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Whether or not this hack was developed with the help of Apple (a “backdoor”) or by a third-party exploit, this is exactly what a “golden key” looks like after i

by zaroth 8y ago

Whether or not this hack was developed with the help of Apple (a “backdoor”) or by a third-party exploit, this is exactly what a “golden key” looks like after it gets in the wild. An espionage tool developed by a major world power proliferates to totalitarian regimes, aided and operated by ex-NSA agents on the payroll, to compromise human rights activists and the political opposition. If ever there was proof that our devices need to be striving — constantly striving — for absolute security, and can never allow any “trusted party” an authentication or encryption bypass, this article is it. An exploit like this is incalculably valuable to intelligence agencies. That the exploit would proliferate is undeniable. And the ends to which it would be (has been) used is atrocious. Probably the only thing different about how intelligence agencies exploited this, and how they would exploit a golden key, is that with the golden key they would be sweeping up every photo on every device, and not just some photos on some devices. “It was like, ‘We have this great new exploit that we just bought. Get us a huge list of targets that have iPhones now,’” she said. “It was like Christmas.”

FakeComments 8y ago
I disagree with the conclusion of absolute security — it won’t happen, and only encourages subversion by people who both need and have a right to access the content. Instead of pontificating, the tech industry should innovate. There’s no reason that hashchains can’t be used to timelock the key, and the enclave export it in response to a signed request. Then we can at least force the compromises through the legal system and require effort to reverse the hashchain. That kind of court authorized targeted access removes the incentive (and justification) for other actors to more deeply compromise the system. In turn, this let’s us provide more security, in practice. What’s not going to sell, and what the tech industry needs to get over is “lulz, it’ll impossible to intercept military or terrorist information because I need absolute privacy for my saucy emails”. I think it’s been empirically demonstrated that won’t happen. Be part of the solution.
- techntoke 8y ago
  C'mon everyone, be part of the solution like this person says. The intelligence agencies will never abuse their power. You can trust them. /s
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    That’s a deep straw man of what I said, to the point of being non-constructive mocking. You’re just being dishonest to claim I suggested trusting the spy agencies. Rather, I pointed out that they have a real mission, and they’re going to spend effort accomplishing it. But their mission isn’t to own every device — it’s to own a select few, probably on the order of hundreds or thousands a year. So, if we create a mechanism by which they can do that without owning every device, we can align our goal of protecting most devices with theirs of owning a few. This in turn increases security for nearly everyone, because powerful agencies no longer have the same motivation to cause harm — and might be persuaded to help. After all, it’s in their interest to prevent large remote compromises — just not a higher priority than maintaining their own access. Further, the best way to actually restrain them is through a change in government policy, which will only happen when the government believes there’s an alternative solution. Perhaps you could try responding to the point?
    - pjc50 8y ago
      I think the underlying point is "which intelligence agencies would be allowed to compromise devices like this"?
      - FakeComments 8y ago
        The ones courts which governed the relevant company were willing to issue warrants on behalf of — that is, those our regular legal and political systems decide on. For a big multinational like Apple, that’s probably a fair number. But it’s also harder to hide they’re doing that, and let’s us bring pressure on them politically for their political misdeeds. In the end, it’ll be major powers who can — US, Europe, China, etc. My point is that it’s never going to be the case that technologists get to unilaterally decide that for all of society. My proposal is just to bring phones into line with existing warrants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19036408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19036408 But by doing so, technologists have the political cover to push back on spy agency excesses and abuses.
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  This sounds like a first order objection to a second order concern. In particular: > What’s not going to sell, and what the tech industry needs to get over is “lulz, it’ll impossible to intercept military or terrorist information because I need absolute privacy for my saucy emails” Seems to be an ironic mischaracterisation of the parent’s point, which was precisely that one coubtry’s terrorism is another’s gay rights activist or high ranking foreign official. From the article: In 2017, for instance, the operatives used Karma to hack an iPhone used by Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, as well as the devices of Turkey’s former Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Şimşek, and Oman’s head of foreign affairs, Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah. It isn’t clear what material was taken from their devices. “Saucy e-mails” is a bit tone deaf :(
