, BlackHat != Defcon, even if tptacek wants them to be.
Abu Dhabi anyone?
Q: "[..]Does the NSA really keep a file on anyone? [...]"
A: "[..] Frist, no, we don't [...]"
Absolutely astonishing!
listen/watch here: http://youtu.be/tz0ejKersnM?t=33m2s
Not technically the same as a blanket ban, but they were pretty clear that they didn't want anyone attending while representing federal agency...
News shows and websites will tell the story about a reasonable-seeming establishment guy going to give a speech, and a bunch of weird-looking hackers acting unruly.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/23/police-infiltration-of...
I'm certain that this infiltration will be a pretty standard play; you can bet the security services also have people who get extra money at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Skype etc.
"Ubiquitous surveillance prevents millions from speaking
freely. BlackHat keynote attendees, let's not let Gen.
Alexander speak freely today."
I think the thing that made this disruption ineffective is the majority of attendees weren't black-hat hackers. They were mostly corporate professionals. See Black Hat's own demographic survey http://www.blackhat.com/docs/bh-us-12/sponsors/bh-us-12-spon...
It's therefore not really surprising that most of the audience wanted to hear the general speak, and was annoyed by the disruption.
If, on the other hand, the general were speaking at DEFCON I think he probably would have been almost unanimously booed off the stage. But the feds are staying away from DEFON this year (for that reason).
So in retrospect, I think the disruption was a miscalculated PR move for the hacker community.
If that's the narrative we want to create, then I think we need to take every opportunity we can to inject whatever cultural influence we can, because keynotes like this are the NSA's effort to do the opposite. I agree that one or two people heckling doesn't mean much, but I appreciate the bravery of the people that were disruptive, and I only wish that everyone there critical of Gen Alexander had contributed to an enormous chorus of boos and forced him off the stage.
In the end, at the very least the title of this story is "NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference" rather than "NSA director universally applauded by Black Hat security conference."
I think the walkout would have had the benefit of creating a wall of peers waiting outside the conference hall watching their peers who refused to participate. Also, again, good photo op.
It's funny, you and I are on the same page about wanting to disentangle software security (and I guess infosec) people from USG/SIGINT/LEO work, but for I suspect are somewhat different reasons. So many people on HN seem to think the whole industry is in the back pocket of the USG, which just isn't true; I think a lot of people considering careers helping with online privacy think they need to surrender their moral qualms about assisting the USG, which just isn't true.
I mean, can you imagine how horrible this would have turned out if he didn't stay calm? It's basically standard procedure to stay calm and try to explain your way out of it. Sure, he got some applause, and the heckler got some applause too. I think anyone could have imagined something like that happening.
A joke in every sense, then. Audacious. He leads with a bit of humor, then says,
> and I do want to give a chance for you to ask some questions. Hopefully they'll be easy ones, and I have a crew here that can answer the hard ones if I need to.
The existence of nuclear weapons has rendered traditional warfare unprofitable, except against the very weak, and even in those cases only military contractors benefit.
We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories.
I expect in the long drawn out economic warfare to come that cyber espionage and surveillance to be critical advantages & well connected military contractors with access to the NSA's total information awareness database to profit handsomely from insider trading.
Update & Question:
I'm taking a short break from work and wondering why this comment has been down voted twice?
Instead of down voting & unless you just hate ST: DS9 references, can you provide a plausible argument against the inevitability that tapping the entire world's communications will not lead to insider trading?
There are so few terrorists in the world, and so many opportunities to profit from having early access to employment reports, corporate revenue numbers and other economic data.
Please give me a compelling reason why a wiretap on all the worlds communications is more likely to be used to catch terrorists than for simple greed?
...a "business" which companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. are certainly doing/planning on doing too, at least indirectly, privately or otherwise under the radar.
They can also simply look at the correlations between the movements of their data and the market movements, and then make their predictions and thus investment decisions. It's not even rocket science.
