Bottom line to the Bottom line: The Media that broadcast his fraudulent shit loud and clear, again, timed perfectly with the man made Colorado disaster are complicit/implicated. We all know to ignore the trolls - shouldn't Slashdot editors have known better to post a story from troll researches with antecedents right here on/.? Lie to me once, shame on you... lie to me twice...
acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve.
Your right although the organizations are not being treated like criminals by the powers that be, more like rewarded as an owner rewards a guard dog. We the public are the enemy/being treated like we are all criminal "terrorists" so they are defiantly not operating in our interests - surely this is obvious at this point, or are the researchers just being polite?
I should have said Most Intellectuals not imply all of them - my mistake. So no I am not engaging in anti-intellectualism just trying to raise the standard (which might be more obvious if you read the link I posted).
The flesh-and-blood sharks were thrown in jail (overnight, litrally) convicted of fraud many years later and given a tiny slap on the wrist compared to their actual crimes. This not done in the name of justice, but part of a larger power struggle to take the NYSE electronic (the families that had operated the NYSE for 200 years were blocking the move, shit started to hit the fan around 2003). The exchange specialist were only accused of skimming off the top for a short period of time, but everyone familiar with this practice knows that it goes back to 1970's and most likely well before that (Richard Ney called them out for skimming off the top in his best selling book The Wall Street Jungle around 1970), Richard Wyckoff talked about the principles & techniques of stock market manipulation (by the exchanges) it as far back as early 1900's). Since 1970 that are billions of dollars skimmed off the top - no investigation until a power struggle. The practice goes on today and it is the electronic exchanges that benefit instead of the NYSE specialists. Any talented stock market data analyst can confirm this by taking NYSE data pre electronic exchange data and comparing their "skimming" techniques as confirmed in the court case against the electronic data. Wyckoff became very wealthy living off the crumbs of the exchanges ill-gotten gains.
All this news is underlining is that the exchanges are having more of their crumbs stolen by independent parties... if you want reform, start with brining transparent to the stock marker exchanges and their skimming off the top practices. The cost to society is enormous.
That was before the Internet was invented. We would have to see a whole lot more totalitarian control over it before this old rule, the equivalent of blinding the independent scribes, cutting out their tongues could ever be applied again. At best all they can do now is use mass media to try and convince the majority of an alternative "truth" arguably effective in the short term I must admit.
The TL;DW version of Cold Fiord's video on Conservative policy think tank Hoover Institution intellectual Thomas Sowell and his book "Intellectuals and Society"... for those that are interested...
European Parliament may be "officially nominating" - but their respective countries have all denied Snowdens asylum requests. Sure sounds like a consolation prize and even if he wins it, it does not let European countries off the hook for their crime. History will judge their actions very poorly - they have done the world a disservice and revealed their deep rooted hypocrisy.
"You don’t have any other society where the educated classes are so effectively indoctrinated and controlled by a subtle propaganda system – a private system including media, intellectual opinion forming magazines and the participation of the most highly educated sections of the population. Such people ought to be referred to as “Commissars” – for that is what their essential function is – to set up and maintain a system of doctrines and beliefs which will undermine independent thought and prevent a proper understanding and analysis of national and global institutions, issues, and policies." - From Language and Politics
Example:
A more difficult task is to shift the moral onus of the war to its victims. This seems a rather unpromising enterprise -- rather as if the Nazis had attempted to blame the Jews for the crematoria. But undaunted, American propagandists are pursuing this effort too, and with some success. Things have reached the point where an American President can appear on national television and state that we owe "no debt" to the Vietnamese, because "the destruction was mutual."28 And there is not a whisper of protest when this monstrous statement, worthy of Hitler or Stalin, is blandly produced in the midst of a discourse on human rights. Not only do we owe them no debt for having murdered and destroyed and ravaged their land, but we now may stand back and sanctimoniously blame them for dying of disease and malnutrition, deploring their cruelty when hundreds die trying to clear unexploded ordnance by hand from fields laid waste by the violence of the American state, wringing our hands in mock horror when those who were able to survive the American assault -- predictably, the toughest and harshest elements -- resort to oppression and sometimes massive violence, or fail to find solutions to material problems that have no analogue in Western history perhaps since the Black Death.