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    > Seems to be an ironic mischaracterisation of the parent’s point, which was precisely that one coubtry’s terrorism is another’s gay rights activist or high ranking foreign official. My point was that issues like this should be mediated by courts and existing legal systems, not the unilateral decision of technologists. And that society is going to insist that be the case, hence the most effective way to protect those persecuted minorities is via cooperation and steering how that process happens — not fighting a losing battle. Finally, that the way to increase the effective security is stop fighting ideological battles on the issue, and find a politically workable compromise which still prevents remote exploitation — the main danger of encryption bypasses.
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      Which courts? Which legal systems? Legal systems and courts of nations who believe political speech is a crime and that alternative lifestyles are capital offenses?
      - FakeComments 8y ago
        The ones who are capable of compelling the phone company to obey over political pressure from other sources. This is a strict improvement over the current situation, where the answer is “anyone who has money”.
- syn0byte 8y ago
  Wouldn't the police have a "right" to know if a person has any weapons? Detaining everyone and performing a full cavity search for any and all infractions is just the police exercising their "right" to such information. Will you be the first to bend over and spread for the cops "right" to peace of mind? "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."
  - Ntrails 8y ago
    >"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved. It is not fundamentally true nor universally accepted. Where does the scale tip? All criminal justice systems attempt to minimise the risk - but one some level it is simply the cost of doing business. For all that it is an admirable sentiment, it is limited.
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    Uh, my proposed solution required getting a warrant to order a company to produce a device specific message which in turn could be provided via cable to the physical device, which they must also have access to, followed by spending time reversing a hash chain. So yes, the police already have the power to search you for weapons if they have a warrant, and this is bringing the ability to search phones into line with that.
  - LeifCarrotson 8y ago
    > "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." I wonder if that maxim is still generally approved. It seems like some authoritarians would prefer that 100 innocents would suffer than one guilty person should escape. I suppose it depends how you define "innocent" and "suffer". Under modern law, everyone is guilty of something. And while we might not require suffering in prison, a little suffering of expensive legal fees, invasions of privacy of your digital data/at the border/in the airport, or searches and seizures of property by police in your car are commonplace.
- sobellian 8y ago
  The objections to a golden key are irrespective of whatever system permits the golden key access. Your hashchains are completely irrelevant. The courts will use some key to sign their request, and that key will leak. Cryptography reduces message security to key security, nothing more.
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    That’s why it’s a two stage system: leaking the key only permits forged requests, but an attacker still has to spend the time reversing the hash chain. For each and every phone they want to crack. Apple has also done a reasonable job of holding onto their signing keys, to date.
    - jhayward 8y ago
      > Apple has also done a reasonable job of holding onto their signing keys, to date. How do you know that?
      - FakeComments 8y ago
        Because whoever has stolen them has been reasonably discreet, and we don’t see compromised Apple things all over the place — which means if they’ve been stolen at all, it’s been by high class attackers. If your goal is to stop the NSA et al stealing a key or owning a device, you’ll be sad. But if your goal is to change the law and redefine the parameters of them owning devices, you might make progress. The political process will insist on a means to access these devices, and they’ll accomplish it by one means or another. By engaging with instead of fighting that, we gain the ability to have a say on what those means are.
- smolder 8y ago
  If I want to have a private conversation where the details of what are said are undiscoverable, I believe that's a right that people should have in a "free country", including over the internet, over phone, and so on. The fact is, I can, using some combination of math and secrets, accomplish this. I don't think anyone on earth has the right to collect/record/see the contents of my communications other than me and the other participants, until there's reasonable suspicion of a crime. Covert dragnet snooping is an evil means to any end, and it damages the moral standing of the society that does it.
  - zerocrates 8y ago
    The trick here is that the authorities will (somewhat reasonably) advertise their need for these tools under the "reasonable suspicion" label: they want the backdoor or whatever it is they need to conduct their surveillance once they do have reasonable suspicion.
- int_19h 8y ago
  > What’s not going to sell, and what the tech industry needs to get over is “lulz, it’ll impossible to intercept military or terrorist information because I need absolute privacy for my saucy emails”. I think it’s been empirically demonstrated that won’t happen. It's very much the other way. Strong encryption algorithms have been available to the public for a long time now. You can ban using them, but the only way to effectively enforce that ban would be for the government to require that all devices capable of running code from external sources run only code that's signed by that government. Without that, you can ban all you want, but terrorists and others who need that stuff will have it anyway. So the only effect would indeed be no privacy for saucy emails. Of course, intelligence agencies would love that, since it would allow them to have a society-wide dragnet.
  - FakeComments 8y ago
