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Spy Chief Complains That Edward Snowden Sped Up Spread of Encryption By 7 Years (theintercept.com)
An anonymous reader cites an article on The Intercept: The director of national intelligence on Monday blamed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for advancing the development of user-friendly, widely available strong encryption. "As a result of the Snowden revelations, the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years," James Clapper said. The shortened timeline has had "a profound effect on our ability to collect, particularly against terrorists," he said. When pressed by The Intercept to explain his figure, Clapper said it came from the National Security Agency. "The projected growth maturation and installation of commercially available encryption -- what they had forecasted for seven years ahead, three years ago, was accelerated to now, because of the revelation of the leaks." Asked if that was a good thing, leading to better protection for American consumers from the arms race of hackers constantly trying to penetrate software worldwide, Clapper answered no. "From our standpoint, it's not ⦠it's not a good thing," he said."Of all the things I've been accused of," Snowden said, "this is the one of which I am most proud."
Thank you, Mr. Snowden. Countless around the world are in your debt.
The phrasing is bad. It's actually 7 - (-3) = 10. So, the predictions were for 10 years from 3 years ago or 7 years from today.
I imagine he lies awake at night worrying about losing the free world the same way that J Edgar Hoover lied awake at night worrying about losing the free world. But both of them are simply wrong.
It turns out that letting black people vote, and letting women get jobs didn't destroy America. Hoover was simply wrong about that. Sure, there were race riots in LA. And there's been a lot of yelling about cops shooting black people. But it has not spelled the end of the United States of America. Hoover's subversion of the democratic process did FAR more to threaten the USA then those actors he was trying to thwart. There was no need to spy on MLK nor run a smear campaign against him. There was no need to radicalise the black panthers and help them pull off an assassination. There was no need to run a dragnet on academics. Now, he was also trying to thwart the commie bastards. And he failed. They simply had a better spy campaign then we did. But we were ideologically better and more aligned with reality, so it didn't really matter. Give it time. Even China is capitalistic now. (More then we are, by some measures)
And terrorism? The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. 3,000 corpses in NYC is, with no disrespect to the dead, chump change in the larger picture. Simply put, these radicals have no hope of threatening the existence of the USA. The worst they can do is piss us off enough to go get a bunch of people killed in the desert (most of whom had no connection to the terrorists).
What he should lie awake at night worrying about is all of the clandestine and blatantly illegal operations he signed off on coming to light and spending the rest of his days in prison. But hell, he can bold-faced lie at a congressional hearing to a senator who has the clearance to know he's lying and still somehow not get charged with anything. So who knows how much dirt he has on everyone.