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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.
You cannot just kill yourself, then babble endlessly on the Tome of Faces Crossed Over about your meta existence while expecting to "Rest in Peace". Charon may promise safe passage, that those pesky "seers" won't stalk you, but don't be surprised when one unearths your casket and has his way with your corpse.
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.
Problem exists between keyboard and chair. Every security professional knows this. The math is an upper bound of security. What sits between keyboard and chair is the lower bound.
The real question is how to solve this problem. My traditional answer is education, but that's been actively attacked for the past 100 years. Fear does the same in 6 months what education does in 50 years. How do you make people fear for their loss of privacy enough that they will lash out against it? That's the million-(billion-?)dollar question freedom advocates have to answer.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
The snowden leaks almost seem like a false flag type situation. the scary NSA/CIA/FBI are snooping on you, queue the outrage! Meanwhile every single fucking corporation in the USA is doing the same, with far less oversight, and far spookier goals. (Sure a government agency should be expected to come along and strong-arm entities such as google and facebook (though who am I kidding? they're basically partners.) so either way they get the data..). How is it not commented on, that short of a few very specific use cases, 'big data' is basically the solution to personal privacy?
GIve it 10 years and you'll have your health and life insurance companies discussing your shopping habits with your grocery store, your car insurance company with it's lojack device in your car (or failing that, your smartphones GPS data), and 100% of your web-usage habits tracked and correlated to YOU. It's 12:30 am and maybe it's the wine, but as melodramatic as this sounds, we're a society marching into our own yokes -- all for the sake of convenience and saving 10 cents on a pack of toilet paper.
Basically the score is this: the security/privacy/sanity focused crowd is up in arms over the NSA, which represents about 1% of the population, half of whom bleat about privacy while still using the services that enable the NSA/FBI/Whoever. 99.5% of the population is either not using these services, or is indifferent (in actions, though perhaps not in words.).
Or do you think they have spared Schneier from being forced to hand out Snowden's data, while they have destroyed Lavabit just to get to his emails? C'mon people, this is ridiculous! Of course he had to give it to them!
On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if he had been somehow prevented (presumably in some 'legal' way) from re-editing and updating Applied Cryptography after the 2nd edition. At least in this case it's fairly hard to see any other reason why the best selling and most popular book on cryptography shouldn't have been modernized.
America is a lot more free than many countries, arguably less free than a few others, and certainly falls short of the (unattainable) ideal many citizens believe it to be.
It's exactly this kind of mindset that is KILLING THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Unattainable ideal ?
You gave up even before you started the journey ?!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"which organism in nature has developed an unassailable position, from which it cannot be dislodged?"
Cats.
Consider, they domesticated mankind thousands of years ago, having discovered just how weak our minds can be, We feed them, care for them, provide them shelter and in return they give nothing back, but disdain or the occasional brush up. Sure there are exceptions to the rule, individual cats being harmed, but when looked in total, they have become the true, dominate species on the planet. One day it will be Cats that go into space, using their human drones to establish the infrastructure and means to propel them out into a galaxy ripe for conquest.
(I have to go, my overlords are coming towards me, pray they don't see what I wrote)
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter