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Tech-savvy people often miss the forest for the trees on this one. Once you get past the engrossment in implementation details, the fundamentalist political phi

Tech-savvy people often miss the forest for the trees on this one. Once you get past the engrossment in implementation details, the fundamentalist political philosophizing, and the harping on spurious and mostly anecdotal evidence for Western police states, there actually is good reason for government surveillance of W/Obama scale. There is a distinct threat that global terror will increase in scope by orders of magnitude, due to a) gains in message efficacy, b) positive feedback loops for recruitment (i.e., bombing Iraq over and over again), c) weapon availability gains, d) geopolitical posturing, or e) a black swan. Of what has been revealed from Snowden's leaks, the worst intentional (read: potentially malicious) invasion of privacy was NSA employees making fun of tapped conversations. If that and you not being able to torrent 24-bit flacs off of what.cd is the cost we have to pay for security in a future which is less certain than is widely acknowledged, sign me up.

benashford 11y ago
The worst thing for me about the Snowden leaks wasn't that. It was the deliberate interference in secure protocols (e.g. the flawed random number generators), combined with the pressure to leave open accidental flaws. This makes everyone vulnerable to J. Random Cybercriminal when those same flaws are finally discovered by the non-secret services. Being a victim of an identity thief is a lot less terrifying than being in the middle of a automatic weapon massacre, but it's a lot more likely to happen. The framing of the debate as "encryption = only used for evil" is not only wrong, but very dangerous from that point-of-view. I don't have any easy answers that keeps everyone happy. But neither does anyone else.
mbrock 11y ago
You are already signed up. There is no opt-out and no democracy. Thank you for your cooperation.

benashford 11y ago

The worst thing for me about the Snowden leaks wasn't that. It was the deliberate interference in secure protocols (e.g. the flawed random number generators), combined with the pressure to leave open accidental flaws. This makes everyone vulnerable to J. Random Cybercriminal when those same flaws are finally discovered by the non-secret services. Being a victim of an identity thief is a lot less terrifying than being in the middle of a automatic weapon massacre, but it's a lot more likely to happen. The framing of the debate as "encryption = only used for evil" is not only wrong, but very dangerous from that point-of-view. I don't have any easy answers that keeps everyone happy. But neither does anyone else.

mbrock 11y ago

You are already signed up. There is no opt-out and no democracy. Thank you for your cooperation.