10 ms·

NSA Codebreaking: I Am The Other

450 points by thecoffman 13y ago

devx 13y ago
> "I wonder: what if a substantial number of Americans started using strong crypto on a routine basis?" That may happen anyway, in time, if this situation is not fixed, but it could happen so much faster if companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook (ok, I know I'm really pushing with this one) who have services used by over a billion people would offer very secure end-to-end communications platform, by default, and in a very transparent way (being able to check for sneaky backdoors pre-encryption, or anything like that). They don't even have to do it for everything, especially the parts which are meant to be more public anyway, but there's absolutely no reason why IM's couldn't be completely private - from everyone and anyone, including the companies themselves. So what are you waiting for Google, Microsoft and Facebook (and others, too)?
- webjprgm 13y ago
  No IMs definitely can't be kept private from the companies themselves because those companies make their money by knowing what it's users talk about. This is part of why I never trusted GMail from the beginning. (But I'm still stuck with it.)
  - devx 13y ago
    They can already use the e-mails. Why do they have to use the chat conversations, too?
- smsm42 13y ago
  You understand that any platform offered by any company with substantial presence in the US would have full access to any data provided to NSA and law enforcement agencies, in most cases under gag order preventing them from disclosing that fact? It can not be any other way - US government has full jurisdiction in the US, and if US law says US citizens can not have privacy from the government and have their data not be accessible by the government - and that is what current interpretation of the law seems to be - then any provider on the US soil, including Google, Microsoft and Facebook - has no other option but to comply with the law?
  - derefr 13y ago
    It'd be interesting if US, Russian, and Chinese entrepreneurs got together and agreed to build start-ups for one-another's citizens, where the US brand was run from Russia, the Russian one from China, etc. Now that'd get some people on terrorist watch-lists.
    - smsm42 13y ago
      I think the temptation would be too great for the respective governments to resist, and given that surveillance against foreigners would not even cause a significant public backlash, those would be compromised even quicker. Right now the whole story blew up because NSA is spying on Americans. If Snowden revealed that NSA is mass-collecting information on Chinese or Russians, the only response would be "keep up the good work, guys!".
      - derefr 13y ago
        Well, sure, it decreases the amount of "security by angry-mob-if-you-screw-up" you get, but it increases the amount of "security by inability to legally compel keys from the companies involved." I'm not sure whether that's positive- or negative-sum, actually.
rasur 13y ago
We are all The Other now.
- Finster 13y ago
  By claiming you are The Other, that clearly places you in the category of domestic terrorism. You are no longer The Other.
aray 13y ago
It would be great to break through the "if you have nothing to hide" line and push that responsible citizenry need security (and cryptography) as well. I am also the other.
- malandrew 13y ago
  I think Martin Fowler has written one of the better arguments that appeal to the "I have nothing to hide" crowd, in "Privacy protects bothersome people"[0]. It's worth sharing with anyone who thinks that just because they have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean that they are not beneficiaries of those that do have something to hide. Privacy is one of the few things that protect those that protect us from the transgressions of our government. [0] http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html
  - Symmetry 13y ago
    I actually think the biggest danger is the NSA digging up dirt on politicians a la J. Edgar Hoover. If details of my sex life were made public I'd be embarrassed but my employer wouldn't care and my life would go on. For a politician, though, scandal means losing your job.
    - sseveran 13y ago
      Unless of course you can be made to look like a bad person and the twitterverse blows up.
- mpyne 13y ago
  > It would be great to break through the "if you have nothing to hide" line and push that responsible citizenry need security (and cryptography) as well. Who (of any relevance) on the NSA or DoJ side is saying people don't need crypto or security though? I've seen a Congressman use the 'nothing to hide' line but haven't seen it much elsewhere even among NSA's defenders. The government does seem to be saying that if you're only concerned about the government possibly seeing your stuff, that you don't have anything to worry about (as long as you're not recruiting for AQ or something) as the NSA doesn't have time to care about you anyways, but that's not quite the same concept. Plus even that has an adequate justification if we assume there is some bizarro universe where the NSA might actually only be doing their job (as everyone "needlessly" using crypto to hide their innocous emails simply helps The Bad Guys to blend in even more effectively). If you don't believe there could be a 'needless' reason to hide emails from any possible government collection, or that there's no such thing as Bad Guys (or both) then you would probably conclude we don't actually live in that bizarro universe. But not everyone would come to the same answers for both and they have logical reasons too.