    I disagree with your analysis — the way most people receive encryption, including criminals and terrorists, is through a provider. Regulating their behavior does change the general trend in security. Further, forcing them to implement their own encryption increases the likelihood they make a mistake while also refocusing the NSA et al to those algorithms instead. What we’ve seen is governments subverting encryption and systems repeatedly, in ways they wouldn’t if they had other methods. I’m not trying to accomplish some absolute ideological position, I’m trying to shift the state of affairs to realign incentives for several players. If some people write their own encryption, or the technologists use GPG everywhere, whatever. > allow them to have a society-wide dragnet I don’t think you even read my proposal: the mechanism I proposed makes that impossible, which is in contrast to the current state of affairs, where they subvert the security of the entire system instead of targeted people. Allowing for targeted cracking at a certain level of expense and requiring physical possession of the device in no way enables mass dragnets, and in fact, removes their legal cover by providing alternative means. I’m not saying people can’t invent their own security — just that factory made safes need to not be “unbreakable”, because it just incentivized bad behavior when they discover a flaw and/or subverting the integrity of the factory.
    - baybal2 8y ago
- baybal2 8y ago
  FakeComments, can you tell who you are?
lawnchair_larry 8y ago
Nobody credible believes for a second that Apple was involved, for whatever it’s worth.
- abrichr 8y ago
  Could you please provide some sources?
  - ryanlol 8y ago
    Wouldn’t it be far more useful for you to provide someone credible making such a claim? If he was wrong this claim would be so trivial to refute that sources seem entirely pointless.
    - abrichr 8y ago
      To clarify my earlier comment, I wasn't taking a position one way or the other. lawnchair_larry made a claim about "nobody credible" believing something. As a lay person in the field, I don't know who these credible people are. Therefore I asked whether lawnchair_larry could tell us who one or more of these credible people are, and where we can read more about what they believe to be true about the situation.
      - jonathanyc 8y ago
        Asking lawnchair_larry to give you a complete list of everyone he considers credible is disingenuous. As the other commenter stated, if someone thought that someone credible made that claim they could simply provide that source, which both (1) involves asymptotically less effort for everyone involved and (2) under reasonable assumptions is at least as effective. “Sir, I’m going to need for you to list for me all the crimes you didn’t commit last Saturday.”
        abugheratwork 8y ago
        > Asking lawnchair_larry to give you a complete list of everyone he considers credible is disingenuous. Implying that was asked seems disingenuous to me, but I assume that wasn't your intent. What I see is a request for clarification, specifically asking for the sources from which a conclusion was drawn. It's not a police raid. Relax.
bawana 8y ago
Isn't the UAE muslim? Why Christmas? or is it because UAE dollars bought Christian mercenaries? We are still in the middle ages and the crusades are still raging. Time to get rid of money - or at least build walls that prevent money from crossing borders as well as criminals. We are not worthy of the the technologic advances that a few geniuses have bestowed on us.
- _mitch 8y ago
  That quote is attributed to a former NSA employee. Something being "like Christmas" is a popular American phrase that doesn't indicate one's religion.
  - isostatic 8y ago
    Christmas has very little to do with religion, it's a cultural holiday across the world.
    - sockopen 8y ago
      "Christmas is an annual festival, commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
      - darkpuma 8y ago
        This may be a disturbing thought to some, but a great many people don't give a damn about any supposed virgin birth. To them, it's about getting time off from work to visit family, various pagan-derived decorations around the home (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule), seasonal desserts, and of course consumerism/consumption (particularly the giving of gifts, which is what "like Christmas" in this instance refers to.)
- andrepd 8y ago
  There's an awful lot of stuff going on in that comment :p Didn't really understand what the focus was.
house_atr 8y ago
"Totalitarian regime" I stop reading whenever I hear doublespeak. You need to find a new way to address countries that aren't western democracies. Especially since the rest of the world is catching up, you won't hold this monopoly on labels for much longer.
- Godel_unicode 8y ago
  Connotations aside, totalitarian is an accurate description of the majority of the UAE. Most of it's citizens live in constituent Emirates which are absolute monarchies. Dubai is a notable exception as a constitutional monarchy, although the relative strength of the monarch is not exactly set even there.
  - house_atr 8y ago
    And Imperialist and hegemonic are accurate descriptions of the Nato bloc. Won't catch you accurate labelers incessantly using that at every opportunity, now will we.
- frostburg 8y ago
  Those countries being relatively more powerful doesn't directly make their governments less unethical. Giving lip service to their propaganda doesn't help either. Also, if you're talking about the mid east and not, say, China, the future doesn't really look bright.
  - house_atr 8y ago
    The future you're afraid of is already the present for the rest of the world under the hegemony of the Anglo sphere. The future looks very bright for me.
- house_atr 8y ago
  Hahaha feed me your downvotes. It fuels me and validates how much of a threat it is to you to treat world affairs without cartoon labels.

by zaroth 8y ago

FakeComments 8y ago

I disagree with the conclusion of absolute security — it won’t happen, and only encourages subversion by people who both need and have a right to access the content. Instead of pontificating, the tech industry should innovate. There’s no reason that hashchains can’t be used to timelock the key, and the enclave export it in response to a signed request. Then we can at least force the compromises through the legal system and require effort to reverse the hashchain. That kind of court authorized targeted access removes the incentive (and justification) for other actors to more deeply compromise the system. In turn, this let’s us provide more security, in practice. What’s not going to sell, and what the tech industry needs to get over is “lulz, it’ll impossible to intercept military or terrorist information because I need absolute privacy for my saucy emails”. I think it’s been empirically demonstrated that won’t happen. Be part of the solution.

techntoke 8y ago
C'mon everyone, be part of the solution like this person says. The intelligence agencies will never abuse their power. You can trust them. /s
- FakeComments 8y ago
  That’s a deep straw man of what I said, to the point of being non-constructive mocking. You’re just being dishonest to claim I suggested trusting the spy agencies. Rather, I pointed out that they have a real mission, and they’re going to spend effort accomplishing it. But their mission isn’t to own every device — it’s to own a select few, probably on the order of hundreds or thousands a year. So, if we create a mechanism by which they can do that without owning every device, we can align our goal of protecting most devices with theirs of owning a few. This in turn increases security for nearly everyone, because powerful agencies no longer have the same motivation to cause harm — and might be persuaded to help. After all, it’s in their interest to prevent large remote compromises — just not a higher priority than maintaining their own access. Further, the best way to actually restrain them is through a change in government policy, which will only happen when the government believes there’s an alternative solution. Perhaps you could try responding to the point?
  - pjc50 8y ago
    I think the underlying point is "which intelligence agencies would be allowed to compromise devices like this"?
    - FakeComments 8y ago
      The ones courts which governed the relevant company were willing to issue warrants on behalf of — that is, those our regular legal and political systems decide on. For a big multinational like Apple, that’s probably a fair number. But it’s also harder to hide they’re doing that, and let’s us bring pressure on them politically for their political misdeeds. In the end, it’ll be major powers who can — US, Europe, China, etc. My point is that it’s never going to be the case that technologists get to unilaterally decide that for all of society. My proposal is just to bring phones into line with existing warrants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19036408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19036408 But by doing so, technologists have the political cover to push back on spy agency excesses and abuses.
nothrabannosir 8y ago
This sounds like a first order objection to a second order concern. In particular: > What’s not going to sell, and what the tech industry needs to get over is “lulz, it’ll impossible to intercept military or terrorist information because I need absolute privacy for my saucy emails” Seems to be an ironic mischaracterisation of the parent’s point, which was precisely that one coubtry’s terrorism is another’s gay rights activist or high ranking foreign official. From the article: In 2017, for instance, the operatives used Karma to hack an iPhone used by Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, as well as the devices of Turkey’s former Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Şimşek, and Oman’s head of foreign affairs, Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah. It isn’t clear what material was taken from their devices. “Saucy e-mails” is a bit tone deaf :(
- FakeComments 8y ago
  > Seems to be an ironic mischaracterisation of the parent’s point, which was precisely that one coubtry’s terrorism is another’s gay rights activist or high ranking foreign official. My point was that issues like this should be mediated by courts and existing legal systems, not the unilateral decision of technologists. And that society is going to insist that be the case, hence the most effective way to protect those persecuted minorities is via cooperation and steering how that process happens — not fighting a losing battle. Finally, that the way to increase the effective security is stop fighting ideological battles on the issue, and find a politically workable compromise which still prevents remote exploitation — the main danger of encryption bypasses.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    Which courts? Which legal systems? Legal systems and courts of nations who believe political speech is a crime and that alternative lifestyles are capital offenses?
    - FakeComments 8y ago
      The ones who are capable of compelling the phone company to obey over political pressure from other sources. This is a strict improvement over the current situation, where the answer is “anyone who has money”.
syn0byte 8y ago
Wouldn't the police have a "right" to know if a person has any weapons? Detaining everyone and performing a full cavity search for any and all infractions is just the police exercising their "right" to such information. Will you be the first to bend over and spread for the cops "right" to peace of mind? "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved."
- Ntrails 8y ago