Let's take Obama's Nobel Prize away and give it to Snowden.
I agree 100%. He's done more for liberty in the USA than any politician has done in 50 years. he's actually managed to push surveillance as a topic of conversation at the average american's dinner table. That alone is an excellent achievement, nevermind the rest he has done.
That all being true, no matter what Snowden or any other activist does to try and roll back the fascist encroachments of absolute power - the peace prize world is off limits. Heroes of the people like Manning, Snowden will continue to be labeled traitors and excluded from all significant high profile peace prizes, Time Person of the Year, in large part due to the failure of our intellectuals:
The article is an attack on the intellectual culture in the U.S., which Chomsky argues is largely subservient to power. He is particularly critical of social scientists and technocrats, who he believed were providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the crimes of the state
Intellectuals have betrayed us all before and it will continue to happen until a groundswell of people start to shun, exclude and shine a bright constant light on these mostly unnamed behind the scenes policy setters who have corrupted their purpose blinding following the "party line" subservience to power.
it's common practice to never use unexplainable magic numbers in cryptography standards, especially when those numbers are being chosen by intelligence agencies.
Well then, how do we explain the common practice of using magic numbers in cryptography standard, then?
As well as reviewing the standards themselves, I hope someone is reviewing the processes which allowed these weaknesses to get into the standards.
Exactly. A list of people had to be complicit in getting these "magic backdoor" numbers into the standards. The integrity of these people is now highly questionable, and they should be put to task over the issue, removed from decision making posts and in the worst cases, professionally shunned by the community and excluded from all standards processes... the cost of not doing this is a return to business as usual once things settle down.
tech companies are fighting furiously to report the "total number of NSA requests" they complied with.
Considering that those requests are "extras" on top and in addition to the NSA's always on access to the backend servers (as per Prism docs), then even if they win that fight it will be little comfort. All the "total number of NSA requests" tell us is that after looking through all the users stored emails and search profiles the NSA then decided to put in an extra request to track a users search keystroke and other front end data.
Speaking of foiling NSA and other of the worlds shadowy sky organizations shenanigans, there are some great ideas floating about like this one posted a few NSA stories back by Anachragnome: "The NSA has made it clear that making connections--following the metadata--is often enough to get an investigation started. So why not do the same thing? Turn the whole thing around? Start focusing on their networks."
A sort of They Rule type network connection analysis on lists of people involved, start tallying connections and contacts build dossiers and trust-worthiness - combined with dead man switches for websites and professionally shunning anyone/organizations that have worked to subvert the security of the internet in favor of spying and undermining the social contract of the internet.
Here is the evidence you wanted that the US is different to the other first world nations, especially in regards to spying but that is all common knowledge hardly requires repeating. That is why the US is subject to more scrutiny than the rest - we are leading the rest of world by example, for good or for worse.
No that is common knowledge already and yes, especially France is guilty of spying, I never implied otherwise. It is irrelevant however, and does not change my original point above..
Even if you believe what Clapper/Woolsey et. all say (and quite frankly who does now after so many lies cover-ups and partial hangouts have been exposed in such quick succession regarding the Snowden leaks?), Edward Snowden walked out with all that data and we only know about it because he went public and was not in it for industrial espionage. How many before him had been doing the same only working for some company or other, we will never know.
Does any country want all their home grown companies data stored at the NSA even if the best case your proposing is "Well, yes the NSA cracks, collects and stores your industrial and economic secrets... but trust us we don't pass that data on to American companies."
[1] Probably because American's have been expelled from various countries various times for economic spying, so James Clapper cannot very apply the default PR script which is to deny it ever happens... as you are trying to lead us to believe applies in this case... cold fjord.
Because all government's want to spy on their citizens. European governments used to be the best at fascism but have been playing catch up to the US for a while now.
But do all government's of the world wish to permit industrial espionage on their soil, or is it political power first over protecting national business interests...