mpyne 13y ago
> The NSA's official response is to suggest that wanting to secure our communications from our surveillance is inherently suspicious and suggestive of criminal activity. No, their official response is to suggest that encrypting your communications makes you indistinguishable (at their end) from those who encrypt for criminal activity. There is a difference, and there's no getting around the idea that if the set of Bad Actors are to have the crypto broken then it will necessarily involve breaking the same crypto in use by the Good Actors. Even the NSA also says in the very paragraph quoted that encryption is also used for "nations [...] to protect their secrets" (which is hardly a criminal or illegitimate goal). Likewise, if the government hires a lockpicker to plant a bug in an embassy then by definition they now have the technical ability to pick locks (even if they don't have the legal permission). The rest of his points, on the whole, are quite valid but are sometimes answering a question that isn't actually behing asked from the other side.
- javajosh 13y ago
  Something just came into clear focus for me: the NSA really screwed the pooch here. They had a situation where they had access to anything they wanted, but because they insisted on not getting warrants for access, they pissed off Snowden, and now people are going to punish the NSA by becoming more security savvy and using systems that are impenetrable, even with a warrant. Smooth move, NSAssholes.
  - Finster 13y ago
    And that's the core of the issue for me. I don't have any problem with the NSA working with and studying encryption and methods to break encryption. What I have a problem with is invading my privacy and gathering my communications and information without a warrant. My 4th amendment rights have been completely violated.
    - javajosh 13y ago
      Totally. No-one (including me) would have blinked an eye if it turned out the NSA was snooping on anything and everything...with a warrant. Heck, I would have probably been moderately pleased. But snooping on anything, in secret, without judicial oversight, without public consent...that is all very wrong, and Sheier is right: it's a total betrayal of the internet. Whatever short-sighted jerk-offs came up with this grand plan ought to be put in prison for harming US interests. To say that Snowden is the one who harmed US interests for revealing these activities is an intolerable act of a government that values only one thing, loyalty. Principles? Nah. Principles are soooo pre-Industrial revolution. And let's face it: with all the thousands of people working on these projects, someone was bound to blow the whistle sooner or later, because no matter how far down the rabbit hole an agency like the NSA goes when it comes to defining new norms, there are always some awesome weirdos who don't buy it, no matter how normal everyone around them treats it. (Hat tip to you, Snowden, for not drinking the Kool-Aid). Guess what bozos (yes, NSA, I'm talking to you): national security is affected by abrogation of trust and betrayal of people like you. Our position as an exemplar of personal freedom, and self-restrained government, has been badly damaged by you. Going after Snowden, doubling down on internal security...these damage you, and us, further. Maybe Congress is confused on this issue, but I (and most everyone I've talked to) am not: you need to stop collecting data without warrants immediately. You need to dismantle your capacity to do so. You need to delete all information that you've gathered under those conditions. And this should be the last act of the NSA's senior leadership before resigning.
pyaniv 13y ago
Well...NSA is built by a democracy. The people wanted war..their representatives gave it. The people wanted spying...their representatives gave it to them. Only a minority doesn't want these. In a democracy, minority loses. Unfortunately, it turns out the majority are stupid..anywhere in the world. So, just have to live with it, hoping they get intelligent someday.
anigbrowl 13y ago
