They are the ones with unlimited technical resources. You don't have armed drones nor biological nor nuclear weapons. You are an hostage like everyone else. You might as well accept that fact for now and just enjoy life.
They are the ones with unlimited technical resources. You don't have armed drones nor biological nor nuclear weapons. You are an hostage like everyone else. You might as well accept that fact for now and just enjoy life.
For example, I know for a fact that a large number of intelligence tools are written on top of open source projects. That base did not come from the technical resources of the government (in most cases) but rather the collective ingenuity of the hackers and programmers that built it for various reasons. You can already see projects springing up with the intent of circumventing government technical oversight. This is going to result in an endless game of technical whack-a-mole where one side is motivated by a paycheck and the other is motivated by ideals and the desire for liberty.
I'm all for OSS. I believe this is going to cause a lot more people to take it and security seriously.
I don't see how that's really relevant, at all. Did you expect the USG to continue to use Windows instead of Linux for everything? Of course they're going to use tools available that others create. It doesn't mean they don't have unlimited resources. They can easily hire extremely intelligent and creative technical minds (we're talking about the NSA here, come on) and unfortunately, IQ does not mandate a specific political view. This was hard for me to accept, but there are some people much smarter than I am that hold very different positions on things. (Edit: To my knowledge, they are wrong, but caused by operating from different priors than I have.)
You're deluding yourself if you think that somehow the only good tech people are going to be "good guys".