An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA | Hacker News Reader

An Open Letter to the Chiefs of EMC and RSA

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166 pointskoenrh28 comments

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Knew his name was familiar. Mikko Hypponen has some great Ted talks as well:

http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed...

http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_onlin...

http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_fighting_viruses_def...

Another great one is "The History and Evolution of Computer Viruses" [1].

I actually have the viruses he demonstrates. You can download them here [2]. He emailed them to me once. Just load them into DosBox!

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yswPIwDFYDY

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/rhqt3wh8hzuf8vn/dosboxViruses.zip

In the first of these talks, he correctly predicts (~8:30 in the video) on October 28 that US companies first eyeballed on the PRISM slides had been hacked by the NSA, two days before those revelations were made public on Oct 30 in the Washington Post [1].

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...

I'm an american and I care about widespread surveillance of foreigners.

2nd, and I'm not so certain backdoors like these are not used on all people.

Yeah, that honestly almost felt like a challenge to his fellow presenters and show caring by boycotting the conference as well.

EDIT, Also NSA is a intelligence agency: spying on foreigners seems to me like it'd be their objective, regardless of the revelations... Lets not act surprised about this now. Other foreign intelligence agencies do their share of spying on foreigners too (again, their objective). Unless you're stressing 'widespread'.

> "NSA is a intelligence agency: spying on foreigners seems to me like it'd be their objective, regardless of the revelations ... Other foreign intelligence agencies do their share of spying on foreigners too"

I don't know why we should find this more acceptable, whether NSA or foreign agencies. If it is supposed to be acceptable, than give every single person even greater power of surveillance of powerful government/corporate entities and their agents, given their power, they are more likely to do serious harm when unaccountable.

Whether or not it should be acceptable (aside: I'd agree it shouldn't), no one (few) was complaining until very recently. I mean why else have they been hiring the best mathematicians, cryptographers, & programmers with their billion dollar budgets? Acting like we didn't know it was to spy on foreigners until now is a bit disingenuous to me.

>Whether or not it should be acceptable (aside: I'd agree it shouldn't), no one (few) was complaining until very recently.

That's also a flawed argument. So what? Awareness has to built up for complaining to happen first -- and sometimes it doesn't even build up that much. Sometimes the complaining only happens after much damage has been done.

The existence or not of complaints against something doesn't justify it. People didn't complaint about slavery much back in the day either.

Yeah, I was stressing "widespread" as its unrealistic for any modern country to not commit some resources to intelligence gathering.

Spying on foreign governments is to be expected, but not very much against allies, and not at all against average non-politically-powerful citizens. That's going well beyond the duties of the job.

>Everyone expects them to be performing espionage

This comment is very trite. Everyone expects them to be performing espionage, but dragnet surveillance of civilians on this scale, domestic or foreign, is completely unprecedented and unacceptable.

>NSA is a intelligence agency: spying on foreigners seems to me like it'd be their objective, regardless of the revelations...

And the objective of the KKK was to spread fear on certain parts of the population. That doesn't make it OK. Objectives, even obvious ones, can be shitty too.

Also, spying on elect foreigners, doing targeted work to get intelligence data on terrorism etc is one thing. Spying on almost everybody on the world, and especially targetting politicians, allies, officials involved in trade deals, etc, is not what it should be doing. The German chancellor is not bloody Osama, and helping some major corporation get a stronghold in some country is not about "national security".

> helping some major corporation get a stronghold in some country is not about "national security".

While I agree with your overall message, and even the part I quote, if you think "holistically" then it is in the US interest to dominate trade negotiations through intelligence. For example, it's better for US national security if Brazil had bought a US fighter. It strengthens the financial health of Boeing, makes it easier for the US to keep up a certain level of capability (paid for by foreignors, win-win!), has money coming in to the US for decades as a result of the maintenance contracts, and there's a non-zero chance that the software for flying those planes have backdoors and loggers.

I'm not saying it's right, but the security forces and corporations are very much motivated for this to happen, with ready made excuses of national security to justify it.

I'm a person and I care about widespread surveillance of people.

Yes, this is the most important, that we are all people regardless of what identities were were born into or adopted since!

I was just responding to his point that "Americans wouldnt' care about surveillance of foreigners" which is why I marked myself as an American. Some of us care.

Initially I was surprised, then disappointed, and now just disgusted by how rare your position actually is.

Excellent principled stand by Mikko.

Minor problem ".... In fact, I'm not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are american anyway – why would they care about surveillance that’s not targeted at them but at non-americans."

Incorrect - NSA surveillance most definitely HAS targeted Americans in America. That is precisely what the Snowden disclosures show - leaving aside all the contortions of "Only Collecting data is not surveillance - Metadata is not Surveillance, etc, etc"

I'm 100% Mikko knows this and he is just being sarcastic.

Hmm ...complete Sarcasm fail on my part then. Getting harder and harder to tell.

Does not look like sarcasm to me either.

It's most likely a response to the 60 minutes feature episode on their (the NSA's) actions where they abstained from spying on Americans. If they were, they'd only target non-Americans.

"In fact, I'm not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are american anyway – why would they care about surveillance that’s not targeted at them but at non-americans. Surveillance operations from the US intelligence agencies are targeted at foreigners. However I’m a foreigner. And I’m withdrawing my support from your event."

I realy like all the double layers he put into this :D Its a joy to read.

Mass surveillance of foreigners vs. citizens is a red herring anyway, since the national agencies can easily get around such restrictions by swapping data, or by declaring data "foreign" when it travels over international networks. And those are just the workarounds we've heard about.

Thanks for taking a public stand against this. I like to muse about whether the rot is so entrenched that anything can clean it out now, but principled people taking a stand is a good thing.

You should hold it at 30C3 instead (unless it's too late to sign-up now).

Can't make it to Berlin this year, sorry.

What, you think Tucci cares? lol!

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