Excellect! It's the most cogent analysis that I've seen from him. Damn, what a fucking hero!
A few comments, however ...
> ... we had to go to the dark side to be able to confront the threat posed by bad guys. We had to adopt their methods for ourselves.
He's using "we" there in reference to the government. But it can also be read with "we" as you and me, and "bad guys" as the government ;) But then, I claim a broad "right to be left alone", one that doesn't concede any state monopoly on power.
> ... you can’t opt out of governmental mass surveillance that watches everybody in the world without regard to any suspicious criminal activity or any kind of wrong doing.
Well, sure you can ... as he goes on to explain ...
> You would need to act like a spy to pursue a career in a field like journalism because you are always being watched.
... and ...
> Instead of changing your phone to change your persona — divorcing your journalist phone from your personal phone — you can use the systems that are surrounding us all of the time to move between personas.
Right! Compartmentalization is for sure the way to go. There are numerous personas like Mirimir. Maybe I make it too distinctive. But I have no meatspace identity that goes on like Mirimir does. And Mirimir, ve has lots of vis personas. So hey, let's create a tangled morass of overlapping personas ;)
You touched on the cyperpunk fantasy: using multiple online identities, all kept carefully separate from each other and from your real identity. (There's an excellent short story called True Names that explores this idea.)
For the majority of ordinary, nontechnical people, there are lots of simpler solutions.
* Use cash. In Berlin, many ordinary people have an awareness of and distaste for government surveillance. People remember East Germany. One result is that lots of people will just pay for everything in cash. In most other western countries, the norm is to leave an electronic trail of every single shop you visit.
* Use Signal or WhatsApp. WhatsApp rolled out strong end to end encryption to a billion people--most of whom have no idea what a "key" is and only the faintest sense of what "encryption" means.
The lesson I take from those projects is that whenever we can ship transparent, easy to use encryption that our users dont have to worry about, its a massive win.
If your app allows users to talk to each other privately, consider adding E2E encryption. It's the future.
If your app has some kind of cloud backup, like a password manager or a photo app, make sure that it's encrypted with a key that you don't have access to.
E2E comes with product tradeoffs. You may have to charge your users money, because you cant target ads against data you cant access. You'll need to make an installed app rather than a webapp. But its worth it -- and I think someday, hopefully soon, users will demand it.
What you have to realize is it's an arms race. When splitting and comparmentalizing is the norm, the government will be putting every effort into connecting the dots between your disparate personas.
It takes a special kind of persistent, all-encompassing paranoia and effort. And as we've seen in the past, it only takes a single fuck-up, logging into the wrong server with the wrong account once, mentioning the wrong anecdote with the wrong persona, and bam, you're fucked. Once two dots are connected, they cannot be unconnected.
> But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consider to be a fairly forthright upstanding government was abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way.
I guess all he needs is to grow his hair long and a beard and HNers would genuflect at his picture in their hallway. Funny how this guy, at age 29 three years ago, is an expert in all worldly things nowadays.
The EFF warned long ago something was going on when AT&T was putting beam splitters on Internet backbones to feed the NSA. Then Snowden revealed how everything is tapped.
Then, be sure all mainstream encryption is "NOBUS". Nothing is truly random. Someone somewhere has the master key: elliptic curve cryptography using magic numbers from NIST? "Secure boot" by Intel? OpenSSL? Microsoft software? All backdoored.
Trust no one.
For as long as technologically minded folks insist on technological solutions to political problems, we will be stuck in this quagmire. The answer is a political solution to a political problem. Admittedly, that's a hard one for some folks. It requires talking to people and building relationships. It takes a long time and change can be frustratingly slow to present itself. But that's how it is.
Trust no one
With this sort of attitude you might as well give up on life. Society doesn't work without trust between people.
I wish there was some kind of map showing where each area (hardware, software/firmware, network, yada yada) is compromised and by which initiatives and companies. With solid info (avoid speculation). Just curious if would make any impact if the regular user see how their data and everything else is treated by the companies they think they "know" and "trust".
I heard about those taps in 2008/2009 I think. Snowden hasn't really given us anything truly new. It's also bizarre how quickly everything he presented was/is accepted as fact immediately without question.
I think it's way more likely Snowden was intentional. He's still working for the Federal government and the leaks are intentional so that the Federal Government could announce to the world that they are spying on all their own citizens...and nothing happen. No real revolution, and no real end to the surveillance.
I mean yea, we have better security practices, more people use encryption, more people are aware about security ... but overall the landscape hasn't changed except in one crucial aspect: people are talking less publicly. People are afraid that what they say is monitored. There has been a chilling effect.
The Snowden narrative needs to be questioned. Since when does an NSA contractor working from home in Hawaii get VPN access to all the government secretes? Like...people actually believe that?
> But at the same time, we technologists as a class knew academically that these capabilities could be abused, but nobody actually believed they would be abused. Because why would you do that? It seemed so antisocial as a basic concept.
I guess so? Not me though. Snowden literally only proved what I had learned on my own.
> But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consider to be a fairly forthright upstanding government was abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way.
Yeah, he's full of it. We in high-assurance community and even the cypherpunks have been telling people forever it was being abused. Because people were abusing it and its design practically asked for it. These were ignored as externalities by people motivated by convenience, feature bloat, price, and/or profit. Even getting it down to almost identical cost/speed didn't help if it lacked unnecessary feature X.
This was censorship by business and security communities plus apathy by consumers. Plain and simple. The business communities didn't want to spend crap on INFOSEC. The ones that did faced two obstacles: (a) low volume meant real deal was ridiculously expensive with slower development; (b) mainstream INFOSEC conned companies with bandaids or fake security because they made more money that way. Constantly charging to fix problems they left in or upgrades people didn't need.
So, result was everything is shit security and stays that way. Neither proprietary nor FOSS learn from lessons 99% of the time. All due to what Schneier always called "perverse incentives" that keep bad stuff produced.
Without Stallman's foresight of the need for public domain open source software, there would only be proprietary software, all subject to PRISM.
Without the foresight of potential Government's to come the US founding fathers would not have written in such protections as still exist today.
Before Snowden there were many that suspected but now everyone knows.
>Um. Who thought this?
Snowden himself:
"I had too much faith that the government really would do no wrong. I was drinking the Kool-Aid in the post-9/11 moment. I believed the claims of government, that this was a just cause, a moral cause, and we don't need to listen to these people who say we broke this law or that law."
pre Snowden this was unopposable, the NSA's James Clapper lied to Ron Wyden in Congress about mass surveillance.
> > But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consider to be a fairly forthright upstanding government was abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way.
> Um. Who thought this? Ever? Since the 90s.
To be clear this meant who thought we had "a fairly forthright upstanding government [not] abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way" ever since the 90s.
Yeah...there was a pretty hit movie in the 90s about government abusing surveillance powers with two power house actors (Enemy of the State.) I think what Snowden did was good generally, but I think he thinks too highly of himself. Almost everything he leaked was already suspected or known, he just pushed it into the public eye.
Well yes, the internet is broken. That article is inaccessible to me. I am redirected from popsci.com to popsci.com.au which, it appears, doesn't have the article in question. I just get a message telling me "Oops! Something went wrong. Please scroll down to find your content." The content isn't there and there is no way to select the non-au site. Very broken.
I guess, the Snowden incidence is being used to hurl undue venom towards USA. But these people are ignoring or deliberately misleading other people to ignore the real dangers posed by extremists (including Islamists, communists, the far right Christians and so on). These ideologically driven criminals (called terrorists) live hidden in the general public. Their identification is a main problem. This "identification" problem is what requires mass surveillance.
