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Whistleblower: NSA Has All of Your Email
mspohr writes with this excerpt from Democracy Now!: "National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney reveals he believes domestic surveillance has become more expansive under President Obama than President George W. Bush. He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion 'transactions' — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States. Binney talks about Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and challenges NSA Director Keith Alexander's assertion that the NSA is not intercepting information about U.S. citizens." The parts about National Security Letters in particular are chilling, even though the issue is not new.
if someone is - that would be shocking.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'm mostly not a big fan of Ron Paul, but I would love to put him in charge of eliminating this kind of crap.
... they got all the spam as well.
This is a problem whose solution has been known and available for over two decades, yet deployment is stagnant.
Palm trees and 8
Then they should have all those missing White House emails. ...oh, wait...
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
has 18 acres of mainframe computers underground. You're talking to your wife on the phone and you use the word "bomb", "president", "Allah", any of a hundred keywords, the computer recognizes it, automatically records it, red-flags it for analysis. That was 20 years ago.
Save the taxpayers' money.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
send an email between two accounts only you use with fake plans for a terrorist attack...if you get arrested then we'll know they were reading it. (tell somebody you're going to do it just in case you disappear in the night).
Still sometimes I think the government puts out these rumors on purpose to make everyone scared and think they are more powerful than they really are. I mean if the government "knows all" they when did Sept. 11th happen? Why do Mexican drug cartels ship billions of dollars of Cocaine across the border every year? I think they float these rumors on purpose to keep us scared.
Protest like they did in Canada. Send the Ministers and your government representatives including the White House everything. For days they CCed them on every email, posted what they are doing to their members twitter accounts. After several days of having the Parliamentary mail and web servers taken to their knees the bill they were trying to introduce was 'sent to committee' (killed). People can make a difference
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
They're just doing backups for us, that's all...
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
While this is certainly rather awesome, as a non-US citizen I think they should be open about it. Even if everyone else already assumed that they monitored everything they possibly could. Also, how did they ever think they where going to keep a domestic operation of that scale secret?
Besides, how could they monitor foreign computer/internet-based espionage and other such things without actually monitoring the entire domestic network? If they where more open about this they could perhaps release information about botnet activity or similar useful data.
Emotions! In your brain!
..That they're building that huge Federal data center in Colorado just to store party photos from the GSA conferences or the Secret Service whore-a-thons, did you?
That's why I've always kept my plans to overthrow the government using my backdoors into the NSA's and White House's computer systems completely off the grid...
Oops!
Hi boys! :)
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Might as well add some scripting to the email client to add cc:jerkoff@nsa.gov automatic like.
Is there a script that I could reroute all my spam to them as well? If they want the goods on me, they gotta support some sponsors too.
When it's all done and the investigators know me inside and out and see what I see and read what I read, I'll hire them to work in my luthiery. Cause if they study me that closely they'll be able to build instruments the way I DAMN WANT IT DONE. Could there be any more perfect employees? They could spy/intimidate my competitors! Patent licensing fees would melt away like vapor. Soon I could have a factory of super spy ninja luthiers. I could branch into percussion and pipe organs and eventually Pro sound. I would absorb companies like Fender and Gibson like a fat lady sitting on a cupcake. Then would come weapons research and government contracts. International intrigue. I would slay Cort/ Cor-tek . Then the Chinese instruments will fall and my research will branch into medicine and IT. Man will interface with guitars for all his needs and there will be tube amps in every living room. Rock on Garth.
I only see upsides to this story so far...
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Seriously are they saving all that crap?
Consider the criticism on government for having failed to head off 9/11. Next consider the fact that the younger government employees will want to operate it in a 21st century way. Then, I think the logical extrapolation is to expect NSA to introduce the requirement that they can track communications retroactively.
Suppose some person X becomes suspicious. Then there will be an instant demand to examine all X's communications in recent years, together with those of X's contacts, and their contacts, N levels deep. NSA can't know in advance who X is, so they only way to meet that requirement is to intercept and archive everyone's communications all the time.