I mean I am the "other" contemptuously categorized by my government, a vast category of people with an interest in using encrypted communications to thwart my government's attempt to spy on me. The government almost certainly doesn't want to spy on you, it just wants to be able to find spies and other bad actors among you. I have to admit to taking a jaundiced view of these complaints, since for almost 20 years the US has maintained an immigration regime in which illegal aliens have virtually no legal path to residency (despite many of them having no criminal record - unauthorized presence in the US is a violation of administrative rather criminal law, and it only become a criminal matter in the case of deportation and repeated unlawful re-entry); illegal immigrants can be detained incommunicado for up 6 months without any right to a hearing, have no right to provided counsel, and enjoy very few constitutional protections (in general, those extended to 'persons' rather than 'citizens' or 'the people'). Leaving the US imposes a whole raft of additional sanctions on such a person (eg a 3 or a 10 year banishment during which the person may not even apply to re-enter the country) which don't apply to people who stay, and thus create a strong economic incentive to remain, resulting in an entirely legal underclass of about 11 million people who have even fewer rights than ex-felons. 'But they broke our laws' is the response of most people, as if the laws were not the responsibility of the legislators and people who elected them, but had come down from heaven. I'm not excusing the NSA's overbroad vacuum-cleaner approach to gathering metadata, busting encryption and so on, other than to note it's not very different from the kind of data collection private actors fiercely defend the right to engage in, saying that the onus is on the data owner to use good security. But it's very hard for me to give a sympathetic ear to complaints of tyranny from people who seem happy to tolerate a system that severely curtails the freedom of several millions of their neighbors.
- lukejduncan 13y ago
  > The government almost certainly doesn't want to spy on you, it just wants to be able to find spies and other bad actors among you. Maybe, that is true today. My fear is that tomorrow they will want to spy on me? Why, because the definition of "bad actor" has serious scope creep. I think this is the authors point.
  - 13y ago
jusben1369 13y ago
So I was really excited then disappointed as I clicked through. I thought it was going to be a developer who helps the NSA crack encryption. No offense to anyone here but the last thing I need is another article around the NSA and snooping from someone. Who here wouldn't love to hear from a developer who's helping with this and has strong beliefs in their reasons for doing it?
brown9-2 13y ago
"I wonder: what if a substantial number of Americans started using strong crypto on a routine basis?" They already do! Everyone who makes Amazon purchases, or sends Facebook messages, or does online banking is all using some form of strong crypto. Does our government treat all e-commerce shoppers as "bad guys"? No.
- gknoy 13y ago
  Perhaps I am cynical, but my bet is on "Yes, let's collect that too Just In Case".
- pronoiac 13y ago
  Don't forget: SSH is strong crypto too.
- gnoway 13y ago
  They also don't need to snoop on the in-progress transaction to get all the information they want. They can get evidence via your CC records for Amazon, and in both cases they can subpoena the purchase/banking records. AFAIK the bar for getting those is a little lower than the bar for private email, which seems to be what most people are thinking of.
iandanforth 13y ago
"Thousands of Americans have fought and suffered and died to preserve freedom over our history — does it make sense to sacrifice freedom now because the state tells us people will die if we don't?" This.
- 205guy 13y ago
  I agree with the sentiment of the passage you quote (and the original article in general), but I actually think historical circumstances are a bit different than "Americans have fought and suffered and died to preserve freedom over our history." Yes, Americans have fought and suffered and died to preserve some nebulous definition of freedom, but not the Americans you think--nor the freedoms you think. I'm not sure how the original author meant the statement, but usually, statements like that refer to American soldiors who fought in wars that are assumed to have preserved US freedom. But not since 1812 have the US armed forces needed to defend the territory where the freedoms enshrined in its constitution are in effect. For the US civil war, there was no black nor white (to make a bad pun) on the Union side, so I'll call that a wash on preserving freedoms. Yes, during the world wars, the US projected its power and helped to reinstate freedoms in Europe (almost exclusively), but we're not talking about the defense of Europe here. One could argue that by using and projecting military power and becoming the sole remaining world superpower, the US has preserved US freedoms by pushing our "borders" further away and engaging the "enemies" of said freedoms before they reach us/US (which is why 9/11 was such a shock, similar to the Vandals sacking Rome). I think that's a stretch, given that much of our recent military action seems directly aimed at preserving access to petroleum energy, not actually preserving freedoms. Taking the Howard Zinn approach to US history, there have always been US citizens who are denied their freedoms within the US. From native Americans in the 19th century, to labor movements in the early 20th century, targets of McCarthy, civil rights activists, to occupiers