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The Network Is Hostile
An anonymous reader writes: Following this weekend's news that AT&T was as friendly with the NSA as we've suspected all along, cryptographer Matthew Green takes a step back to look at the broad lessons we've learned from the NSA leaks. He puts it simply: the network is hostile — and we really understand that now. "My take from the NSA revelations is that even though this point was 'obvious' and well-known, we've always felt it more intellectually than in our hearts. Even knowing the worst was possible, we still chose to believe that direct peering connections and leased lines from reputable providers like AT&T would make us safe. If nothing else, the NSA leaks have convincingly refuted this assumption." Green also points out that the limitations on law enforcement's data collection are technical in nature — their appetite for surveillance would be even larger if they had the means to manage it. "...it's significant that someday a large portion of the world's traffic will flow through networks controlled by governments that are, at least to some extent, hostile to the core values of Western democracies."
And some of those will be the governments of Western democracies. That's the truly maddening part.
"..someday a large portion of the world's traffic will flow through networks controlled by governments that are, at least to some extent, hostile to the core values of Western democracies.."
You mean, like the US government? /That was way too easy.
I'm not one of the many self-loathing Americans, but it's pretty irrefutable that the US government is "at least to some extent" hostile to the core Western, humanist values that are even laid out in its own Constitution.
-Styopa
Some of the very worst offenders on surveillance are "democracies." It's time for us to stop living cliche to cliche and start realizing that things like personal freedom are correlated with, not caused by, particular structural forms of government. Ask a Jew in 1940 if they missed the Kaiser, who was a strong monarch, not a figurehead. Ask the average Russian pleb under Stalin if they'd not have given a small body part to be back under the Tsar.
Some of the worst governments in the modern age were ones built on being "for the people." Let's start judging governments based on what they do, not their structure.
If you are truly paranoid about security - or these days, at least overly aware of security issues - any network where you are not 100% in control of everything from source to destination and all spots in between should be considered as possibly hostile.
That said, how many people/groups/organizations/businesses really care about this?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
The Soviet vs. Imperial Russia example was to show that the general argument applies across all forms of government.
Most of those efforts are simply symptoms of our use of districts. A simple shift to a proportional representation system chosen across the entire polity would eliminate the most pernicious form which is gerrymandering.
In actuality, most of what is called efforts to disenfranchise are actually efforts to add integrity to the system such as voter ID laws. The idea that you should be allowed to wield any political power without being positively identified as a citizen eligible to wield it is utterly insane, but par for the course for certain types of ideologues (don't know if that applies to you personally)
Funding is certainly not where we're failing. Many of the worst districts are funded with the same devil-may-care attitude toward how much we're spending that is used on the military at the national level. The problem is that our educational system is structurally flawed in ways that are politically impossible to fix. It's a problem of culture and political will to address the culture.
It also doesn't help the situation that politicians know that the majority of voters are low-information voters. Point #1 greatly exacerbates that. The easiest way for politicians to destroy the influence of the more informed voters is to drown them in a sea of low-information voters who are the sort of people that are congenitally more interested in their own immediate creature needs than the public weal.
Like it or not, most low information voters are not that way because there's an informed citizen waiting for an excuse to burst forth from them. They are simple people who have simple needs and expectations. A lot of them are even smart people. Some of the dumbest arguments I've had on politics were with badly informed people with high IQs.
Expanding to a more democratic system provides a great deal of cover for the political class because democracy feels like we have power, feels like "we chose this." If we had a monarchy like Imperial Germany, the King would have feared a violent revolution over some of the scandals that have come out in the last 20 years because the public couldn't just say "we'll vote the King out." Consequently, I think a less democratic system would have likely chosen a more moderate and accountable course of action because the lack of an illusion of control would have channeled the public outrage directly at them.
"...it's significant that today a large portion of the world's traffic flows through networks controlled by governments that are, at least to some extent, hostile to the core values of Western democracies."
We call that hostile government the United States of America.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.