Given their "Big Data" treasures, I don't think they will be able to resist that temptation.
This is another reason why I generally see a future of decentralization: it's simply a concept that's less prone to corruption and failure.
The trillions in national debt benefits somebody. Somebody somewhere gets those interest payments and they wouldn't have if the U.S had not borrowed from them.
As an aside I never read that Hussein had threatened to flood the market, I read that he threatened, as a negotiating tactic, to withhold oil. Do you have a source for the "flooding the market" claim?
Example: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,998512,00.h...
For values of "for other things" of creating a massive flood of dollars on the world financial markets, undercutting its value, and precipitating a financial crisis the likes of which the US still hasn't seen.
Truth is the story's likely complicated.
We blew a trillion bucks on nothing useful. That's destroyed value. That somebody is benefitting in some small way from the side effects of this doesn't change that fact overall.
To reduce it to more comprehensible terms, imagine that I take out a $10,000 loan to buy a car, then crush that car into a cube. That's one less car in the world than before. That's a waste of $10,000 in value. That my creditors benefitted because they got interest off the loan doesn't change that fact.
In this case of a trillion dollar war, the cost is to the US taxpayer, and the soldiers who fight the war.
The economic benefits go to military contractors, the various war departments of the USG who need reasons to keep their budgets intact, and holders of the US Government's debt (http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/politicalcalculations...)
This perspective, horribly, leans towards moving the large bulk of defense spending into the category of non-essential goods like cable tv, or beer, football, shopping at pottery barn. This is spending with a focus on the psychological state the good induces.
On the other hand, a true believer in the project of us military probably really feels that resources spent on war are actually essential to survival and should be categorized with spending on food, shelter,medical care, insurance.
There's a profound paradox here.
If this was all capitalistic private enterprise, it would be much simpler. The people who saw value in it would contribute whatever money they thought was worthwhile, and that would be the "value" of the effort. I kind of doubt that most of the people who feel the war was necessary would actually put up the $3,000 per person if they had to write a check for it, but who knows.
When you get government involved, the question of value becomes much more complex.
I don't think the US far right is quite that farsighted or quite that cynical. However, I've historically been too optimistic about the American power elite, so I wouldn't take my word for it.
Just a few days ago was the 75th anniversary of Henry Ford getting a medal from Hitler. I guess we learn from history that we don't learn from history.
Those boys aren't so interested in "starving the beast" as they are in feeding their wealthy constituent-donors. We need campaign finance reform.
Obama's promises sounded very compelling and believable, too - until we learned the facts of his actions after he already won his 2nd mandate. I think it's important to remember that whenever you hear a politician speaking nicely without anything real to back it up. Otherwise we'd doomed to repeat the same mistakes, over and over and over again, fooled by master actors.
If this is how it goes in the United States, and the U.S. is held up as the standard for freedom, how is that good for the rest of the world?
BUT, you're making it sound like getting heckled on stage was desirable. I don't agree. I think it is more appropriate to say that the NSA is between a rock and a hard place. They could either...
* Get heckled and look culpable, but maintain the illusion that they give a shit what the general public thinks, or...
* Not attend and completely look like assholes hell bent on violating civil liberties.
Keith Alexander didn't win any friends by getting heckled. He just made fewer enemies.
I think they're between breaching the constitution with far-reaching surveillance the Stasi would've given their left nut for, and hiding behind secret courts to legitimise their acts through rubber stamping. The surveillance continues. The genie is out of the bottle, justified by the biggest lie you were told - i.e. that there ever was a rock or hard place to begin with.
In my mind, I imagine what I wrote above as being disinformation 101.
Aside from that, It struck me that a lot of people at conferences like this are on the NSA payroll one way or another. I'd hardly call the group a bunch of freedom fighters.
(the whole keynote is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvVIZ4OyGnQ)
Alexander didn't score any points for himself or his organization by coming off like he has something to defend besides American citizens.