I'm slightly amused the Yahoo icon on this story has a transparent background.
For all the good this transparency does to restore our confidence. The Snowden leaks/NSA documents clearly show that the NSA directly taps into the backend systems without any need to reque4st anything from these companies - Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc. The only time these companies receive extra requests like the ones being reported above is when the NSA want's to do more proactive monitoring or targeted individuals that requires hooking into the front end (monitoring search as you type etc). PR departments have been working overtime to try and muddle, confuse and distract from this small detail - do not let them off the hook so easily people - this is not transparancy.
I do not know how we the geek community should respond, but NSA is defiantly is using the following Sun Tzu tactic to destroy any coherent and effective security standard - worldwide (which is the amazing part - how do all the non US security professionals and their respective countries sign themselves up to a NSA destroyed security standard?):
"Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate."
Ok yes now you have given me more to go on I can understand how the title could be interpreted as a FUD attack and might be over the top - my bad. In my defense at that time I was thinking more along the lines of - what on earth is Schneier "playing at"/"game", did he have shares in the company or something. How could he recommend Silent Circle right after this major news story and even what he himself has just written underlying exactly why we cannot trust propriety companies like Silent Circle anymore - they are high risk not to be trusted. Your right I should just have written "Silent Circle?" for the title.
For the record I personally think Bruce Schneier is a credible guy - but I think that makes it even harder to understand his recommendation.
The fact that they shut down operations of one of their products rather than give in to the NSA's demands is pretty good evidence.
There are other less admirable interpretations for that action (my post above outlines a couple I have seen expressed around the internet). Main new one I see many people commenting: If the Snowden leaks might possibly name Silent Circle as one of the collaborators in the future, then closing down their mail product would give their PR team some moral defense - "see we did not collaborate!". Not that I believe any of these theories one way or the other mind you - I don't care and don't have to. I just do not think it is wise for anyone to give any closed source security company a free pass and our blind trust because of something like that, especially after all that we have learned today.
Yes you could be right it could be hyperbole - however it does have some legs to stand on especially in some of the marketing/media stories targeted at the less technically inclined like the one I just linked. An uninformed reader would read that article and arguably assume that the product is all open source peer reviewed, "torn to shreds" and no possibility for govermental back doors. Ok yes maybe dishonest is too strong a term, but it certainly creates distrust for those of us that pay attention to this little detail.
The fact that they closed down their mail product rather than risk giving in to the NSA lends them a certain amount of credibility when we know that other major companies have been complicit in this for years without saying anything.
If everything is as they say it is, then yes, it is very admiral of them. That in no way should buy them a free pass validating all the binaries they sellwith a free security pass though, should it? The cynical might conclude differently, saying that Silent Circle may have taken the opportunity to both terminated a low profit product and win marketing feel good points in the process driving sales of their more popular and profitable products. The really paranoid might conclude that they shutdown the mail service because if they didn't follow LavaBit's lead and it ever got out, their reputation would be nil.
Personally I do not consider myself paranoid or overly cynical so do not believe in those two theories - but I am concerned when high profile security researches recommend security software that many will take as good advice when there is a very good chance the thing is compromised given what we have learned from the news (and Schneier's own research) today.
Like you I also welcome the debate and agree with Schneier's goal of encouraging engineers to "take back the internet". Good luck getting that essay published.
If they open-sourced it, then the NSA gets the opportunity to pervert the public release
This was covered by someone else in the thread above. TL;DR "But then they also have to persuade all the users to adopt that [new NSA modified] fork. " - i.e. not going to happen.
...while building a secure release for the government customers who need the product - thus eliminating the one piece of leverage that Silent Circle can use to keep the NSA from weakening their software.
Do you really think the NSA or any big govermental agency serious about security buys binaries from Silent Circle and never sees the full source code? Of course not - if the NSA buys any software it is after signing NDA's and reviewing the source themselves.
