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Inside PRISM: Why the Government Hates Encryption
Lauren Weinstein writes "Now, what's really going on with PRISM? The government admits that the program exists, but says it is being 'mischaracterized' in significant ways (always a risk with secret projects sucking up information about your citizens' personal lives). The Internet firms named in the leaked documents are denying that they have provided 'back doors' to the government for data access. Who is telling the truth? Likely both. Based on previous information and the new leaks, we can make some pretty logical guesses about the actual shape of all this. Here's my take."
that if our government really has all of this data then China has it too
There's always the chance that NSA has Google employees on its payroll that are tasked with secretly handing off data. They could even be there under a verbal handshake agreement with Google management, giving Google plausible deniability in case they are ever discovered: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that data gathering is going on in here!"
Then everyone is happy - the NSA gets their data, and Google can legitimately say that "they" are not handing over data to the NSA.
And since secret FISA orders can apparently compel anyone to do just about anything and keep it a secret, there's nothing illegal about it.
s/Hates/Hates\ When\ Citizens\ Use
Unless you're one of the 1.5% of the people didn't vote for a republican/democrat, STFU! You voted for this at least six times since it was officially made legal. And no doubt you will approve again in the next election.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If they are willing to do things like define all military age males as militants to avoid admitting to civilian casualties from drone attacks you know they don't have a problem redefining pretty much any word in order to avoid being held accountable to the people.
"The terrorists are smart and we're dog meat"
Yet more evidence that the terrorists have won. We have here yet another citizen who believes that terrorism is a major problem. Each and every day, more Americans die in automobile accidents, than the terrorists have managed to kill since 9/11/01. Yet, "we're dog meat" because of terrorists.
Far to few Americans have any balls these days. Is it something in the diet? To many drugs? To much brain washing? What is it that causes Americans to whine like whipped dogs? "we're dog meat".
On the day of the Boston Marathon bombings, I saw a lot of people who have a bit of fortitude running TOWARD the explosions, to care for their fellow citizens. People with big brass balls, who understood that something bad had happened, and decided that they should disregard the potential for further explosions. Most of the severely injured have survived because all those people ran toward the disaster, and not away from it. The crowd at the marathon bombing made me proud.
This "we're dog meat" shit is embarrassing as all hell. I can see why he posted as AC.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Let me turn that on your head. If you had been living in your family home for all your life and a bunch of hoodlums came into your neighborhood and started shooting up the place, would you A. leave, or B. stay to spite them? Many people would choose A., but many would choose B.
Wrong. You don't make it so nobody wants to be anywhere near the militants. You teach the families of the innocent victims to hate America and Americans for assuming guilt by proximity. There's a difference. It is policies like these that fuel terrorism and anti-American sentiment around the globe.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The terrorists are NOT especially smart. Sometimes they get lucky. Witness these two bozos in Boston, or the underwear bomber who about set his nads on fire, or the shoe bomber who failed to execute, or the butt bomber in the middle east who (ahem) blew his own ass up. The jerks who tried to bomb a terminal in Glasgow caught themselves on fire, and one of the people who caught them in the act kicked one of them so hard he tore a tendon in his own foot. Several of the otherwise successful bombers (Spain, London) got caught because they screwed up security with cell phones in traceable ways.
I also know a few people who may or may not have at one time worked for the NSA, and they're all smart, and one of them was kinda intense. Don't assume that you're smarter than them; the risks, if you're wrong, are high.
Yes, it's very brutal, but I still think it's too early to tell whether the drone strikes are a policy that works
When we have technology capable of putting a missile through an attic window, or down a ventilation shaft, the government does have an obligation to limit civilian casualties. This isn't like Dresden, or London during WWII, when bombs were more or less flung out the back door and they hit where they hit... sometimes miles off target. Thus the reason for carpet bombing in the first place -- there was no accuracy: It was Angry Birds with kilotons of ordinance.
But ignoring the technological side of things, thousands (yes, thousands) of years of military history has shown that the key to winning any war is not in having superior technology or weapons, but in winning the hearts and minds of the people. Sun Tzu wrote about this back when the state of the art was long spears and loud screams, and not a damn thing has changed. But you know, fuck Tzu, maybe you need something a little more modern: How about the British/American war of independence? The greatest navy on the planet, best trained military at the time, got its ass handed to it by some upstart guy named Washington whose troops crossed the Potamac river on Christmas while starving to the point they had been eating their own boots only a few days prior. How'd that happen? "SOONER", you say? Okay, the Vietnam war. Now we're the greatest military force on the planet. We get our asses handed to us by a bunch of tunnel-dwelling communists who largely rely on traps made out of sharpened bamboo and guns that are 40 years old. SOONER! Okay, the war in Iraq. Which one? All of them.
So please, don't even try taking the position that making our ambassadors to the world a predator drone is going to end anything but very, very badly for us. Sun Tzu, were he alive right now, would be posting Picard facepalm pics as a reaction to just about every strategic initiative our government has undertaken in the past twenty years. To him, we're push-overs. We are not a threat... all the nukes in the world can't change the simple fact that where we go, we're resented. And it'll be the death of us, perhaps quite literally.
The fight for democracy cannot be won by any technology we now possess. Not drones, not nukes, none of it. There is but one weapon to assure us of victory: People.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"The terrorists are smart and we're dog meat"
Yet more evidence that the terrorists have won. ... This "we're dog meat" shit is embarrassing as all hell.
It helps if you put "dog meat" in its original context.
The FBI, NSA, CIA are just too stupid, moronic, retarded to actually work within the Constitution of the United States of America and therefore have to violate it in order to do - attempt - their job. If they were truly smart, they could work within the confines of the Constitution. But they can't - they are stupid. The terrorists are smart and we're dog meat because our security services are stupid. Security services have to eliminate basic freedoms to achieve their goals; which means they are morons.