0. The intros were more than courteous, they were gushing
1. "Holding questions to the end" was an obvious grinfuck
2. The 8 minutes of q&a seemed completely prepared
3. It also had a sense of "we're hiring"
Having lost a brother who deployed as a signals operator in Afghanistan (to an IED), it always makes me cringe whenever they use forward-deployed soldiers as a defense of the higher-level states "nobility". There is nothing noble about mass surveillance or the invasion of privacy of non-enemy combatant nations/citizens.
The fact citizens signed up to risk their lives in combat-zones at the bottom end of the chain does not legitimize the actions of those at the top.
In another context they might be called human shields. Shields in the PR war.
I'm sorry for your loss.
You can argue all you want, but in the end, some boundaries have to be set. What the NSA did (does actually) is way past that boundary for most people, and I think with reason, but that's another debate. He hasn't supplied any argument that would make us reconsider the boundaries. All this terrorist talk is bullshit.
I'm not liking the vibe of the audience there.
I imagine a bunch of these Black Hat people fancy their big payout using their skills for evil.
Still, pretty disgraceful.
What I've been wondering about though, is the legal definition of "effects" (noun, not verb). That term seems very broad to me, and should include emails, but I'm not a lawyer.
This is nothing new, read up on J. Edgar Hoover with his wiretapping and files on almost everybody. Sometimes with White House knowledge and approval, sometimes without. All this while completely ignoring that quaint document down the street called the Constitution. Doing things like that is easy if you can hand over a note to someone that starts out "It'd be a shame if people found out about [insert criminal/embarrassing act here]." Information is power.
The problem is that people foolishly assume that the plaintext packets they send online are private by default. As in real life, good privacy can only be assured by significant effort on the part of the communicants. Is it evil to observe something occurring on a public street corner? It is not different to observe something occuring on a public IP router.
The postal system is a public utility. Should it be filtered? What we're arguing now is why one envelope is special. I put my communications in paper envelope and I'm protected, but when I put it in an SMTP envelope, I'm not. I'd like someone to rationalize that.
As far as I'm concerned, let's do it one way or another. Either protect email or start OCRing the post.
Don't be dense. Letters are easily intercepted and read, but we still expect that the government is not doing so because the constitution forbids that sort of behavior and the judicial branch is supposed to protect us from it.
You're conflating privacy with security. Security requires encryption, etc... privacy exists in the absence of monitoring devices.
If you are "vibrating the air" in public, then yes, you should realize that there could be a microphone nearby that records what you're saying (and in fact, in modern practice, there is a microphone on pretty much every person you see, any of which could be recording at any time).
> people foolishly assume Yes those ignorant fools deserve everything they get for not being security enthusiasts, and for assuming good faith on the part of their government, right?
I also found disheartening the applause given to the general for his clever answers. "I have. So should you"?! I expected more from the Black Hat crowd.
And, finally, I applaud Jon McCoy for his sacrifice. His willingness to endure all the cavity searches he'll be subjected to before and after every flight inspires us all.
They aren't really the same cryptologists that we think of, and they aren't the same guys who are writing programs to go through our phone records.
The majority of cryptologists who are forward deployed are there to ensure that the cryptography is used correctly. Despite many years of attempts to make it easier to use, cryptography. especially for portable radios, is a pain in the ass to use. People have to be trained. Areas have to be made where crypto equipment is stored and secured. Deficiencies in use have to be identified. That's what those people are for.
With the fact that we've had more than two million troops deployed during the War on Terror, I'm actually surprised that the number of NSA cryptologists is at 6,000. They must be very senior people.
"The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults, finds that 50% approve of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 44% disapprove. These views are little changed from a month ago, when 48% approved and 47% disapproved."
http://www.people-press.org/2013/07/26/few-see-adequate-limi...