Support contracts are how companies with open source products make most of their big money as well... remind me again why Silent Circle have not open sourced their security software. At the end of the day it is their right to do what they want with it, but a security expert like Schneier should know better than go recommending to use it in a high profile post read by many non security experts without any caveat's or warnings.
Slashdot Mirror
Bottom line to the Bottom line: The Media that broadcast his fraudulent shit loud and clear, again, timed perfectly with the man made Colorado disaster are complicit/implicated. We all know to ignore the trolls - shouldn't Slashdot editors have known better to post a story from troll researches with antecedents right here on /.? Lie to me once, shame on you... lie to me twice...
acting against the interests of the public that they are meant to serve.
Your right although the organizations are not being treated like criminals by the powers that be, more like rewarded as an owner rewards a guard dog. We the public are the enemy/being treated like we are all criminal "terrorists" so they are defiantly not operating in our interests - surely this is obvious at this point, or are the researchers just being polite?
I should have said Most Intellectuals not imply all of them - my mistake. So no I am not engaging in anti-intellectualism just trying to raise the standard (which might be more obvious if you read the link I posted).
All this news is underlining is that the exchanges are having more of their crumbs stolen by independent parties... if you want reform, start with brining transparent to the stock marker exchanges and their skimming off the top practices. The cost to society is enormous.
History, my friend, is written by the victors.
That was before the Internet was invented. We would have to see a whole lot more totalitarian control over it before this old rule, the equivalent of blinding the independent scribes, cutting out their tongues could ever be applied again. At best all they can do now is use mass media to try and convince the majority of an alternative "truth" arguably effective in the short term I must admit.
The TL;DW version of Cold Fiord's video on Conservative policy think tank Hoover Institution intellectual Thomas Sowell and his book "Intellectuals and Society"... for those that are interested...
European Parliament may be "officially nominating" - but their respective countries have all denied Snowdens asylum requests. Sure sounds like a consolation prize and even if he wins it, it does not let European countries off the hook for their crime. History will judge their actions very poorly - they have done the world a disservice and revealed their deep rooted hypocrisy.
"You don’t have any other society where the educated classes are so effectively indoctrinated and controlled by a subtle propaganda system – a private system including media, intellectual opinion forming magazines and the participation of the most highly educated sections of the population. Such people ought to be referred to as “Commissars” – for that is what their essential function is – to set up and maintain a system of doctrines and beliefs which will undermine independent thought and prevent a proper understanding and analysis of national and global institutions, issues, and policies." - From Language and Politics
Example:
A more difficult task is to shift the moral onus of the war to its victims. This seems a rather unpromising enterprise -- rather as if the Nazis had attempted to blame the Jews for the crematoria. But undaunted, American propagandists are pursuing this effort too, and with some success. Things have reached the point where an American President can appear on national television and state that we owe "no debt" to the Vietnamese, because "the destruction was mutual."28 And there is not a whisper of protest when this monstrous statement, worthy of Hitler or Stalin, is blandly produced in the midst of a discourse on human rights. Not only do we owe them no debt for having murdered and destroyed and ravaged their land, but we now may stand back and sanctimoniously blame them for dying of disease and malnutrition, deploring their cruelty when hundreds die trying to clear unexploded ordnance by hand from fields laid waste by the violence of the American state, wringing our hands in mock horror when those who were able to survive the American assault -- predictably, the toughest and harshest elements -- resort to oppression and sometimes massive violence, or fail to find solutions to material problems that have no analogue in Western history perhaps since the Black Death.
Let's take Obama's Nobel Prize away and give it to Snowden.
I agree 100%. He's done more for liberty in the USA than any politician has done in 50 years. he's actually managed to push surveillance as a topic of conversation at the average american's dinner table. That alone is an excellent achievement, nevermind the rest he has done.
That all being true, no matter what Snowden or any other activist does to try and roll back the fascist encroachments of absolute power - the peace prize world is off limits. Heroes of the people like Manning, Snowden will continue to be labeled traitors and excluded from all significant high profile peace prizes, Time Person of the Year, in large part due to the failure of our intellectuals:
The article is an attack on the intellectual culture in the U.S., which Chomsky argues is largely subservient to power. He is particularly critical of social scientists and technocrats, who he believed were providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the crimes of the state
Intellectuals have betrayed us all before and it will continue to happen until a groundswell of people start to shun, exclude and shine a bright constant light on these mostly unnamed behind the scenes policy setters who have corrupted their purpose blinding following the "party line" subservience to power.