Consider the alternative. If they don't archive that stuff, and they could have, and if another 9/11 occurs, then the criticism will be wilting. They will be blamed for not doing everything possible to prevent it, They must do it as a matter of political self defense.
I posted something similar once before. Another slashdotter thought I was writing science fiction. I don't think so. I calculate that it could be done for 300 million Americans with only a dozen or so exabytes. Heck, pull out your Visa card and order an exabyte server from Oracle today. It is hardly beyond the capability of NSA.
I also believe that we privacy advocates also have to get our heads into the 21st century. It is time to shift focus from restricting government gathering of information to restricting government use of information already in their possession.
Does anyone send anything sensitive in email that isn't strongly encrypted? Maybe terrorists are that dumb.
So if those of us who live outside the U.S. use an American service - any American service - like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Messenger or perhaps mobile kit like an iPhone, are our messages thrown into the NSA Ueber-Surveillance-Database as well? If this is the case, the U.S. is breaking dozens and dozens of national/regional laws. Let me get this straight... You advertise a "free", supposedly "reliable" and also supposedly "private" service like say Gmail, and when I use it to communicate with my friends, acquaintances or business clients, all of my confidential messages get intercepted and funnelled into some huge NSA datacenter in Utah, or wherever it is that these spooks keep their pile of intercept-data. How can this be legal under any definition of any law? If my emails include confidential business documents - like confidential business strategy documents lets say - then "intercepting" and "evaluating" these messages is nothing short of "illicit industrial espionage". That's a serious crime that carries a prison-sentence in many countries. ------- More brave people need to come forward with what they know about clandestine "surveillance centers" being built by various governments, because if they don't, there will be no public outcry, and all these "regional efforts" will eventually be combined into one huge, powerful, global "surveillance grid" that nobody can escape from anymore.----- There is also International Law to consider. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, quoted in my signature, makes it very clear that it is illegal to arbitrarily invade someone's privacy. So these large-scale efforts to gather as many emails or phone conversations as possible, are actually a super-violation not just of regional or country laws, but of human rights treaties most countries signed years ago, and with that, a serious and eggregious violation of internation law. ----- Somebody needs to put a stop to all this nonsense. Not only do these snooping systems not contribute to a safer world in any serious capactiy, but they also threaten to create a future where everyone is watching by someone or some system in everything they do. What precisely are we supposed to tell future generations about this, for example? Are we supposed to tell them "We are sorry, but you will have to grow up and live in a world where everything you do is being watched and evaluated. We could have protested against this stuff when it first appeared on the world scene, but we were daft enough not to do that. Again, sorry for having to live in a f_cked future! Have a nice life..."
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
At what point will psychiatrists have to stop classifying people as paranoid simply because they believe the government is tracking them?
Why can't you give me someone I can vote for? I won't pull the lever for Batshit Crazy Reactionary (e.g. Palin, Santorum) or for Big Business Uber Alles (Romney) or for Naive Solutions to Real Problems (Paul), but I'm really disappointed in Obama.
Give me a sane candidate, please.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
they're being given to us instead...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
1. set up several email accounts
2.email goats.cx and tubgirl pics with keywords like "Da Bomb" & "explosive"
3.make the government spys so disgusted with their jobs that they quit
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The EU has a law from (2005-ish?) that requires all email headers for inbound/outbound users located in the EU be sent to EU-based law enforcement. I'd be shocked if the NSA didn't get at least this much data. I worked a project for an extremely large USA-based ISP that had clients overseas and some perl was written to grab all the headers and transmit them to servers in Europe. I didn't see the code, but I can't imagine any useful way to differentiate between EU and USA email senders or receivers. It is just easier to send them all.
If the NSA didn't get a feed from this - and I don't think they did - they probably have access to the EU database.
I doubt they can store all the content inside emails for much time and since more and more people are using gpg (2048 and larger keys) to encrypt their messages, that is less useful for the NSA.
The use of SMTPS between servers probably puts a wrinkle in the NSA listening too, provided both ends are configured to support it. Dropping back to non-SSL encrypted email is still all too common.