Even if polling shows a lack of discontent, it does not mean they were voting rationally. The emotional fear machine of terrorism will always sway towards totalitarianism policies. But if the majority of those citizens were honestly questioned about having their phones (and their entire families) monitored, I doubt they would be for it.
Irrationality and logical fallacies are flourishing on both ends of the spectrum (citizens and politicians), and there are few vocal voices in between correcting the bullshit.
What's missing are leaders (aka media) evaluating and promoting policies based on rationality reasoning rather than what emotional ploys that sell.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-ebook/...
Leaders in media have no external incentive to promote rationality. They make money by appealing to their audience, to increase the size and loyalty of that audience.
There is no solution.
The best I could think of is tightening the reins through FCC licenses, revoking them for intentional deception (although good luck proving this in a way that can't backfire.)
Unless you want the state to control everything, how do news organizations make the money they need to put on the broadcasts, if not with ratings? They have to sell something to somebody right? Should the US have a licensing system like they have in Britain?
There are newscasts on PBS but almost nobody watches them (I do, but then I used to work at a small PBS station) and tote bags can only get you so far.
I believe that's pretty central here. I don't see how we can ever be able again to trust an organism such as the NSA - or even the government.
Transparency is the only solution here. Will we get it?
If we don't, the only other solution would be to cut budgets so drastically that such an enterprise will simply not be possible financially, anymore.
And maybe, as a general improvement: Decentralize the government and give the States back their autonomy (and here you have your link between technology and politics - see the recent cry for less "political posts" on HN).
We won't. This cancer is a one-way street. It will kill the organism and kill itself with it. And they know it. That's why they buy billions of ammunition rounds and dispatch lightweight tanks throught the states borders. They know that history repeat itself and they don't want another fourth of July to be celebrated in 500 years now (this time US 2.0 that bunch of clever people used GIT to form a better government). NSA systems are not in place to save you and your family from terrorist -- terrorism needs to be wisely guided; some need to leak through so that you and your family keep being scared, submit to the State and pay more taxes for more "safety". Terrorism is not on their agenda. Had they not let shoe bomber and Boston bombers do what they did, me and you would protest against more surveillance (with Boston bombers officials were inconveniently kept notified by russian government) because we would have been felt safe.
> Transparency is the only solution here. Will we get it?
We won't and we can't. They will oppose it saying that if we tell you what we do, bad guys will use it. Nothing will change this approach. Manning did a huge leak of gov docs and military officials said many lives will be lost as a result; other than Arab spring that did not happen on US soil, nothing happened at all. It was a bluff that they will continue using.
> If we don't, the only other solution would be to cut budgets so drastically that such an enterprise will simply not be possible financially, anymore.
Its not that simple. Even President of United State does not know how many black-ops agencies exist within the goverment. Some entities of the gov sponsor themselves God only knows doing what. If you cut their air supply, they will go to CIA and say: "here are the tapes when you and other officials are negotiating deals with drug cartels in Afganistan, here is a conversation where smuggling is being organized to move tons of heroine into US on a military aircraft, sponsor our venture or we will leak the info". And there you have it. Most likely dirty branches of gov do not need public money but of course they will take it anyways.
I didn't know this, but I was thinking along the same lines when I read about the "anti-missile blimps" being deployed over DC. I mean it's as if they "prepared for what's coming".
So you seem to think that there is actually no real solution apart from letting things fall apart and then "start from scratch"?
I'd be really interested to hear what other people see as potential solutions for all this.
And WTF was that, now?
EDIT: I guess this is true because actually, he lied to the chairs in the room. Or some coffee mugs that were also present.
Is that how one evades a lie detector, btw?
It really can't get any sicker. We have now reached the bottom.
Then this came out later: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-spying-fla...
And now this: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-...
And then, is Obama part of the same category? The contrast between how he's been selling to us and what's really happening is just too much.