of the 21st century. Many of these did suffer and die because they dared to oppose the political and economic status quo, and relied on their freedoms of speech and assembly to do so. And to be frank, they preserved nothing. The freedoms were always trampled whenever it suited the powers-that-be. In other words, exactly what's happening now. I think now feels different because the internet gave us a taste of true freedoms. Freedom to publish your speech to the world at almost zero cost. Freedom to find and network with like-minded people. Freedom to have political influence just by writing a blog. Freedom to enact change lawfully and peacefully by rallying against WallSt corruption, revealing the extent of the Military-Industrial Complex, questioning the wars, questioning the powers-that-be. It turns out, we never really had those freedoms on the internet. Edit to add one of my favorite pithy sayings: same as it ever was.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
ferdo 13y ago
"Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their E-mail? What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity." Phil Zimmerman, 1994 http://www.pgpi.org/doc/whypgp/en/ http://www.pgpi.org/doc/whypgp/en/
- mpyne 13y ago
  You know what's beautiful about the mail example? Who delivers those letters? In the U.S., and many other countries, it's the government. You're literally handing your letters to the government and asking them to deliver them to the intended recipient without peeking. In short, you are trusting them to do the right thing, because they certainly could look inside the envelope if the really wanted to. Legal safeguards are your only defense against the government here, but we the people generally consider it a solid safeguard. But if it were to even be suggested to send email using government-provided networks (even encrypted email) you'd be laughed right out of any hacker con you attend. It's a pretty surreal difference IMHO.
  - cinquemb 13y ago
    Maybe if it were possible to be notified when the contents of files are opened/read, and some how change the appearance (or state of them) to some extent that people know that something has been tampered with, like with enveloped mail and custom seals people used to send mail during the colonial america/pre-revolutionary times because mail was being opened and read…
Revisor 13y ago
I am the spied upon Other, because I'm not an American. I don't have a voice in your debate, no representative, no senator, no amendment. My only hope is that privacy becomes a generally accepted human right.
- lkbm 13y ago
  I think your only hope is that we develop a robustly secure Internet.
frank_boyd 13y ago
> Would it be better to say back to the government "no thank you" and accept a higher risk of terrorist attack if it means not living in a society of entitled spies? Of course it would be better, b/c: Right after the argument for the right to privacy comes the fact that there literally IS no terrorism (in western countries, anyway - I'm not about places like Iraq after the invasion etc.). We've been brainwashed by our media to think there is. Just take a look at some numbers: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-... Conclusion (as an example): If we know that "You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist", then we'd first need to fight the police officers before pouring billions into a surveillance state.
blahbl4hblah 13y ago
This writing is like a teenager in "Creative Writing" class. Also, I love how people are all up in arms over their precious internet traffic but not upset that the police can stop you just because you are black and force you to let them pat you down. After listening to all of the crying about being safe from terrorism over the last decade only to hear the same privileged white people crying now about how its done…the way you make it stop is the way that it started…you use the law, you fucking simpletons. What's implicit in the bad prose of this kind is the weird pride that you guys feel about being an "outlaw"…even though you haven't done anything…the sense of persecution is palpable. White privilege has always been looking for a way to assume the role of the persecuted and the NSA provides the perfect adversary. It's not actually persecuting you in any real way…like say coming to your house and throwing you on the floor with a gun to your head…you know, like you were in a minority housing project...so you can wax poetic in bad prose about how you feel affronted. You have a perfect faceless evil that seeks to undermine this unquestionable "good" that everyone like you seems to agree with. The libertarian idealists that this apply to are always the same people who actually benefit from the monopoly of the state while philosophizing on its nature as an unnecessary evil. There are troubling prospects for government overreach. this stupid self absorbed tripe isn't helping. Its just boring. Also, just because you are talking doesn't mean that you are part of the conversation. This silly shit doesn't contribute to the subject AT ALL. "Let's use encryption!" Go to hell you boring sod.

