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Comment by malandrew | Hacker News Reader

    "For what it's worth, this is about the point where I get 
    off the Snowden train. It's true that some of these 
    disclosures are of clear public interest. In particular, 
    I'm thinking about the details of NSA efforts to 
    infiltrate and corrupt the standards setting groups that 
    produce commercial crypto schemes."

If anything this new information should put more people on the Snowden train. In the 90s, legislation was proposed which would have put backdoors everywhere via the Clipper Chip. Back then, we voted against that bill and all was good. This new information is shocking because we've already told the government that backdooring things was unacceptable behavior, yet they've done so anyways. We should all be outraged by this because it clearly doesn't represent the interest of the people.

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Kevin Drum (edited name) was relegated to an old guy who really doesn't get it when I read that paragraph. I understand the need to the NSA to have countermeasures and options - however this is in the public interest as it puts disclosure, privacy and breach laws in a very awkward position. It also asserts that there is no expectation of privacy within US borders on the Internet - that is unacceptable and complete bull shit. Soghoian said it best recently when he stated that it is not OK for the NSA to possess dragnet capabilities on all crypto.

Sorry Kevin, I think you've gotten off the wrong train - you landed in the land of complacency.

> It also asserts that there is no expectation of privacy within US borders on the Internet - that is unacceptable and complete bull shit.

Have you solved the problem of bright-line jurisdictional boundaries on the Internet? That doesn't just interest the NSA, it would surely interest tax agencies around the world.

The Clipper Chip didn't fail because of any vote, and a Congressional vote wasn't really necessary because it was intended to be a "opt-in" technology mainly for telcos and electronics manufacturers. It was never adopted due to backlash and criticism, but it's not as if they were explicitly banned from similar pursuits.

Of course, that isn't to say that this justifies recent actions or is really even relevant to the latest releases, but you made the connection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Thanks for the correction. I recalled history correctly since I was young at the time and failed to fact check.

I can't any record of a Congressional vote on the subject, only that its adoption was the subject of a proposed FIPS #185. I don't think your statement above is founded in fact.

I refer you to Michael Froomkin's lengthy but readable analysis from 1996: http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/planet_clipper...

It sounds like you're misunderstanding Kevin Drum's statement.

The sentences that you quoted are examples of leaks that Kevin Drum believes were in the public interest. Kevin supports these leaks because they are about what the NSA chooses to do, and are therefore necessary for public debate about US policy.

Kevin clearly distinguishes between leaking NSA behavior (as in your quote) and leaking NSA capabilities (which is in the following paragraph). The ability to decrypt certain types of encryption is the sort of technological advancement that we should expect military and intelligence agencies to make and to keep secret.

Here's the part where Kevin talks about specific Snowden leaks (about NSA capabilities) that he disagrees with:

   "But the rest of it is a lot more dubious. It's
   not clear to me how disclosing NSA's decryption
   breakthroughs benefits the public debate much,
   unlike previous disclosures that have raised
   serious questions about the scope and legality of
   NSA's surveillance of U.S. persons. Conversely,
   it's really easy to see how disclosing them harms
   U.S. efforts to keep up our surveillance on
   genuine bad guys. Unlike previous rounds of
   disclosures, I'm a lot less certain that this one
   should have seen the light of day."

How is knowing a crypto is no longer strong not in public interest? We would most certainly like to know if they have broken RSA somehow.

This latest leak reduces the NSA's effectiveness at whatever they are doing. That is a good thing if, and only if, the NSA does more harm than good.

It tells us nothing about whether the NSA does more harm than good. That is the key point that distinguishes this leak from previous leaks. This leak does more to reduce the NSA's effectiveness than to improve the quality of public debate about NSA policy.

(Previous Snowden leaks make me suspect that the NSA does do more harm than good... but I can disagree with Kevin's conclusion and still respect his position.)

It doesn't matter what the NSA does or has done with its capabilities. The NSA could be whiter than white, and but still be unsupportable and reprehensible, simply for building out the capabilities.

The vast majority of human history shows the powerful controlling the weak, usually through "legitimate" rule of convenient laws. Democracy, which inverts this with varying levels of effectiveness (the rich can still mostly buy their laws), is an aberration. But what the NSA has built is a turnkey system for an effective subversion of democracy: a database that can find anyone's dirty secrets, or, if necessary, plant the right kind of evidence.