Some related reading: "The Responsibility of Intellectuals"
it's common practice to never use unexplainable magic numbers in cryptography standards, especially when those numbers are being chosen by intelligence agencies.
Well then, how do we explain the common practice of using magic numbers in cryptography standard, then?
As well as reviewing the standards themselves, I hope someone is reviewing the processes which allowed these weaknesses to get into the standards.
Exactly. A list of people had to be complicit in getting these "magic backdoor" numbers into the standards. The integrity of these people is now highly questionable, and they should be put to task over the issue, removed from decision making posts and in the worst cases, professionally shunned by the community and excluded from all standards processes... the cost of not doing this is a return to business as usual once things settle down.
tech companies are fighting furiously to report the "total number of NSA requests" they complied with.
Considering that those requests are "extras" on top and in addition to the NSA's always on access to the backend servers (as per Prism docs), then even if they win that fight it will be little comfort. All the "total number of NSA requests" tell us is that after looking through all the users stored emails and search profiles the NSA then decided to put in an extra request to track a users search keystroke and other front end data.
I quoted you here, nice ideas.
Speaking of foiling NSA and other of the worlds shadowy sky organizations shenanigans, there are some great ideas floating about like this one posted a few NSA stories back by Anachragnome: "The NSA has made it clear that making connections--following the metadata--is often enough to get an investigation started. So why not do the same thing? Turn the whole thing around? Start focusing on their networks."
A sort of They Rule type network connection analysis on lists of people involved, start tallying connections and contacts build dossiers and trust-worthiness - combined with dead man switches for websites and professionally shunning anyone/organizations that have worked to subvert the security of the internet in favor of spying and undermining the social contract of the internet.
In related news Reddit co-founder was exposed as wanting to sign up and use Reddit/his reputation as a mouthpiece/research partner for Stratfor. Stratfor turned him down they already had people from the social networking world working for them apparently. Given Slashdot appears to give regular airtime to well known warmongering trolls, will anyone be surprised if most sites like Slashdot are already on the payroll...
The truth, it's just a leak away, it's just a leak awaaay....
Here is the evidence you wanted that the US is different to the other first world nations, especially in regards to spying but that is all common knowledge hardly requires repeating. That is why the US is subject to more scrutiny than the rest - we are leading the rest of world by example, for good or for worse.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
No that is common knowledge already and yes, especially France is guilty of spying, I never implied otherwise. It is irrelevant however, and does not change my original point above..
Even if you believe what Clapper/Woolsey et. all say (and quite frankly who does now after so many lies cover-ups and partial hangouts have been exposed in such quick succession regarding the Snowden leaks?), Edward Snowden walked out with all that data and we only know about it because he went public and was not in it for industrial espionage. How many before him had been doing the same only working for some company or other, we will never know.
Does any country want all their home grown companies data stored at the NSA even if the best case your proposing is "Well, yes the NSA cracks, collects and stores your industrial and economic secrets... but trust us we don't pass that data on to American companies."
Ahh, so Clapper says they only collect the data [1] but do not actually inhale it.
Next you will be trying to convince us all that access to the gathered intelligence data is strictly controlled and only after [secret] court approval, for terrorism related reasons only.
[1] Probably because American's have been expelled from various countries various times for economic spying, so James Clapper cannot very apply the default PR script which is to deny it ever happens... as you are trying to lead us to believe applies in this case... cold fjord.
Because all government's want to spy on their citizens. European governments used to be the best at fascism but have been playing catch up to the US for a while now.
But do all government's of the world wish to permit industrial espionage on their soil, or is it political power first over protecting national business interests...
Statement by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper on Allegations of Economic Espionage
"...It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters, and terrorist financing...."