450 points by thecoffman 13y ago

devx 13y ago

> "I wonder: what if a substantial number of Americans started using strong crypto on a routine basis?" That may happen anyway, in time, if this situation is not fixed, but it could happen so much faster if companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook (ok, I know I'm really pushing with this one) who have services used by over a billion people would offer very secure end-to-end communications platform, by default, and in a very transparent way (being able to check for sneaky backdoors pre-encryption, or anything like that). They don't even have to do it for everything, especially the parts which are meant to be more public anyway, but there's absolutely no reason why IM's couldn't be completely private - from everyone and anyone, including the companies themselves. So what are you waiting for Google, Microsoft and Facebook (and others, too)?

webjprgm 13y ago
No IMs definitely can't be kept private from the companies themselves because those companies make their money by knowing what it's users talk about. This is part of why I never trusted GMail from the beginning. (But I'm still stuck with it.)
- devx 13y ago
  They can already use the e-mails. Why do they have to use the chat conversations, too?
smsm42 13y ago
You understand that any platform offered by any company with substantial presence in the US would have full access to any data provided to NSA and law enforcement agencies, in most cases under gag order preventing them from disclosing that fact? It can not be any other way - US government has full jurisdiction in the US, and if US law says US citizens can not have privacy from the government and have their data not be accessible by the government - and that is what current interpretation of the law seems to be - then any provider on the US soil, including Google, Microsoft and Facebook - has no other option but to comply with the law?
- derefr 13y ago
  It'd be interesting if US, Russian, and Chinese entrepreneurs got together and agreed to build start-ups for one-another's citizens, where the US brand was run from Russia, the Russian one from China, etc. Now that'd get some people on terrorist watch-lists.
  - smsm42 13y ago
    I think the temptation would be too great for the respective governments to resist, and given that surveillance against foreigners would not even cause a significant public backlash, those would be compromised even quicker. Right now the whole story blew up because NSA is spying on Americans. If Snowden revealed that NSA is mass-collecting information on Chinese or Russians, the only response would be "keep up the good work, guys!".
    - derefr 13y ago
      Well, sure, it decreases the amount of "security by angry-mob-if-you-screw-up" you get, but it increases the amount of "security by inability to legally compel keys from the companies involved." I'm not sure whether that's positive- or negative-sum, actually.

rasur 13y ago

We are all The Other now.

Finster 13y ago
By claiming you are The Other, that clearly places you in the category of domestic terrorism. You are no longer The Other.

aray 13y ago

It would be great to break through the "if you have nothing to hide" line and push that responsible citizenry need security (and cryptography) as well. I am also the other.

malandrew 13y ago
I think Martin Fowler has written one of the better arguments that appeal to the "I have nothing to hide" crowd, in "Privacy protects bothersome people"[0]. It's worth sharing with anyone who thinks that just because they have nothing to hide, it doesn't mean that they are not beneficiaries of those that do have something to hide. Privacy is one of the few things that protect those that protect us from the transgressions of our government. [0] http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html
- Symmetry 13y ago
  I actually think the biggest danger is the NSA digging up dirt on politicians a la J. Edgar Hoover. If details of my sex life were made public I'd be embarrassed but my employer wouldn't care and my life would go on. For a politician, though, scandal means losing your job.
  - sseveran 13y ago
    Unless of course you can be made to look like a bad person and the twitterverse blows up.
mpyne 13y ago
> It would be great to break through the "if you have nothing to hide" line and push that responsible citizenry need security (and cryptography) as well. Who (of any relevance) on the NSA or DoJ side is saying people don't need crypto or security though? I've seen a Congressman use the 'nothing to hide' line but haven't seen it much elsewhere even among NSA's defenders. The government does seem to be saying that if you're only concerned about the government possibly seeing your stuff, that you don't have anything to worry about (as long as you're not recruiting for AQ or something) as the NSA doesn't have time to care about you anyways, but that's not quite the same concept. Plus even that has an adequate justification if we assume there is some bizarro universe where the NSA might actually only be doing their job (as everyone "needlessly" using crypto to hide their innocous emails simply helps The Bad Guys to blend in even more effectively). If you don't believe there could be a 'needless' reason to hide emails from any possible government collection, or that there's no such thing as Bad Guys (or both) then you would probably conclude we don't actually live in that bizarro universe. But not everyone would come to the same answers for both and they have logical reasons too.

