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The most important line: "put security ahead of both domestic and international surveillance". That's what it comes down to, we can have communications security

by ds9 13y ago

The most important line: "put security ahead of both domestic and international surveillance". That's what it comes down to, we can have communications security or surveillance, not both.

Zigurd 13y ago
> we can have communications security or surveillance, not both With all the smart people in the industry, I don't see Google, much less Cisco, internalizing this fact. They want the toothpaste to slide back into the tube so they can sell to normal users as well as law enforcement as well as spy agencies. Nobody, especially not overseas customers, will believe that is possible. Any product that accommodates surveillance is not secure. Too much of the tech industry, and especially the security industry, is too impressed with helping catch "bad guys." They will have to leave that to real-world person-to-person police work if they want to be credible about secure communications and storage.
higherpurpose 13y ago
Yes, so far NSA has been successful as promoting mass surveillance as a matter of "security" not just against terrorists (which we now learn is being very wasteful and ineffective), but against "cyber-attacks", too. Every time they talked about cyber-attacks, they implied Congress need to give them more powers and more money, which they later used for offensive actions, rather than securing the networks. NSA has zero interest in security networks at this point. Maybe they cared about that a little before 9/11, but I don't think they care about it at all anymore. All they want to do now is be able to break into everything or have backdoors into everything, which means they will not only hoard systems' vulnerabilities for themselves, but they also won't even use that knowledge to secure domestic systems, because the truth is they want access to domestic systems, too, and to them that has a higher priority than securing those systems even against China and so on. The NAS has probably always had this corrupted idea about security, but I think it became much more so when they merged the US Cyber Command with the NSA. Bottomline is that we need to educate others that surveillance is pretty much the opposite of "cyber-security", and we need to call NSA out on it everytime they try to use the lie that they're the same.
jobu 13y ago
This is my favorite part of the article: "We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings -- even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail." It's upsetting how freely those in the government are willing to give up liberty for safety, but when we find out it isn't even a fair trade they're still ok with it.

by ds9 13y ago

The most important line: "put security ahead of both domestic and international surveillance". That's what it comes down to, we can have communications security or surveillance, not both.

Zigurd 13y ago

> we can have communications security or surveillance, not both With all the smart people in the industry, I don't see Google, much less Cisco, internalizing this fact. They want the toothpaste to slide back into the tube so they can sell to normal users as well as law enforcement as well as spy agencies. Nobody, especially not overseas customers, will believe that is possible. Any product that accommodates surveillance is not secure. Too much of the tech industry, and especially the security industry, is too impressed with helping catch "bad guys." They will have to leave that to real-world person-to-person police work if they want to be credible about secure communications and storage.

higherpurpose 13y ago

Yes, so far NSA has been successful as promoting mass surveillance as a matter of "security" not just against terrorists (which we now learn is being very wasteful and ineffective), but against "cyber-attacks", too. Every time they talked about cyber-attacks, they implied Congress need to give them more powers and more money, which they later used for offensive actions, rather than securing the networks. NSA has zero interest in security networks at this point. Maybe they cared about that a little before 9/11, but I don't think they care about it at all anymore. All they want to do now is be able to break into everything or have backdoors into everything, which means they will not only hoard systems' vulnerabilities for themselves, but they also won't even use that knowledge to secure domestic systems, because the truth is they want access to domestic systems, too, and to them that has a higher priority than securing those systems even against China and so on. The NAS has probably always had this corrupted idea about security, but I think it became much more so when they merged the US Cyber Command with the NSA. Bottomline is that we need to educate others that surveillance is pretty much the opposite of "cyber-security", and we need to call NSA out on it everytime they try to use the lie that they're the same.

jobu 13y ago

This is my favorite part of the article: "We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings -- even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail." It's upsetting how freely those in the government are willing to give up liberty for safety, but when we find out it isn't even a fair trade they're still ok with it.