"In general I agree with McCoy in his ad-hoc debate with Gen Alexander as well as his post presentation remarks about the distorted perspective of national security. At the same time, I do conceed that the NSA is acting in good faith and ‘within the law’ as presented to them via the Patriot Act. I have similar feeling about the value of TSA, but whereas the TSA is a publicly disclosed program, my most pressing concern with the NSA is the secrecy of it. First, the secrecy presents an extremely high degree of risk (in terms of both the probabilty of occurance as well as the dangers) of mission creep. I doubt Congressional nor FISC oversight are adequate to mitigate this risk. Second, secrecy is not really a valid tool for deterence. Anti-terrorism programs are like a doomsday devices: it’s a good deterence only if it is widely known about (see Dr Strangelove). Moreover, while secret programs might be good for support of kill/capture programs, it is far from clear that such efforts reduce terrorism.
For all I know, the government spy/drone program is to terrorists as a hammer is to an ant colony. If you have a spilled pot of honey in the kitchen, it doesn’t matter how good you are at spotting and smashing ants. I want to know these things, so that I can help shape public policy through the ballot box." --uspatriot2001
I think that's a good assessment of the high-level picture, and it's much more informative than "NSA BAD! Freedom good!" (not to belittle anyone's comments here) in that it reflects a road forward.
While everyone else on this subject is going to be armchair-debating whether or not the article is a fair representation of what happened... I'm going to just listen into the audio myself and make my own opinion.
It would have been easy for the situation to devolve into something much uglier, but fortunately it seems like things stayed pretty calm!
Especially one who seems to be running an illegal and unconstitutional program like Gen. Alexander.
Law is akin to code, and suffers from the same complexity-induced limitations that end up as the halting problem. With enough indirection, meanings and definitions divert wildly from what they purport. This divergence starts as soon as abstraction enters the picture - for example the widespread tendency to see rights as "primitives" that are acceded when forming higher-level emergent structures. Participation in the higher-level structure becomes de facto mandatory, and those purported rights end up nowhere to be seen. And once this erosion process starts, it becomes harder and harder for anybody to see that their rights should apply universally, rather than just in a nondescript wood shack on unincorporated land in Wyoming.
I guess I feel that the average hacker has a better understanding of the platonic ideal or "most correct" interpretation of the Constitution than Gen. Alexander.
Q: "[..]Does the NSA really keep a file on anyone? [...]"
A: "[..] Frist, no, we don't [...]"
Absolutely astonishing!
listen/watch here: http://youtu.be/tz0ejKersnM?t=33m2s
Also, the organisers invited him because they thought you might want to hear what he has to say, so you do it out of respect for them.
Playing nicey-nice with people that have little to no conscience doesn't work as a method of political change.
Politicians are already one of the most reviled groups around, and that doesn't discourage them.
Stage effective, organised opposition that will actually threaten their plushy careers, then they'll listen.
Politeness is reserved for society, not for antisocial personalities.
The best it can do is surprise him for a millisecond, then let him write you off as an "unserious" person to be briefly patronized and then devoutly ignored (or worse, add you to a list of "interesting" persons).
If Joseph Welch had been "polite" to Joe McCarthy instead of talking to him like the opportunist that he was, McCarthy would have stayed in business.
"Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness...Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad...It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentle man but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me."
When McCarthy tried to renew his attack, Welch interrupted him:
"Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
McCarthy tried to ask Welch another question about Fisher, and Welch cut him off:
"Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this further with you. You have sat within six feet of me and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have seen fit to bring it out. And if there is a God in Heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further. I will not ask Mr. Cohn any more questions. You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness."
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_N._Welch#Army.E2.80.93Mc...
But that's a far cry from yelling "bullshit" at the back of a conference room.
What they're doing is bullshit and they should be reminded of it every second of every day by anyone that can tell them.