  >"That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved. It is not fundamentally true nor universally accepted. Where does the scale tip? All criminal justice systems attempt to minimise the risk - but one some level it is simply the cost of doing business. For all that it is an admirable sentiment, it is limited.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  Uh, my proposed solution required getting a warrant to order a company to produce a device specific message which in turn could be provided via cable to the physical device, which they must also have access to, followed by spending time reversing a hash chain. So yes, the police already have the power to search you for weapons if they have a warrant, and this is bringing the ability to search phones into line with that.
- LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  > "That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." I wonder if that maxim is still generally approved. It seems like some authoritarians would prefer that 100 innocents would suffer than one guilty person should escape. I suppose it depends how you define "innocent" and "suffer". Under modern law, everyone is guilty of something. And while we might not require suffering in prison, a little suffering of expensive legal fees, invasions of privacy of your digital data/at the border/in the airport, or searches and seizures of property by police in your car are commonplace.
sobellian 8y ago
The objections to a golden key are irrespective of whatever system permits the golden key access. Your hashchains are completely irrelevant. The courts will use some key to sign their request, and that key will leak. Cryptography reduces message security to key security, nothing more.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  That’s why it’s a two stage system: leaking the key only permits forged requests, but an attacker still has to spend the time reversing the hash chain. For each and every phone they want to crack. Apple has also done a reasonable job of holding onto their signing keys, to date.
  - jhayward 8y ago
    > Apple has also done a reasonable job of holding onto their signing keys, to date. How do you know that?
    - FakeComments 8y ago
      Because whoever has stolen them has been reasonably discreet, and we don’t see compromised Apple things all over the place — which means if they’ve been stolen at all, it’s been by high class attackers. If your goal is to stop the NSA et al stealing a key or owning a device, you’ll be sad. But if your goal is to change the law and redefine the parameters of them owning devices, you might make progress. The political process will insist on a means to access these devices, and they’ll accomplish it by one means or another. By engaging with instead of fighting that, we gain the ability to have a say on what those means are.
smolder 8y ago
If I want to have a private conversation where the details of what are said are undiscoverable, I believe that's a right that people should have in a "free country", including over the internet, over phone, and so on. The fact is, I can, using some combination of math and secrets, accomplish this. I don't think anyone on earth has the right to collect/record/see the contents of my communications other than me and the other participants, until there's reasonable suspicion of a crime. Covert dragnet snooping is an evil means to any end, and it damages the moral standing of the society that does it.
- zerocrates 8y ago
  The trick here is that the authorities will (somewhat reasonably) advertise their need for these tools under the "reasonable suspicion" label: they want the backdoor or whatever it is they need to conduct their surveillance once they do have reasonable suspicion.
int_19h 8y ago
> What’s not going to sell, and what the tech industry needs to get over is “lulz, it’ll impossible to intercept military or terrorist information because I need absolute privacy for my saucy emails”. I think it’s been empirically demonstrated that won’t happen. It's very much the other way. Strong encryption algorithms have been available to the public for a long time now. You can ban using them, but the only way to effectively enforce that ban would be for the government to require that all devices capable of running code from external sources run only code that's signed by that government. Without that, you can ban all you want, but terrorists and others who need that stuff will have it anyway. So the only effect would indeed be no privacy for saucy emails. Of course, intelligence agencies would love that, since it would allow them to have a society-wide dragnet.
- FakeComments 8y ago
  I disagree with your analysis — the way most people receive encryption, including criminals and terrorists, is through a provider. Regulating their behavior does change the general trend in security. Further, forcing them to implement their own encryption increases the likelihood they make a mistake while also refocusing the NSA et al to those algorithms instead. What we’ve seen is governments subverting encryption and systems repeatedly, in ways they wouldn’t if they had other methods. I’m not trying to accomplish some absolute ideological position, I’m trying to shift the state of affairs to realign incentives for several players. If some people write their own encryption, or the technologists use GPG everywhere, whatever. > allow them to have a society-wide dragnet I don’t think you even read my proposal: the mechanism I proposed makes that impossible, which is in contrast to the current state of affairs, where they subvert the security of the entire system instead of targeted people. Allowing for targeted cracking at a certain level of expense and requiring physical possession of the device in no way enables mass dragnets, and in fact, removes their legal cover by providing alternative means. I’m not saying people can’t invent their own security — just that factory made safes need to not be “unbreakable”, because it just incentivized bad behavior when they discover a flaw and/or subverting the integrity of the factory.
  - baybal2 8y ago
baybal2 8y ago
FakeComments, can you tell who you are?