mpyne 13y ago

> The NSA's official response is to suggest that wanting to secure our communications from our surveillance is inherently suspicious and suggestive of criminal activity. No, their official response is to suggest that encrypting your communications makes you indistinguishable (at their end) from those who encrypt for criminal activity. There is a difference, and there's no getting around the idea that if the set of Bad Actors are to have the crypto broken then it will necessarily involve breaking the same crypto in use by the Good Actors. Even the NSA also says in the very paragraph quoted that encryption is also used for "nations [...] to protect their secrets" (which is hardly a criminal or illegitimate goal). Likewise, if the government hires a lockpicker to plant a bug in an embassy then by definition they now have the technical ability to pick locks (even if they don't have the legal permission). The rest of his points, on the whole, are quite valid but are sometimes answering a question that isn't actually behing asked from the other side.

javajosh 13y ago
Something just came into clear focus for me: the NSA really screwed the pooch here. They had a situation where they had access to anything they wanted, but because they insisted on not getting warrants for access, they pissed off Snowden, and now people are going to punish the NSA by becoming more security savvy and using systems that are impenetrable, even with a warrant. Smooth move, NSAssholes.
- Finster 13y ago
  And that's the core of the issue for me. I don't have any problem with the NSA working with and studying encryption and methods to break encryption. What I have a problem with is invading my privacy and gathering my communications and information without a warrant. My 4th amendment rights have been completely violated.
  - javajosh 13y ago
    Totally. No-one (including me) would have blinked an eye if it turned out the NSA was snooping on anything and everything...with a warrant. Heck, I would have probably been moderately pleased. But snooping on anything, in secret, without judicial oversight, without public consent...that is all very wrong, and Sheier is right: it's a total betrayal of the internet. Whatever short-sighted jerk-offs came up with this grand plan ought to be put in prison for harming US interests. To say that Snowden is the one who harmed US interests for revealing these activities is an intolerable act of a government that values only one thing, loyalty. Principles? Nah. Principles are soooo pre-Industrial revolution. And let's face it: with all the thousands of people working on these projects, someone was bound to blow the whistle sooner or later, because no matter how far down the rabbit hole an agency like the NSA goes when it comes to defining new norms, there are always some awesome weirdos who don't buy it, no matter how normal everyone around them treats it. (Hat tip to you, Snowden, for not drinking the Kool-Aid). Guess what bozos (yes, NSA, I'm talking to you): national security is affected by abrogation of trust and betrayal of people like you. Our position as an exemplar of personal freedom, and self-restrained government, has been badly damaged by you. Going after Snowden, doubling down on internal security...these damage you, and us, further. Maybe Congress is confused on this issue, but I (and most everyone I've talked to) am not: you need to stop collecting data without warrants immediately. You need to dismantle your capacity to do so. You need to delete all information that you've gathered under those conditions. And this should be the last act of the NSA's senior leadership before resigning.

pyaniv 13y ago

Well...NSA is built by a democracy. The people wanted war..their representatives gave it. The people wanted spying...their representatives gave it to them. Only a minority doesn't want these. In a democracy, minority loses. Unfortunately, it turns out the majority are stupid..anywhere in the world. So, just have to live with it, hoping they get intelligent someday.

