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Whatever you think of the NSA, there's not a high risk its going to start selling data it collects on the black market for use in identity theft. That's a big

by swombat 12y ago

Whatever you think of the NSA, there's not a high risk its going to start selling data it collects on the black market for use in identity theft. That's a big assumption considering you're talking about an agency which openly flaunts the law or lobbies it out of existence as needed (thereby showing very little respect for the rule of law) and whose individual agents have shown very variable levels of judgement in the use of those systems (e.g. the LOVEINT stuff). On the contrary, I think that once that data is in the possession of a large amorphous non-accountable organisation with relatively few checks and balances, it is inevitable that said data will end up on the black market. Why wouldn't it? There's money to be made.

rayiner 12y ago
This sort of slippery slope argument is precisely why I'm so anal-retentive about pointing out that the NSA programs that have been revealed thus far seem designed with a careful attention to toeing the line of various well-established legal precedents. You may not like Smith v. Maryland, but there's a big difference between the NSA following an interpretation of the law you don't like, and flouting the law entirely. And that difference is wholly salient to the question of whether the NSA would engage in conduct that's obviously illegal, such as selling private information on the black market.
- swombat 12y ago
  Let me quote from today's article by Cory Doctorow: ( http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/what-david-cameron-just-propos.html http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/what-david-cameron-just-pro... ) > If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. The police, the NSA, etc, cannot be trusted not to misuse information which they obtain. In fact, you can quite reliably trust them to misuse that information, if history is any guide (and it is). Whether the misuse will include actually boldly grabbing some private information that's currently valuable and selling it on Evolution or Silkroute 3 or whatever, is a purely academic question. If the information is on NSA servers, and is valuable, and someone at the NSA knows about it, it probably will be misused in some way.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 12y ago
    If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has an embedded elliptic curve public key in it, will criminals eventually discover the private key? Are we using an especially generous definition of "eventually"?

by swombat 12y ago

rayiner 12y ago

This sort of slippery slope argument is precisely why I'm so anal-retentive about pointing out that the NSA programs that have been revealed thus far seem designed with a careful attention to toeing the line of various well-established legal precedents. You may not like Smith v. Maryland, but there's a big difference between the NSA following an interpretation of the law you don't like, and flouting the law entirely. And that difference is wholly salient to the question of whether the NSA would engage in conduct that's obviously illegal, such as selling private information on the black market.

swombat 12y ago
Let me quote from today's article by Cory Doctorow: ( http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/what-david-cameron-just-propos.html http://boingboing.net/2015/01/13/what-david-cameron-just-pro... ) > If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has a deliberately introduced flaw in it, then foreign spies, criminals, crooked police (like those who fed sensitive information to the tabloids who were implicated in the hacking scandal -- and like the high-level police who secretly worked for organised crime for years), and criminals will eventually discover this vulnerability. The police, the NSA, etc, cannot be trusted not to misuse information which they obtain. In fact, you can quite reliably trust them to misuse that information, if history is any guide (and it is). Whether the misuse will include actually boldly grabbing some private information that's currently valuable and selling it on Evolution or Silkroute 3 or whatever, is a purely academic question. If the information is on NSA servers, and is valuable, and someone at the NSA knows about it, it probably will be misused in some way.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 12y ago
  If your Whatsapp or Google Hangouts has an embedded elliptic curve public key in it, will criminals eventually discover the private key? Are we using an especially generous definition of "eventually"?