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Comment by ibisum | Hacker News Reader

I still find it hard to believe that there are people who justify these heinous tools as 'necessary' or 'vital' to the survival of the Western "democracies" who deploy them. Its a terrible state of affairs that we justify such intrusions - and yet fail to see, when 'the other side' lashes out in anger, the reasons why it is so. We are stuck in a feedback loop here, and it seems the only thing to do is turn off the microphone. But oh, the stage lights - how they draw us in!

Quickly people. Build a better Internet.

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Its the same people that want to cut benefits for "those people", etc.

The simple fact of the matter is, the people making these decisions are members of a privileged class of people that see any other class of people as "those people".

Building a better technical solution is only a partial solution. All technical solutions will have flaws that can be exploited given sufficient financial resources being expended at the task.

We need to replace our government.

Replace our government with what and how? What is the timeframe?

Technical solutions can be implemented now.

Formal methods can be used to prove correctness. The number of flaws could be cut by a factor 1000 I'd imagine when thinking of the current state of code running on devices connected to the internet.

> Building a better technical solution is only a partial solution. All technical solutions will have flaws that can be exploited given sufficient financial resources being expended at the task.

History has demonstrated that this is true of social/political solutions, as well (unsurprising, as these are really "technical" solutions in a different domain of technology.)

> We need to replace our government.

This is occasionally a good solution for existing problems, but quite often -- even when the government in question is far worse than our current one -- the cure ends up at least as bad as the disease. So, with any such call, one must demand a detailed accounting of "with what do you wish to replace it" that stands up to scrutiny not just of its theoretical attractiveness but its ability to be established and operate as intended in the world that actually exists and the people that are actually in it.

I mean vote against the sort of politicians that empower these people and contribute to lobbies that are pro-privacy/civil rights.

Lots of people voted for Obama exactly because he said or implied that he would rein these people in, yet he's done nothing but ramp up, and add drone strikes.

Now what? Vote for the next guy who says he's going to rein this in?

"Heinous tools"? They're literally running nmap.

"They are using a tool I know, therefore it's ok"

The only way a reasonable person could write this comment is if they didn't know what nmap did.

The only way a reasonable person would correct his comment is if he though mislabelling nmap as heinous is of any importance with regards to the heinous nature of the whole operation.

Yes, that's about right.

I know what nmap is, and its not the tool I was referring to .. the entire program (a 'tool for governments') is the object of my ire.

One need not use nmap to understand that their reconnaissance is of information already considered public information.

I'll quote the slides: 1. (R)econaissance 2. (I)nfection 3. (C)ommand And Control 4. (E)xfiltration

They're litterally running nmap for the reconnaissance part but I believe the "heinous" qualifier apply to the rest of the plan, which according to figure 18 consists in acquiring "as many new ORBs as possible in as many non 5-Eyes countries as possible". Unless I'm reading it wrong, they describe how they try to pwn as many machines as possible outside of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

I think they may have been referring to the tools used to identify security vulnerabilities and exploit them after the initial port scanning. Probably just variants on Nessus / OpenVAS / Metasploit / etc. at a guess.

I agree with you though, The existence of nmap, Nessus etc. isn't the problem. These tools help the state of security over time. The fact that the governments of the world are so paranoid that they feel they need to try to automatically compromise the majority of internet facing devices in the world is a problem.

Yes, the surface justifications for the surveillance programs of the NSA/GCHQ/etc. are one of public safety and national security, but I think the evidence increasingly points to strategies whose primary intent is to protect the political and capitalist classes against an uprising. These intrusive efforts by the intelligence agencies are necessary simply to better shape public opinion and, if things truly go from bad to worse, to protect themselves.

Improving the internet so that it is less susceptible to surveillance is an important effort, but one that does not address the underlying problems of current income inequality or future climate change, both which can (and more than likely will) become vessels for disorder.

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