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What evidence is there for another NSA hacker? Proof by narrative. The narrative says that the NSA is impenetrable, except for inside threats. Therefore it w
by narrator 10y ago
What evidence is there for another NSA hacker? Proof by narrative. The narrative says that the NSA is impenetrable, except for inside threats. Therefore it was an inside threat.
Proof by narrative is the slippery slope whereby the state becomes a religion.
It's borrowed from religion and used in the modern state. In the old testament, whenever the chosen people were defeated, the only reason could be that someone was making sacrifices to the wrong god somewhere. The proof was that god would have been with them on the battlefield otherwise.
It's why, in Stalinist show trials, political enemies are made to confess for crimes of sabotaging production, because the narrative says that the production process is perfect in the Soviet Union and the only way that quotas would fail to be met is because of reactionary saboteurs. Fallacious or not, each additional conviction reinforces the state's narrative.
- tptacek 10y ago"The NSA is impenetrable" is not and was not the prevailing narrative, to say the least.
- Coding_Cat 10y agoNot on here at least. I wouldn't be surprised if a large part of the population still believed it though.
- revelation 10y agoHell, large parts of HN seem to believe this. No amount of shitty PowerPoint, terrible Java Enterprise(TM) desktop apps and outdated open source software with extra functionality hacked in seems to convince people otherwise. I blame Hollywood.
- CWuestefeld 10y agoIt's implicit in any of the arguments supporting key escrow.
- tedunangst 10y agoAre they planning to store the escrowed keys on forward deployed staging servers?
- zipwitch 10y agoWhat they're _planning_ is not relevant. What matters is whether they're competent enough to keep such keys secure. (Such as by not allowing malicious actors to get copies of them.) What is relevant is that they are demonstrably _not_ competent.
- tedunangst 10y agoYou don't think the relative attack surface of two classes of machine is relevant? Are "they" (the tailored access division) going to be in charge of safeguarding the keys?
- tptacek 10y agoYou, too, are rebutting an argument nobody is making.
- jdp23 10y agoReally? It seems to me like it's key to pro-mass-surveillance people's support for the "collect it all" approach - and for key escrow schemes in particular. And it ties into the VEP discussions as well.
- tptacek 10y agoI don't know what our beliefs about key escrow have to do with the reality that NSA's "impenetrability" isn't part of the prevailing narrative. Among experts, the gauge on NSA is trending strongly towards "clownshoes".
- pdeuchler 10y agoThese points are not mutually exclusive. Most on hacker news or security twitter or slashdot or whatever would agree that the NSA has serious vulnerabilities and have terrible policies/practices, but the narrative being pushed to the average american via the usual channels is most assuredly that the NSA is infallible (or that it's only fallible due to pesky things like privacy). This article is on Reuters, which means it wasn't meant for people who know what elliptic curves are, it was meant for people who still call Comcast to restart their router. Given that, I think it's safe to say there's a distinct narrative being pushed here where it's heavily implied that leakers are the main threat to the NSA's security.
- tptacek 10y agoI didn't say they were mutually exclusive; that is also a rebuttal to an argument nobody is making. I'm saying they're orthogonal to the question of who's responsible for leaking these NSA tools.
- pdeuchler 10y agoI think this subthread is pretty clearly about the predominant narrative concerning the NSA and how this article plays into that (regardless of who actually is "leaking" it), I was responding to the discussion around your statement of: > "The NSA is impenetrable" is not and was not the prevailing narrative, to say the least.
- kbenson 10y agoThis may be a case where your security industry experience works against you. I'm not sure the average US citizen doesn't believe that the NSA is so well guarded that the only threat with what they do is corruption and inside actors. Do we have any polls on this? I don't trust people involved in the computer industry to necessarily have views that conform to the average person with regard to this, and the media all have narratives they would like to put forth, but none of them necessarily have to conform to reality.
- jomamaxx 10y agoThe US government promotes a lot of narratives, but it doesn't really talk much about the NSA. So I'm not sure there's a narrative play here. And your comment about religion is simply false, this is reaching way too far and cynically.
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