The world-wide amount of email traffic is extremely high and storing it is tough enough for many ISPs. OTOH, storing selected messages is not that hard, provided your selection criteria is reasonably limited.
Normally, I'd add links to the EU law that requires the email headers be provided, but the last time I looked, it was non-trivial to fine. I know that we wouldn't have deployed those 4 servers and setup DMZ jump boxes to stream the data to other servers in our EU data centers without a good reason. I did find this from 2009 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/5105519/Internet-records-to-be-stored-for-a-year.html
Part 1 seems readily available but how can we load parts 2, 3, and 4? The links seem to go only to part 1 again.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Are they going to open it up as a cloud service so we can get our lost emails and data when our hard drives crashed?
Let's be clear that this guy doesn't have access to any secret information. He's analyzing publicly available information and coming up with his own conclusions about the probable extent of the surveillance. He may well be right, but the summary makes it sound like he's the new Bradley Manning. Quoting:
Vote for a third party only if you see it as helping that third party toward a particular objective. Otherwise, campaign for a third party (promote it, whatever), but vote for the lesser of the two big evils. Because third parties are not going to win anytime soon, and if you vote for the third party, you take a vote away from the lesser evil, which makes the greater evil more likely to win.
It would be great if voting for a third party meant they could win. And it would be great if saying nobody who works hard should go bankrupt made it happen. Sadly, life doesn't work that way, and we have to make strategic choices.
Sometimes you partner with a lesser evil to defeat a greater one, or partner with a greater good even though it costs you the ability to make a lesser good manifest.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The following is a formal FOIA request.
My current employer sent me an email a few years ago detailing the terms of my employment. This would have been about two weeks before my hire date.
I've lost the email, and frankly get along well with the guy so it doesn't matter all that much.
Since you've spent my money to get all this stuff on some big honkin' server farm (geez, I'd sure like a new HDD; I damned sure paid for a few for you!), I'd like you to retrieve a copy of it.
Also, can you please put all my stuff on this "cloud" thingy?
Just give me access to email sent to or from me; also, please all the phone calls etc.
Since you've got security procedures in place to keep bad guys from seeing my stuff, this will be easy, too.
The above is sufficient for you to locate the email.
Please send it and my id/pw for access to the data I've already paid you to collect to my current work or home email address, which you already have.
Failure to comply with this FOIA request in a timely manner will be grounds for legal action.
Thank you
(you know who I am)
The trouble — the fact that no one making these claims actually knows what capabilities may or may not exist — is that many jump to the conclusion that "technically possible" == "must be doing".
In order to fulfill the mission of performing foreign signals intelligence, NSA MUST be able to discern, identify, and target communications of non-US Persons within the United States.
Examining the metadata — the "envelope" — of communications, such as source and destination IPs, email addresses, DNS names, and similar, is allowable without a warrant, and has long been understood to be fair game. The content of the communications of US Persons anywhere on the globe is off limits without a properly adjudicated warrant. The only reason that the "warrantless wiretapping" controversy even existed was because there was a rush to do everything possible to prevent another domestic attack after 9/11. The legislative landscape caught up with reality with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
This excerpt (An 'Intel Gap': What We're Missing, Newsweek, Aug 6, 2007) sums up the issue:
So we got the stopgap Protect America Act of 2007, and the ultimate changes in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, along with the August 2008 FISC ruling.
A lot of things were done immediately after 9/11 which were justified — whether rightly or not — by the AUMF. It took several years for the law to catch up to the urgency of what was happening aft
The president has the power to veto any law congress has passed to limit his ability to deal with prisoners in Guantanamo. And he doesn't need congress' approval to move the 150+ detainees from Guantanamo to another facility - say Bagram, something he has already done to circumvent habeas - or give them due process or just *let them go*. The excuse, apparently, is that congress wont authorise special funds to deal with the prison and prisoners in the exact manner the president would like. But that is a far ways from keeping him from closing the camp. He could do so today.
