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Death and the NSA: A Q&A With Bruce Schneier
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Since Edward Snowden's disclosures about widespread NSA surveillance, Americans and people everywhere have been presented with a digital variation on an old analog threat: the erosion of freedoms and privacy in exchange, presumably, for safety and security.
Bruce Schneier knows the debate well. He's an expert in cryptography and he wrote the book on computer security; Applied Cryptography is one of the field's basic resources, 'the book the NSA never wanted to be published,' raved Wired in 1994. He knows the evidence well too: lately he's been helping the Guardian and the journalist Glenn Greenwald review the documents they have gathered from Snowden, in order to help explain some of the agency's top secret and highly complex spying programs.
To do that, Schneier has taken his careful digital privacy regime to a new level, relying on a laptop with an encrypted hard drive that he never connects to the internet. That couldn't prevent a pilfered laptop during, say, a 'black bag operation,' of course. 'I know that if some government really wanted to get my data, there'd be little I could do to stop them,' he says."
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." Helen Keller
Schneier is right,
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Schneier addresses one important point here. That the intelligence community is created in it's present form as a means to fight the cold war. It was made as an conventional army fighting another conventional army (the GRU and KGB) and the sigint operations was hand-tailored to this kind of war. But what has happened since is that the enemy has changed. The guerrilla tactics of terrorism is a sigint nightmare, and scaling it to perverse and antidemocratic level isn't helping at all. Every time I hear about the needle and the haystack I can't but wonder how these dinosaurs have come to pull this Jurassic stunt on us. The reality is that what works is not sigint. It is not more computers. What seems to be working is classic infiltration. Please think about that Dianne Feinstein before you use more American tax-money on your Silicon Valley pets.
One solution is technological. You can't educate users, but you can configure the technology to improve the 'idiot mode' security. SSL is a good example: The end user can get most of the benefits without even knowing what SSL is or having any understanding at all of cryptography.