Comment by ericlavigne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericlavigne | Hacker News Reader

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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...

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