46 & 2
If it can be done, then someone will do it. If not the Republicans, then the Democrats. If neither, then the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, Brazilians, Germans, Iranians, or Japanese. The point is that when opportunity knocks, someone will answer. Usually, that someone will then have the advantage. Case in point, we got the nuke first, and we used it. As soon as someone else had it, we started talking about nuclear disarmament. There you go.
On good thing about the NSA collecting all the emails, phone calls, SMS, etc -- the best place to hide is in the largest crowd.
I suspect The Hard Drive Shortage(tm) of a few seasons ago wasn't due to weather at the factories. That was just a cover story. They probably all went to the NSA, so don’t think we'll be able to ddos them with attachments ;)
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
No, if we try they'll just give us more wedgies =(
But really, everyones fucked and there's no going back.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Are we still really naive enough to believe anything that we do an the internet is private in any way unless precautions are take to encypt?
The naivete implicit in this being a story worth discussing is amazing.
They must be a hit at Fort Meade.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Nature doesn't make things invisible, it evolves camouflage - extra data points to confuse. People should tell more lies via email. Oh, wait..
Gently reply
This part of your comment amazed me: "It is possible that the NSA has some proof that P=NP.."
I'm not up on my crypto-game these days (i'm in entrepreneur mode not scientist mode), but that's the right way to think...however, with actual code-breaking, there is ALWAYS a situation and context for the communication to be decoded that puts a 'spin' on the 'universe' of the message
My dad was a cryptographer in the US Navy during the 70s. He taught me cryptography from a wireline, communications engineer perspective. In other words, based on the Shannon-Weaver model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Weaver_model
I LOVE the P=NP problem but its weird/fascinating that the state of the art in crypto is talking about P=NP as a matter of course on slashdot...
Thank you Dave Raggett
I accidentally deleted a bunch of email I really needed; I'm glad there's a backup.
What if you want to sue NSA based on what Binney is saying. What makes it reasonable to believe Binney's claim of a continuation and expansion of the terrorist surveillance program? There are probably a few ways to analyze this, but here's one line of questioning that looks only at the reasonableness angle: Hoovering up "trillions" of transactions has to be feasible technology-wise and budget-wise, right? NSA probably spends a chunk of its resources and budget analyzing the transactions because throwing the stuff away like unread junkmail makes no sense. Who would care if Binney's claim amounts to "NSA fondles Americans' emails and then throws them away". So is it reasonable to believe that NSA has the tech and budget capacity to do what Binney claims, while at the same time, they're supposed to be collecting foreign intelligence in support of the US military in Afghanistan, Iraq and across the world, and also the State Department, the DNI, etc.? It doesn't seem reasonable that the NSA would collect nothing other than Binneys' "Trillions" of American "transactions". That's because the information gathered probably won't do much of a job helping track domestic threats AND helping answer foreign intelligence questions such as: when is the taliban is going to attack a US military post in Afghanistan, or when and how is Kim Jong Un is going to act like a douche. So NSA probably has to split its attention to do the domestic and foreign collection. Also, NSA probably can't get away with shortchanging the parts of the government that rely on the foreign information. Judging by the scale of global US military and foreign affairs work, gathering foreign intelligence information is probably not a small job--lots of languages and lots of places. So NSA is probably using a lot of resources and money for foreign intelligence military, because otherwise it would really tick off the military, the DNI, the State Department, and also the Congressional committees that need foreign intelligence. So why is it reasonable to think that NSA has the capacity to do what Binney claims? Is it so cheap and easy to get and analyze Binney's American "transactions" that NSA hardly needs to use any effort? Maybe this is his argument, because if this is such a shameful or illegal effort, there's a chance that it wouldn't attract a lot of scrutiny. But otherwise, it's probably a substantial effort that requires significant money, time and people to run, and that means if Congress doesn't already know about it, they've caught wind of it. In that case, why isn't Congress making a big public effort to investigate claims by Binney and others? Even if Congress can't prove the thing is illegal, they money alone would probably lead some members of Congress to ask questions about a potentially embarrassing, illegal or wasteful program. Senators and congressmen doesn't usually get reelected because of how nice they are to the federal government. Senators and congressmen have an interest in showing the public that their oversight protects citizens' rights, and protects taxpayer dollars by doing something about illegal and wasteful government efforts. Certainly Senators Wyden has expressed concerns (http://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-and-udall-call-for-informed-debate-of-domestic-surveillance-law) but so far it seems like more smoke than fire. Also, this is a national election year. Those who want a different President probably aren't interested in protecting the incumbent from a budget or civil liberties scandal. There are a lot of incentives for a lot of legislators to take a public oversight interest in a valid claim, and at least some of them would probably welcome whistleblowers. So isn't it odd that not much is happening? What about Binney himself? His credibility would certainly be made an issue in any lawsuit. Why should he be believed? He retired 11 years ago in 2001 according to the www.democracynow.org article. But he's making claims about a secret program that he hasn't had access to since 2001. Th
The problem is that the GOP has become quite intrusive, and Obama had to move to the right on the issue so as not to be called a weak traitor. It used to be that the GOP was the party of civil liberties (heck, Bush campaigned against Clinton's "secret evidence" laws), but under Bush it all fell apart post-9/11.
