Lessig (or something) is deleting my comment on Disqus. Here it is: ---- The the government's claims of transparency and audibility of the NSA's PRISM program

Lessig (or something) is deleting my comment on Disqus. Here it is: ---- The the government's claims of transparency and audibility of the NSA's PRISM program is analogous (if not directly related) to the claims of Palantir's. Search for "immutable auditing" below: http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2009/07/Privacy-and-Civil-Liberties-are-in-Palantirs-DNA.pdf http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2... But even with such an audit trail to the core, it is known that it isn't sufficient: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09.pdf http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09.... I wager that for any given system that touts immutable audibility, there is a way to hack around it. Privacy through automated means is impossible. At best it is a kind of DRM that the NSA can easily work around secretly if it wanted it. What we should be advocating instead is Perfect Forward Secrecy in our internet architecture, and the dismantling of PRISM and related data centers. Prof Lessig, in your book "Code", you are using the issue of copyright to condone the current direction of the surveillance state and offering red herrings as "balancing" compromises. Such a balance is impossible in the face of concentrated storage of (even encrypted) storage data by intelligence agencies. As long as the NSA can tap the wires and record information in vast databases for cold storage, we are absolutely in risk. More technical discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966942 P.S., FTFY: "I have not, AND would not ever, accept money from Palantir..."