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Former NSA Chief Warns Hackers Will Attack US If Snowden Is Captured
Okian Warrior writes "The Guardian is reporting Michael Hayden speculating that hackers and transparency groups are likely to respond with cyber-terror attacks if the United States government apprehends whistleblower Edward Snowden. Hayden called the potential attackers 'Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.'"
("America has no functioning democracy at this moment"--former U.S. president Jimmy Carter). What data on the U.S. population should be legally in government hands? Note that the telecom companies like ATT, verizon and sprint have large stores of domestic call records. Google yahoo and microsoft have a good sized chunk of our emails, documents and search quarries. JP morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, wells fargo and citigroup have most of our credit card and loan data. Should this data, domestic call records and all, also be in the hands of the federal government? Does Google have more up to date information about flu outbreaks than the Center for Disease Control? Is it unreasonable to suspect that Goldman Sachs has better data on the U.S. economy than say the treasury department and federal reserve? A recent foia request by propublica for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a time period that the TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA resulted in the following response from the NSA (the supercomputing powerhouse) "There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately.... [the system is] a little antiquated and archaic." A former employee of the department of labor statistics said that the department's entire data set fits on a single hard drive. Note that in the 90â(TM)s the IRS was still using vacuum tube technology. The National Security Agency in the last couple of years just started building modern data centers in Utah. There is abundant evidence provided by the Thomas Drake prosecution and the 9-11 commission report that information management is a problem in the intelligence community. Does google have better information management technology than the NSA? If corporations do have better data on the U.S. economy and population than the U.S. government doesn't it make sense to be governed by these corporations, ie government sachs? Is it not true that he who has the information has the power? And of course doesn't that create a clear âoemoral hazardâand âoeregulatory captureâ situation as the corporations are run by the 1%? Regulatory capture is basically when the cops and judges are owned, the book "13 bankers" goes over the issue for wall street. Isnâ(TM)t corporate control of government part of what occupy wallstreet activists protested? What is reasonable in terms of government and corporate transparency and secrecy laws and what data on the U.S. population should the government have access to? What information should citizens have about their governments and corporations? Is U.S. law clear and consistent? In any logically inconsistent system one can arrive at any conclusion one likes--selective prosecution and "interpreting" the law. What is the role of the media in all this? A former NSA coworker noted to me that U.K.'s GCHQ can, by U.K. law, perform surveillance on U.S. citizens without a warrant and the U.K. shares that intelligence with the U.S., the English speaking countries have a cozy intelligence sharing agreement sometimes called "five eyes." An effective surveillance laundering strategy. Also, less friendly countries than the U.K. would be interested in data on the U.S. population in order to, for example, strategize a propaganda campaign. If foreign countries can "copy and siphon off several terabytes of data related to design and electronics systems" of the JSF (F-35) they can probably get their hands on our call record data and possibly a lot more. Is it a good situation for foreign governments to have more information on the U.S. population than the U.S. government has? On related issues you could see the google tech talk "secret history of silicon valley"--basically defense spending built much more of silicon valley than venture capital. There is pretty good evidence that the majority of U.S. tech gets its start as gov contracts (IBM and the contract for the 1890 census, Oracle and the CIA contract, Sun Micro and darpa money). A little less relate