Today the Republicans practice a shell of their civil liberties campaign; Ashcroft made sure that the mandatory background checks to buy guns were shredded (to protect the privacy of gun-owners), but insisted on collecting every other form of data. Obama is just following along, since he doesn't want to be blamed if a terrorist attack happens on his watch.
The only thing that would shake things up would be if Romney decides to campaign on actual civil liberties (and not this phony "war on Christmas" or "war on Christians" crap). Obama has boxed himself in, let's see if Romney uses the opening and campaigns for an end to warrantless espionage.
This article is about an example of an organization that can collect, index, and try to make sense of 20 trillion transactions from around the globe, but they not the only one (Google is another example). At some point, quantitative differences become qualitative differences. As our society deals in all sorts of abundances, we are moving into mostly uncharted waters (even as some people like James P. Hogan in "Voyage from Yesteryear" tried to paint us a possible picture of the difference between scarcity thinking and abundance thinking). We need to think about what that "societal phase change" means (to use JP Hogan's phrasing). But very few people are doing that, and the discussion to this article is just one more example of missing the forest for the trees. Whether or not encryption makes sense in any context is completely tangential to this much deeper and broader issue of abundance vs. scarcity thinking.
See also my essays on this: ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing
Or:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."
Or:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sens
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As long as they are collecting my data, can I use them as an online backup service? If my hard drive goes up in smoke, will they restore my emails? As a taxpayer, I want access to this government resource that I paid for.
Every bit of data gets multiplied at least X3, and not just duplicated but also encrypted 3 times over. :^)
In addition to the valid points you raise, there's also the problem that the NSA has had, since about 1996, the ability to crack public key cryptography via quantum computation. The evidence is not public, and I'm sure the NSA will continue to obfuscate for decades to come, but this skeptical author is now completely convinced that Five Eyes (AU CA NZ US UK) got production QC capability circa 1996. This author knows the technical and scientific details of how this was done, the implementation approach, and quite a bit about how the system works. It was done by first generating a topological quantum neural network (see my previous posts), then training the NN to implement Shor's algorithm. Frankly, the crypto-cracking Shor's algorithm system was a bit of a hack and, once understood, is not really very interesting. The juicy bits are the more recent use of this TQNN, via AQC, for other AI-related applications. This author, who is a security professional and software engineer, got hold of this info through a combination of fortuitous leaks and years of painstaking research, starting with a solid background in quantum Physics. Given how many times I've repeated this information on Slashdot, I'm a bit surprised no one has yet asked any smart questions.
Encrypt as much as possible.
Use HTTPS Everywhere.
Have your mail use opportunistic SSL.
Make privacy the norm.
Idiot Obama voters.
End of story.