It doesn't matter what the NSA has done so far. Sooner or later, someone with evil intent will use it. It's too much power, too centralized, too hidden, too tantalizing, for it not to be used.

And what is it all being built for? Stuff that is less risky than you getting in your car. There is zero existential threat to the USA from terrorism. It's not a credible excuse given the danger.

Exactly. It's probably one of the statements that is of most interest of the public because it is unescapable. When people learned about PRISM and cooperation of companies like Facebook and Google, they could choose to take their business elsewhere. With Lavabit, they could make an attempt at moving their data to legal jurisdictions beyond the reach of the United States government and its allies. However, with this new information, we now have learned that the very foundation of security in most of our software and hardware has been or may have already been compromised. This is as close as you can get to absolute dissolution of trust on the Internet and you need trust for markets to work; not only markets of goods and services but markets for the exchange of information and ideas.

Please tell me how we can talk about NSA behavior without disclosing capability used to enable such behavior.

Whether it is acceptable for the NSA to eavesdrop on private messages should not depend on whether those messages are protected by encryption. If I send an unencrypted email to a friend, is the NSA allowed to eavesdrop and get a copy of that email? That is a policy question that can be discussed and answered without any knowledge of the NSA's decryption capabilities.

If I was the NSA, I would flatly decline that we are doing any kind of eavesdropping at all. How would you prove we are eavesdropping? It is not like I am going to admit that information as evidence in a public court of law.

I think at this point we have to treat the NSA as guilty until proven innocent. Nothing they say, either to the public or publicly to our elected representatives Congress holds any water. How can we ever trust them again to be truthful?

Mostly true. (They won't deny EVERYTHING because that wouldn't be believable.)

If this argument is made convincingly in Congress, the NSA could lose funding, but that's a hard decision to make. Even if I am opposed to individual wars, that doesn't mean I would support complete disarmament. Foreign intelligence (and counter-intelligence) is an important part of any modern military. There needs to be public oversight without crippling US intelligence efforts. It's not clear how to accomplish that oversight. That is the discussion we really need to be having.

====

Edit: Looks like there is an official effort to increase oversight of the NSA. Quoting from a Sept 4 article on http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/

   "On August 12, 2013 President Obama directed the establishment
   of the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications
   Technologies."

Link to the press release about this review group: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/12/presid...

It should be noted that Mother Jones is generally regarded as a left-wing magazine - even by Wikipedia's description. [1]

From my understanding left-wing ideology has always placed the interest of the collective, represented by the state, over the interest of the individual. So the article and the author's conclusion seems to me completely in line with this way of thinking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones_(magazine)

Depends on what you mean by "left". The Democrats are called left in the US, but clearly right-wing by much of the world's standards. It's a business party. If you mean leftists like the anarchist-influenced Occupy movement (like David Graeber [1] who popularized "We are the 99%"), well obviously there's many anti-statist leftists. (No one's going to accuse anarchists of being pro-state.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

That's a very simplistic view of a very complicated history of political theories.

Anarchism, a doctrine that explicitly negates the State, is rooted squarely in the leftist camp as classically intended, and gives individuals freedom from being coerced in any collective action whatsoever.

You also have Libertarian Socialism, probably the most romantic of all leftist ideologies, which tries to bring collectivist and individualist theories together.

And then of course, the very source of the meaning of "left": the French Revolution, with its rights trifecta of freedom, fraternity and equality, which was born in complete opposition to the notion of the superiority of the State over individuals.

Saying "left-wing ideology has always placed the interest of the collective, represented by the state, over the interest of the individual" is like saying "right-wing ideology has always placed the interest of the rich, represented by the individual, to screw the poor, over the interest of society to improve as a whole" -- a simplistic mystification.

Don't forget Marxism, with the goal of "the withering away of the state."

Not always, but as it is practiced today in the United States, most certainly.

That stood out to me too. It's exactly at that point I would hope for the opposite reaction in the general public.

Maybe Kevin Drum can provide the government a live encrypted feed of his family's bathroom and bedroom. I'm sure they will only crack the encryption if they think a bad guy is on the video.

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