Slashdot Mirror

There's a podcast interviewing former NSA officer Brian Snow that was recorded before the Snowden leaks, and provides some valuable perspective on what the NSA does. I am probably going to get modded and/or flamed to oblivion for saying this, but listening to that podcast made me believe that not everything the NSA does is bad.

Let them mod you... their ignorance will continue to be fuel for them.

It is far more likely that most of the people employed at the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, etc. are just normal people trying to make a living. People that really do not view what they do as "domestic spying" rather they protect the nation and its assets; something that every nation currently does. These people wake up, go to work, eat, have bad days, good days, dreams, hopes, fears just like the rest of us do. Many of them make the comfortable, cushy lives possible that most enjoy and never give a second thought about, making it possible so that they can freely log in to the Internet and rant on a forum. Further, though they are paid, I would imagine it is a thankless job. I doubt that they can even mention their work to family, much less friends, and the current group think is to vilify anyone associated with those agencies. The masses anger is misplaced and should be blaming those in Congress (Demos as well as Repubs); but most of you are also blinded and still buying in to the two party system or voting for the "lesser of two evils." Such agencies and methods are a requirement for democracy; however, there should never be unchecked power, everything always needs a check and a balance.

Finally, as this plays out, it is far more likely that the media even paid attention to this so that someone could benefit and/or for political reasons. The art of distraction is a powerful thing and the opportunist will always drink the glass of water while the pessimist and optimist debate it being half-empty or half-full.

There's a podcast interviewing former NSA officer Brian Snow that was recorded before the Snowden leaks, and provides some valuable perspective on what the NSA does. I am probably going to get modded and/or flamed to oblivion for saying this, but listening to that podcast made me believe that not everything the NSA does is bad.

People don't argue that point. It's the extent and the soft supervision of it, such that it could be trivially abused by political operatives in the US against other politicians (or business interests, for that matter.)

A lot can be done with knowledge of who is talking to whom (just the metadata) to say nothing of call contents.

There's a podcast interviewing former NSA officer Brian Snow that was recorded before the Snowden leaks, and provides some valuable perspective on what the NSA does. I am probably going to get modded and/or flamed to oblivion for saying this, but listening to that podcast made me believe that not everything the NSA does is bad.

It has always been my experience that universities' IT departments are almost universally clueless. In fact, their level of cluelessness rivals and outstrips that of many banks. My (maybe just slightly cynical) assumption is that these colleges only employ their own graduates...

Then you haven't heard of PaulDotCom

I heard Matt Yoder talk about a "Death Envelope" on Pauldotcom Security Weekly. He gave a presentation about it at DefCon. The slides are here.

If you have an interest in information security, I recommend the PaulDotCom Security Weekly podcast. Paul and Larry do an excellent job of covering the news and giving in-depth tutorials for useful security tools.

Have you considered exposing him to Security Now? Not to get him to convert to Mac, but simply to help him get informed about how bad computer security is these days.

I'd suggest PaulDotCom but he'd probably have a heart attack if he found out the kind of stuff IT guys get up to when looking for security problems in their networks.