The premise is ridiculous. Everybody around here seems to want to believe that the government is much more interested in what they are doing than they could conceivably be.
that have to read through all my Star Wars android sexy fanfiction. Do you think it's a coincidence R2D2 and Jawas are roughly the same height? Though my Ivanova/Troi stuff is much better, I think. So Mr. NSA reader #18424293, I apologize for that whole Tuskan Raider/mini-pod racer scene; it was uncalled for.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
stop Chinese hackers from exfiltrating corporate and government data? If the NSA is monitoring all the Internet traffic they should easily be able to identify data being sucked out and sent to China (probably through a few third party countries). I've said this before...it is against US law to "spy" on US citizens in the US. My bet is the NSA is monitoring all the emails/traffic and if a piece of data meets certain criteria thresholds (e.g. terrorist conversations and the parties are not US citizens, etc.) they can act on it, if not it get forwarded to the bit bucket.
Afghanistan is the ultimate test bed for military weapons systems and (much more importantly) surveillance systems - which are already being rolled out in the US under the Orwellian justification of Security. We're not there for justice nor even revenge; just R&D.
OK here's the dynamic at play.
As technology advances, it heavily favors destructive offense over defense. Armadillo shells, castles and distance were all effective defenses once.
Later, at least you still needed an lot of other people to kill a lot of other people. The Constitution was born here.
Then came the bomb.
Later, at least you still needed a smaller number of highly skilled people and access to rare materials and rare know how .You born were here.
I don't need to tell slashdot readers that the number of people and the skills needed and the access to needed materials are all trending downwards.
Here's an equation that expresses this relationship succinctly:
1/ F = ( (D (superscript V) * A ) / N )
with
F is your Freedom and 1/F is your potential loss of freedom,
N is the number of bad actors needed to use a technology
A is the accessibility to whatever skills and materials those bad actors need
V is the number of victims effected by their bad actions
D is the level of Damage done to their victims ranging from inconvenience to death.
Given a suitable quantitative model of these variables , you can just plug in the numbers and watch your start to shrink.
A bunch of people stealing credit card numbers or one guy writing a computer virus that effects millions? D isn't an a true existential threat, so the base remains calm.
A mutant country only trying to build the bomb? No victims no damage,but let that country succeed and spread its technology and those actors actually start to use that bomb and see what happens. At the extreme, 1/F -> 0 , as in, you're dead.
A small group of terrorists trying to create a super virus? This is where things start to go really badly. D and possibly A go way up, and your freedom is threatened. The only factor really saving you is V- it's hard to make Sarin gas , say, effect a lot of people.
But let V D and A all take off and basically your freedom is going to be severely impinged. It has to be, because the first organizing principle of society isn't freedom or democracy or human rights, it's survival.
I am not saying this makes me happy.
You never want to get to a situation where VD and A are getting very large, but what are you going to do to stop it? Technology marches on. Knowledge becomes more widespread. 3D printers are a Good Thing. I think we all see where this is going.
It's nobody's fault. People are just whatever evolution shit out its ass over the course of a few million years. More and more of hose people are gaining theoretical access to WMD . It's nobody's fault.
You can change the living circumstances for these humans and try to implement regimes which bar access to WMD. That's our approach now.
A different approach is to try to arrange the world so the usual causes of discontent are removed for as many people as possible. Those would be poverty, ignorance, illiteracy, disease, famine, a decent place in a decent world.
The problem with that approach is i> it doesn't work Men-apes, no matter how much power and how many females they have only want more. Ask Arnold. Ask Bin Laden. Ask Trump. Ask anyone.
The drive to expand your sphere of power and control and access to the mating rights to yet more females is a monster that only gets hungrier the more it's fed. How many wives did Bin Laden have? How much money was he born into? How much esteem and status did he inherit? Ditto Trump. Ditto Forbes. Ditto the Record Executive / TV Evangelist / CEO / Senator and Professional Athlete of Your Choice.
Ditto Genghis Khan and his relatives for that matter .
Technology marches on and no one is going to, or even could , stop it. People are motivated to do what they do which is express a set of drives that served them well- a few hundred thousand years ago.
We have to change what people are if we're going to surviv