Why would you think that was the desired outcome? If I'd been the one heckling him, I can guarantee you my thinking would not have been anything along the lines of "I want this guy to listen to what I have to say, consider it carefully, and then decide something". Why? Because I'm pretty close to 100% sure that Keith Alexander doesn't give a flying fuck what I think about anything, and never will no matter what I say. Hey, in an ideal world, I'd be wrong, and I hope I am. But I wouldn't bet a plug nickel on it.
No, if I'd been there and been heckling him, it would have been solely in the hopes of invoking the "someone must go first" aspect of crowd psychology, and hoping to see him booed off of the stage... because I think having that happen, and having it reported that that happened, would send a powerful message to everybody involved... Alexander, members of Congress, the public at large, and other hackers.
then let him write you off as an "unserious" person to be briefly patronized
I don't see any reason to think that that isn't his opinion of everyone in the crowd from the moment he walked in. Remember, to these NSA guys, people like us are "the enemy". When he stands on a stage and looks out at a crowd, he isn't seeing law-abiding, honest, hard-working American citizens worthy of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights - he's seeing a room full of "potential terrorists".
Disappointing if true. I can't imagine anything that Keith Alexander would say that is deserving of applause. The guy deserves no quarter.
Who really deserves no quarter here?
That said, I think the audience should have received him with absolute silence. No applause, no heckling, nothing to betray the mood of the crowd. Let's see how the General Alexander feels about a thousand eyes scrutinising him with no clue as to what they're thinking or planning. Then maybe he'll have an idea about what it feels like to be on this side of the equation.
I disagree. When chatting with Faust, I think it's better to avoid the drawn out conversation and just tell him to fuck off. This Alexander guy is a liar and a felon (lying under oath to congress) and has earned our collective disrespect. He deserves a lot more than "bullshit!" He's a domestic terrorist that's infiltrated the government as far as I'm concerned.
What matters is choosing a strategy that will be effective in exposing this intel-gathering to public scrutiny. One person shouting is not such a strategy.
It's the difference between individual catharsis and effective political strategy that produces an outcome.
I don't think there is one. So let him know you think he's an arsehole while you have the chance because nothing you can say or do is going to change the general's stance on this issue. He's above the law and completely unaccountable. But he's not beyond being called out for being a bad person by another person, and I suspect that's the closest you're going to get to justice on this issue.
But no matter what you do, it's totally futile. The NSA knows what you think, and they don't care.
If you choose to shout him down (e.g., for a messy and still-controversial example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Coalition_to_Unleash_Power...) you'd better have a united message and a goal, and media present. And it might still be a bit of a mess. (I had the privilege of attending a lecture on organizing by one of the leaders of this action.)
Other choices are to turn your backs on the speaker, or to walk out en masse.
I'm not sure there was time to prepare for this one, because these revelations are so fresh.
*
By the way, you seem pessimistic that this state of affairs can change due to grassroots action. I don't share your pessimism. When people find out the NSA has been scooping up their e-mail and Facebook chats?
The argument, such as it is, would go something like this: Instead of physical terror, the policies Alexander pursues create a psychological terror that jeopardizes "our way of life". Instead of a fear of being blown up, we have a fear of persecution for what we say.
A terrorist thinks he is beyond the law and uses his limited power to create fear in a population in order to achieve his ends, which the majority does not support. That's a description that seems to apply to Alexander.
I know he's different, but he's definitely not as different as he thinks.
DEFCON is a community event for anybody and is totally anonymous (entry fee is only payable by cash in person) and has a more freewheeling, community feel.
Boing Boing has the same coverage with a much more reader-friendly site design: http://boingboing.net/2013/07/31/nsa-capo-heckled-at-black-h...
The 2013 Keynote is now on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvVIZ4OyGnQ&t=5m
-- Alexander begins at 5 minutes in
-- no slides visible in video
-- 'heckling' @ 39minutes in)
-- TLDR: One cropped screenshot of 'telephone metadata', assurances of internal audits, a thumbup from a Senate sub-committee.
Slides: https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/us-13-Alexander-keynote.pdf
The crowd's reaction was definitely mixed.