lawnchair_larry 8y ago

Nobody credible believes for a second that Apple was involved, for whatever it’s worth.

abrichr 8y ago
Could you please provide some sources?
- ryanlol 8y ago
  Wouldn’t it be far more useful for you to provide someone credible making such a claim? If he was wrong this claim would be so trivial to refute that sources seem entirely pointless.
  - abrichr 8y ago
    To clarify my earlier comment, I wasn't taking a position one way or the other. lawnchair_larry made a claim about "nobody credible" believing something. As a lay person in the field, I don't know who these credible people are. Therefore I asked whether lawnchair_larry could tell us who one or more of these credible people are, and where we can read more about what they believe to be true about the situation.
    - jonathanyc 8y ago
      Asking lawnchair_larry to give you a complete list of everyone he considers credible is disingenuous. As the other commenter stated, if someone thought that someone credible made that claim they could simply provide that source, which both (1) involves asymptotically less effort for everyone involved and (2) under reasonable assumptions is at least as effective. “Sir, I’m going to need for you to list for me all the crimes you didn’t commit last Saturday.”
      - abugheratwork 8y ago
        > Asking lawnchair_larry to give you a complete list of everyone he considers credible is disingenuous. Implying that was asked seems disingenuous to me, but I assume that wasn't your intent. What I see is a request for clarification, specifically asking for the sources from which a conclusion was drawn. It's not a police raid. Relax.

bawana 8y ago

Isn't the UAE muslim? Why Christmas? or is it because UAE dollars bought Christian mercenaries? We are still in the middle ages and the crusades are still raging. Time to get rid of money - or at least build walls that prevent money from crossing borders as well as criminals. We are not worthy of the the technologic advances that a few geniuses have bestowed on us.

_mitch 8y ago
That quote is attributed to a former NSA employee. Something being "like Christmas" is a popular American phrase that doesn't indicate one's religion.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Christmas has very little to do with religion, it's a cultural holiday across the world.
  - sockopen 8y ago
    "Christmas is an annual festival, commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas
    - darkpuma 8y ago
      This may be a disturbing thought to some, but a great many people don't give a damn about any supposed virgin birth. To them, it's about getting time off from work to visit family, various pagan-derived decorations around the home (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule), seasonal desserts, and of course consumerism/consumption (particularly the giving of gifts, which is what "like Christmas" in this instance refers to.)
andrepd 8y ago
There's an awful lot of stuff going on in that comment :p Didn't really understand what the focus was.

house_atr 8y ago

"Totalitarian regime" I stop reading whenever I hear doublespeak. You need to find a new way to address countries that aren't western democracies. Especially since the rest of the world is catching up, you won't hold this monopoly on labels for much longer.

Godel_unicode 8y ago
Connotations aside, totalitarian is an accurate description of the majority of the UAE. Most of it's citizens live in constituent Emirates which are absolute monarchies. Dubai is a notable exception as a constitutional monarchy, although the relative strength of the monarch is not exactly set even there.
- house_atr 8y ago
  And Imperialist and hegemonic are accurate descriptions of the Nato bloc. Won't catch you accurate labelers incessantly using that at every opportunity, now will we.
frostburg 8y ago
Those countries being relatively more powerful doesn't directly make their governments less unethical. Giving lip service to their propaganda doesn't help either. Also, if you're talking about the mid east and not, say, China, the future doesn't really look bright.
- house_atr 8y ago
  The future you're afraid of is already the present for the rest of the world under the hegemony of the Anglo sphere. The future looks very bright for me.
house_atr 8y ago
Hahaha feed me your downvotes. It fuels me and validates how much of a threat it is to you to treat world affairs without cartoon labels.