In which case it pretty obvious that he's complaining about the laziness and incompetence of our "security" services, not hiding under a table from the terrorists.
Yet more evidence that the terrorists have won.
I'm tired of hearing people say, "the terrorists have won" when the government infringes on our freedom, because it's wildly inaccurate. Terrorists win when their tactics cause outcomes that meet their objectives. Terrorists literally could not care less whether Americans are oppressed by their own government. Their objectives are things like, getting the USA out of the middle east, destroying Israel, etc. What we do in our own country really isn't on their radar, except for American terrorists, who are very few and very low profile and really nobody is worried about them much.
But they weren't dead Americans.
Learn to love Alaska
And those that stayed to fight could be correctly described as "militants", no?
The word militant has traditionally meant that the person is part of an organized resistance, not merely stuck in the combat area when the shit hit the fan. We call those people victims or refugees depending on whether they stay or leave.
I'm pretty sure they already hate America. Maybe for good reason, but that's a matter of perspective.
Most of the world hates America, and they have damn good reasons for doing so that aren't about perspective. America has given up caring about collateral damage. Our international ambassador of peace is the Predator drone. "Bringing democracy" has become synonymous with "They're sending in tanks and missiles and shit again." We've unilaterally withdrawn from several key Geneva conventions, we're engaging in mass acts of torture of areas we occupy...
I don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut what religion you are... if some assholes are rolling tanks down your street, dropping bombs on your neighbors, and shooting friends and family... they are not liberating you, it's not democracy, and you got every reason and right to kick the mother fuckers right in the teeth. And I say that as an American of no particular religion. My home is my castle. The founding fathers started on about that whole business, and I think they might have been onto something there.
We're going about things all wrong. People don't just hate America, America hates itself. It's economically depressed, militarily suicidal... and frankly, if America was my aunt, I'd be asking the state to have them committed post-haste, because they're fucking up every good thing that life ever gave them while screaming "I'm sane! No really! I'm the sanest one here!"
We're going about this whole warfare thing all wrong. Congress, please stop sending us to po-dunk desert countries and pissing off the locals... it's not helping us, and it's not helping them. The only people it's helping are the defense industry, which has massive (and now unlimited!) funds going towards our elected officials, which in turn are inking orders for new tanks That the entire joint chiefs of staff said we don't need, we have no possible need for, in fact, if you give them to us we're just going to park them out in the Nevada desert with the 50,000 other tanks that are sitting out there rusting... that we also don't need, from the last time we said we don't need any more fucking tanks... I mean, guys... when your own military is saying "No thanks, we're full" and we're force feeding them more equipment...
Sit back and take the fucking hint, man. We are seriously messed in the head as a country.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
That was an excellent post. For anyone who can't or doesn't want to visit Reddit, I am reproducing 161719's post dated 2013-06-07 below:
I live in a country generally assumed to be a dictatorship. One of the Arab spring countries. I have lived through curfews and have seen the outcomes of the sort of surveillance now being revealed in the US. People here talking about curfews aren't realizing what that actually FEELS like. It isn't about having to go inside, and the practicality of that. It's about creating the feeling that everyone, everything is watching. A few points:
1) the purpose of this surveillance from the governments point of view is to control enemies of the state. Not terrorists. People who are coalescing around ideas that would destabilize the status quo. These could be religious ideas. These could be groups like anon who are too good with tech for the governments liking. It makes it very easy to know who these people are. It also makes it very simple to control these people.
Lets say you are a college student and you get in with some people who want to stop farming practices that hurt animals. So you make a plan and go to protest these practices. You get there, and wow, the protest is huge. You never expected this, you were just goofing off. Well now everyone who was there is suspect. Even though you technically had the right to protest, you're now considered a dangerous person.
With this tech in place, the government doesn't have to put you in jail. They can do something more sinister. They can just email you a sexy picture you took with a girlfriend. Or they can email you a note saying that they can prove your dad is cheating on his taxes. Or they can threaten to get your dad fired. All you have to do, the email says, is help them catch your friends in the group. You have to report back every week, or you dad might lose his job. So you do. You turn in your friends and even though they try to keep meetings off grid, you're reporting on them to protect your dad.
2) Let's say number one goes on. The country is a weird place now. Really weird. Pretty soon, a movement springs up like occupy, except its bigger this time. People are really serious, and they are saying they want a government without this power. I guess people are realizing that it is a serious deal. You see on the news that tear gas was fired. Your friend calls you, frantic. They're shooting people. Oh my god. you never signed up for this. You say, fuck it. My dad might lose his job but I won't be responsible for anyone dying. That's going too far. You refuse to report anymore. You just stop going to meetings. You stay at home, and try not to watch the news. Three days later, police come to your door and arrest you. They confiscate your computer and phones, and they beat you up a bit. No one can help you so they all just sit quietly. They know if they say anything they're next. This happened in the country I live in. It is not a joke.
3) Its hard to say how long you were in there. What you saw was horrible. Most of the time, you only heard screams. People begging to be killed. Noises you've never heard before. You, you were lucky. You got kicked every day when they threw your moldy food at you, but no one shocked you. No one used sexual violence on you, at least that you remember. There were some times they gave you pills, and you can't say for sure what happened then. To be honest, sometimes the pills were the best part of your day, because at least then you didn't feel anything. You have scars on you from the way you were treated. You learn in prison that torture is now common. But everyone who uploads videos or pictures of this torture is labeled a leaker. Its considered a threat to national security. Pretty soon, a cut you got on your leg is looking really bad. You think it's infected. There were no doctors in prison, and it was so overcrowded, who knows what got in the cut. You go to the doctor, but he refuses to see you. He knows if he does the government can see the record