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."

Comments

Re:Thanks Edward

[Anonymous Coward]

What? No! Who could doubt that the NSA, just like the CIA, is doing anything less but its level best to protect USoA National Security and never ever would go against the best interests of The American People?!?

Therefore, Edward Snowden is nothing but a traitor, because telling perfectly innocent people that they've been systematically spied upon for going on 70 years is of course not in the National Security Interest. That would be telling the truth. Just ask James "least untruthful" Clapper.

Re:What about Aaron Swartz? Eric S. Raymond?

[BitZtream]

Short answer to your question: Swartz is a douche and so are you for mentioning him, and ESR is just a guy, ya know? Neither one of them changed the world view literally over night.

Long answer to your question:
Because they are both hardly worth mentioning douchebags who get FAR more attention then they deserve.

Swartz was nothing more than a common thief who couldn't deal with the consequences of his actions. When you bring up Swartz as if he's a martyr you lose any and all credibility instantly. It shows everyone that you're just an uppity idiot who wants to rant and rave about something you completely don't understand the facts about.

Get this through your heads people: Aaron Swartz was nothing more than a common criminal. Stop romanizing a selfish thief. Best of Yet, he couldn't even cope with the consequences of his own actions and he was plenty old enough to fucking know better since ... IT WASN'T HIS FIRST FUCKING OFFENSE.

ESR is just a guy who writes software and knows a few things and is an all around intelligent guy. You only mention him because you're a noob who doesn't realize that OSS was huge before anyone knew who ESR was. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know through just looking at history. He just said it about a different technology, one that you now know and care about. Nothing wrong with him, but he didn't change the world.

Snowden, good OR bad, changed the world over night. Could have been anyone really. Snowden isn't special either, other than having the balls to do it and deal with the aftermath (something Swartz didn't).