I'm slightly amused the Yahoo icon on this story has a transparent background.
For all the good this transparency does to restore our confidence. The Snowden leaks/NSA documents clearly show that the NSA directly taps into the backend systems without any need to reque4st anything from these companies - Google, Yahoo, Facebook etc. The only time these companies receive extra requests like the ones being reported above is when the NSA want's to do more proactive monitoring or targeted individuals that requires hooking into the front end (monitoring search as you type etc). PR departments have been working overtime to try and muddle, confuse and distract from this small detail - do not let them off the hook so easily people - this is not transparancy.
"Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate."
Sun Tzu
Ok yes now you have given me more to go on I can understand how the title could be interpreted as a FUD attack and might be over the top - my bad. In my defense at that time I was thinking more along the lines of - what on earth is Schneier "playing at"/"game", did he have shares in the company or something. How could he recommend Silent Circle right after this major news story and even what he himself has just written underlying exactly why we cannot trust propriety companies like Silent Circle anymore - they are high risk not to be trusted. Your right I should just have written "Silent Circle?" for the title.
For the record I personally think Bruce Schneier is a credible guy - but I think that makes it even harder to understand his recommendation.
The fact that they shut down operations of one of their products rather than give in to the NSA's demands is pretty good evidence.
There are other less admirable interpretations for that action (my post above outlines a couple I have seen expressed around the internet). Main new one I see many people commenting: If the Snowden leaks might possibly name Silent Circle as one of the collaborators in the future, then closing down their mail product would give their PR team some moral defense - "see we did not collaborate!". Not that I believe any of these theories one way or the other mind you - I don't care and don't have to. I just do not think it is wise for anyone to give any closed source security company a free pass and our blind trust because of something like that, especially after all that we have learned today.
Yes you could be right it could be hyperbole - however it does have some legs to stand on especially in some of the marketing/media stories targeted at the less technically inclined like the one I just linked. An uninformed reader would read that article and arguably assume that the product is all open source peer reviewed, "torn to shreds" and no possibility for govermental back doors. Ok yes maybe dishonest is too strong a term, but it certainly creates distrust for those of us that pay attention to this little detail.
The fact that they closed down their mail product rather than risk giving in to the NSA lends them a certain amount of credibility when we know that other major companies have been complicit in this for years without saying anything.
If everything is as they say it is, then yes, it is very admiral of them. That in no way should buy them a free pass validating all the binaries they sellwith a free security pass though, should it? The cynical might conclude differently, saying that Silent Circle may have taken the opportunity to both terminated a low profit product and win marketing feel good points in the process driving sales of their more popular and profitable products. The really paranoid might conclude that they shutdown the mail service because if they didn't follow LavaBit's lead and it ever got out, their reputation would be nil.
Personally I do not consider myself paranoid or overly cynical so do not believe in those two theories - but I am concerned when high profile security researches recommend security software that many will take as good advice when there is a very good chance the thing is compromised given what we have learned from the news (and Schneier's own research) today.
Like you I also welcome the debate and agree with Schneier's goal of encouraging engineers to "take back the internet". Good luck getting that essay published.
My apologies I read it as backing up the original accusation (which surprised me!) Thank's for helping me interpreter the accusation then ;-)
If they open-sourced it, then the NSA gets the opportunity to pervert the public release
This was covered by someone else in the thread above. TL;DR "But then they also have to persuade all the users to adopt that [new NSA modified] fork. " - i.e. not going to happen.
...while building a secure release for the government customers who need the product - thus eliminating the one piece of leverage that Silent Circle can use to keep the NSA from weakening their software.
Do you really think the NSA or any big govermental agency serious about security buys binaries from Silent Circle and never sees the full source code? Of course not - if the NSA buys any software it is after signing NDA's and reviewing the source themselves.
Support contracts are how companies with open source products make most of their big money as well... remind me again why Silent Circle have not open sourced their security software. At the end of the day it is their right to do what they want with it, but a security expert like Schneier should know better than go recommending to use it in a high profile post read by many non security experts without any caveat's or warnings.