anigbrowl 13y ago

I mean I am the "other" contemptuously categorized by my government, a vast category of people with an interest in using encrypted communications to thwart my government's attempt to spy on me. The government almost certainly doesn't want to spy on you, it just wants to be able to find spies and other bad actors among you. I have to admit to taking a jaundiced view of these complaints, since for almost 20 years the US has maintained an immigration regime in which illegal aliens have virtually no legal path to residency (despite many of them having no criminal record - unauthorized presence in the US is a violation of administrative rather criminal law, and it only become a criminal matter in the case of deportation and repeated unlawful re-entry); illegal immigrants can be detained incommunicado for up 6 months without any right to a hearing, have no right to provided counsel, and enjoy very few constitutional protections (in general, those extended to 'persons' rather than 'citizens' or 'the people'). Leaving the US imposes a whole raft of additional sanctions on such a person (eg a 3 or a 10 year banishment during which the person may not even apply to re-enter the country) which don't apply to people who stay, and thus create a strong economic incentive to remain, resulting in an entirely legal underclass of about 11 million people who have even fewer rights than ex-felons. 'But they broke our laws' is the response of most people, as if the laws were not the responsibility of the legislators and people who elected them, but had come down from heaven. I'm not excusing the NSA's overbroad vacuum-cleaner approach to gathering metadata, busting encryption and so on, other than to note it's not very different from the kind of data collection private actors fiercely defend the right to engage in, saying that the onus is on the data owner to use good security. But it's very hard for me to give a sympathetic ear to complaints of tyranny from people who seem happy to tolerate a system that severely curtails the freedom of several millions of their neighbors.

lukejduncan 13y ago
> The government almost certainly doesn't want to spy on you, it just wants to be able to find spies and other bad actors among you. Maybe, that is true today. My fear is that tomorrow they will want to spy on me? Why, because the definition of "bad actor" has serious scope creep. I think this is the authors point.
- 13y ago

jusben1369 13y ago

So I was really excited then disappointed as I clicked through. I thought it was going to be a developer who helps the NSA crack encryption. No offense to anyone here but the last thing I need is another article around the NSA and snooping from someone. Who here wouldn't love to hear from a developer who's helping with this and has strong beliefs in their reasons for doing it?

brown9-2 13y ago

"I wonder: what if a substantial number of Americans started using strong crypto on a routine basis?" They already do! Everyone who makes Amazon purchases, or sends Facebook messages, or does online banking is all using some form of strong crypto. Does our government treat all e-commerce shoppers as "bad guys"? No.

gknoy 13y ago
Perhaps I am cynical, but my bet is on "Yes, let's collect that too Just In Case".
pronoiac 13y ago
Don't forget: SSH is strong crypto too.
gnoway 13y ago
They also don't need to snoop on the in-progress transaction to get all the information they want. They can get evidence via your CC records for Amazon, and in both cases they can subpoena the purchase/banking records. AFAIK the bar for getting those is a little lower than the bar for private email, which seems to be what most people are thinking of.

iandanforth 13y ago

"Thousands of Americans have fought and suffered and died to preserve freedom over our history — does it make sense to sacrifice freedom now because the state tells us people will die if we don't?" This.

205guy 13y ago
I agree with the sentiment of the passage you quote (and the original article in general), but I actually think historical circumstances are a bit different than "Americans have fought and suffered and died to preserve freedom over our history." Yes, Americans have fought and suffered and died to preserve some nebulous definition of freedom, but not the Americans you think--nor the freedoms you think. I'm not sure how the original author meant the statement, but usually, statements like that refer to American soldiors who fought in wars that are assumed to have preserved US freedom. But not since 1812 have the US armed forces needed to defend the territory where the freedoms enshrined in its constitution are in effect. For the US civil war, there was no black nor white (to make a bad pun) on the Union side, so I'll call that a wash on preserving freedoms. Yes, during the world wars, the US projected its power and helped to reinstate freedoms in Europe (almost exclusively), but we're not talking about the defense of Europe here. One could argue that by using and projecting military power and becoming the sole remaining world superpower, the US has preserved US freedoms by pushing our "borders" further away and engaging the "enemies" of said freedoms before they reach us/US (which is why 9/11 was such a shock, similar to the Vandals sacking Rome). I think that's a stretch, given that much of our recent military action seems directly aimed at preserving access to petroleum energy, not actually preserving freedoms. Taking the Howard Zinn approach to US history, there have always been US citizens who are denied their freedoms within the US. From native Americans in the 19th century, to labor movements in the early 20th century, targets of McCarthy, civil rights activists, to occupiers of the 21st century. Many of these did suffer and die because they dared to oppose the political and economic status quo, and relied on their freedoms of speech and assembly to do so. And to be frank, they preserved nothing. The freedoms were always trampled whenever it suited the powers-that-be. In other words, exactly what's happening now. I think now feels different because the internet gave us a taste of true freedoms. Freedom to publish your speech to the world at almost zero cost. Freedom to find and network with like-minded people. Freedom to have political influence just by writing a blog. Freedom to enact change lawfully and peacefully by rallying against WallSt corruption, revealing the extent of the Military-Industrial Complex, questioning the wars, questioning the powers-that-be. It turns out, we never really had those freedoms on the internet. Edit to add one of my favorite pithy sayings: same as it ever was.