While I think some people don't how to speak up, beside calling/writing my congress person, many don't care either way. In fact, many older people I have talked to (I am in my twenties) dont have a problem with what the NSA is doing. They dont really mind if their data is being sifted through as long as its being used to "Find Terrorists or what have you."
My problem is the lack of oversight and the fact court that has approved 1,789 out of 1,748 requests (97.7%!!!!). Not only that but they have legal justifications for what they are doing, therefore since its legal its allowed, forget the morals/ethics involved.
Who's to say they won't turn this around on the public at large because it will prevent smaller crimes instead of terrorists. Also whats to stop the government from calling people who oppose their views terrorists and then just spy directly at American people.
Right, so they end up like Snowden...
Can anyone speak as to why, with the NSA's systems, they were not able to thwart an attack by the ass clowns in Boston? Russia even warned us about them and they made frequent contact with foreigners.
I'm sorry, but that terrorist event seems like low hanging fruit if their system really works to protect us.
One obvious possibility is that the system that has been erected simply needs fear to be able to continue to exist.
Let some attacks happen (and some Taliban prisons break) from time to time and people can be and will be manipulated via fear, so the powerful stay powerful and the rich become richer. Same old, same old...
Next stop: Middle Class Gone.
Then, people will have nothing to lose again and wake up. Next, we'll have riots and one day, the old system is dead and history will repeat itself once more. So much for the long term.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise, either. Surveillance is not effective for preventing crimes. It is somewhat more useful for investigating crimes after they've happened.
Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were granted legal permanent residence in 2007. Dzhokhar became a nautralized citizen in 2012. Tamerlan's application was on hold due to the DHS being a little suspicious of him.
If the system is working as it should, the NSA could have been prohibited from monitoring the brothers.
Domestic terrorism is domestic and therefore under the FBI's purview. And despite what Snowden seems to think about mind-reading programs, unless either brother put out on the public Internet or phone communications what they were planning to do, there would have been no way for NSA to pre-emptively detect it even if they were warrantlessly monitoring all domestic communications.
So in a way your question is equivalent to asking why ASLR didn't stop that CSRF attack on the web page you just viewed.
It also takes a lot of courage to do just that. And people with courage are rare. They need our support. People who are 2 inches away from getting loud need our support. Because they are the people who can start the chain reaction that is so urgently needed now and that will not happen if we collectively shut up and just stay polite. We have been seriously betrayed and we have now every reason, right and duty to break free from the rules which were appropriate for the times "when things were good".
So I think he did just what everybody should have done - in a perfect world.
I thought everything but the "read the constitution!" heckle was well timed and on point. I only wish that more had joined in.
Those in power keep trying to present this as a "conversation" or a "dialog," but that's absolute bullshit. They're not actually trying to have a conversation, so we shouldn't behave as if that's what's happening. The most powerful thing we could have done would have been to boo him off the stage.
Exactly this. I was hoping that when I clicked through on this story, that I would read about that happening. Sadly, twas not to be.
Even if it was a niche hacker conference that most "regular" people have never heard of, if he'd been booed off of the stage and the media had given it any attention at all, it would have been a symbolically meaningful moment and a powerful message.
Here's one alternative idea: If you can organize enough people for it to look good on camera, a coordinated walk-out could be effective. Tip off a few key press folks in advance, so they know to shoot B roll of people walking out. Then you hold a short press avail in the hall outside the ballroom, delivering a statement with all the people who walked out massed behind you.
It's still confrontational, which the press likes, but it appears more civil and organized.
I disagree. It's important that we speak truth to power. If we don't then they won't hear our case. You don't think the president is wandering around Hacker News and Reddit looking for details do you? No. They employ PR firms or former employees of them to filter information back to reports which get filtered through various aides which finally makes it to the ear of the president.
However, when you stand and loudly speak your feelings, the message doesn't get filtered. That's an important part of the process.