deleted 13y ago

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ferdo 13y ago

"Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their E-mail? What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity." Phil Zimmerman, 1994 http://www.pgpi.org/doc/whypgp/en/ http://www.pgpi.org/doc/whypgp/en/

mpyne 13y ago
You know what's beautiful about the mail example? Who delivers those letters? In the U.S., and many other countries, it's the government. You're literally handing your letters to the government and asking them to deliver them to the intended recipient without peeking. In short, you are trusting them to do the right thing, because they certainly could look inside the envelope if the really wanted to. Legal safeguards are your only defense against the government here, but we the people generally consider it a solid safeguard. But if it were to even be suggested to send email using government-provided networks (even encrypted email) you'd be laughed right out of any hacker con you attend. It's a pretty surreal difference IMHO.
- cinquemb 13y ago
  Maybe if it were possible to be notified when the contents of files are opened/read, and some how change the appearance (or state of them) to some extent that people know that something has been tampered with, like with enveloped mail and custom seals people used to send mail during the colonial america/pre-revolutionary times because mail was being opened and read…

Revisor 13y ago

I am the spied upon Other, because I'm not an American. I don't have a voice in your debate, no representative, no senator, no amendment. My only hope is that privacy becomes a generally accepted human right.

lkbm 13y ago
I think your only hope is that we develop a robustly secure Internet.

frank_boyd 13y ago

> Would it be better to say back to the government "no thank you" and accept a higher risk of terrorist attack if it means not living in a society of entitled spies? Of course it would be better, b/c: Right after the argument for the right to privacy comes the fact that there literally IS no terrorism (in western countries, anyway - I'm not about places like Iraq after the invasion etc.). We've been brainwashed by our media to think there is. Just take a look at some numbers: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-... Conclusion (as an example): If we know that "You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist", then we'd first need to fight the police officers before pouring billions into a surveillance state.

blahbl4hblah 13y ago

This writing is like a teenager in "Creative Writing" class. Also, I love how people are all up in arms over their precious internet traffic but not upset that the police can stop you just because you are black and force you to let them pat you down. After listening to all of the crying about being safe from terrorism over the last decade only to hear the same privileged white people crying now about how its done…the way you make it stop is the way that it started…you use the law, you fucking simpletons. What's implicit in the bad prose of this kind is the weird pride that you guys feel about being an "outlaw"…even though you haven't done anything…the sense of persecution is palpable. White privilege has always been looking for a way to assume the role of the persecuted and the NSA provides the perfect adversary. It's not actually persecuting you in any real way…like say coming to your house and throwing you on the floor with a gun to your head…you know, like you were in a minority housing project...so you can wax poetic in bad prose about how you feel affronted. You have a perfect faceless evil that seeks to undermine this unquestionable "good" that everyone like you seems to agree with. The libertarian idealists that this apply to are always the same people who actually benefit from the monopoly of the state while philosophizing on its nature as an unnecessary evil. There are troubling prospects for government overreach. this stupid self absorbed tripe isn't helping. Its just boring. Also, just because you are talking doesn't mean that you are part of the conversation. This silly shit doesn't contribute to the subject AT ALL. "Let's use encryption!" Go to hell you boring sod.