The terrorists are significantly different than many other criminals. In the sense that terrorists are not mainly driven by personal and earthly goals but they are driven by the goals set by their ideologies. Thus terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter.
Tell this Snowden to do (or at least talk) a little bit about the dire situation of people's freedom in the country he has chosen to flee to, namely, Russia. And the people who are criticizing US way too much should do themselves a favor by looking at countries run by tyrants like China, North Korea, most Islamist countries and Cuba. The way the Chinese government does the mass surveillance of its citizens on the Internet and the way the communists have installed the reward/punishment system based on it will make you realize that what is happening in US is hardly even annoying.
I am not to say that US is innocent person but it has been receiving criticism way too much.
"...people's freedom in the country he has chosen to flee to, namely, Russia."
Snowden got stuck in a Russian airport when his US visa got revoked. He then applied to many countries for asylum. Russia granted it. I've read that Snowden is still trying to find another host country.
> I guess, the Snowden incidence is being used to hurl undue venom towards USA. But these people are ignoring or deliberately misleading other people to ignore the real dangers posed by extremists (including Islamists, communists, the far right Christians and so on).
Yeah, well, I don't think Cuban or North Korean spies are really at the forefront of anyone's concerns (apart from South Korea and Japan).
> Thus terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter.
Funny how pedophile rings are regularly dismantled (and made of "otherwise normal citizens" in majority). As for the "wolf in sheep's clothing" thing, it's not necessarily true (look at the profile of the attackers in France and Belgian, most of whom were linked to petty criminality - not to mention the guy who actually went to Syria).
> Tell this Snowden to do (or at least talk) a little bit about the dire situation of people's freedom in the country he has chosen to flee to, namely, Russia.
It was only a choice in the sense that the alternative was "kidnapping by the CIA". Russia was way down in Snowden's list of countries to flee to. What you don't seem to realize is that even if it's not abused now, it could very well be abused tomorrow. You want a Donald Trump nominating one of his cronies at the head of the US intelligence services and starting to dig into untold amounts of already-recorded communications?
And it's not only the US. Us Europeans are doing exactly the same thing, just with less money. The potential of it being abused by organizations which by their very nature have little to no external oversight (or by their political masters) is absolutely frightening. And that's compounded by the panopticon effect: if you're never sure of how much you're being watched, you will self-censor.
>But at the same time, we technologists as a class knew academically that these capabilities could be abused, but nobody actually believed they would be abused. Because why would you do that? It seemed so antisocial as a basic concept.
What's with 'we?' The various classes of technologists that I've been a member of - from the teen hax0r BBS days thru the crypto lists and Usenet groups to actual working professionals have absolutely believed this. It takes a truly spectacular amount of naivety to believe the contrary.
I have a deep and profound respect for Snowden, who has certainly sacrificed any possible semblance of a normal life in his native culture and likely narrowly escaped a worse fate, something he must certainly have known was a risk. It is his very naivety that made him such a perfect whistleblower : he's in there looking around and he's like "Holy crap! These guys are into some profoundly bad shit! I have to tell everyone!"
There's probably a hiring policy moral for black ops shops in there somewhere.
I think he's right. His statement is carefully phrased. Yes, of course, all sorts of intelligent people have argued that the tools of mass surveillance could be developed and could be abused.
But only a very small number of people picked up on AT&T Room 101 and Echelon and so on, and saw their significance. Unfortunately those things were more like news stories than events that redefined people's thinking. Mass surveillance simply wasn't a part of the conversation for the vast majority of technologists who mattered, i.e. the ones building the products we all use.
The NSA leaks changed all that. Now you have the guys running WhatsApp and Apple talking about this stuff. And even though for politeness reasons they sometimes talk in hypotheticals, "if we don't encrypt it could be abused by bad governments", it's as clear as day that what they really mean is "because we don't encrypt it is being abused by our governments".
He's still not getting it or fully recommending it any more than most have. The funny thing is that I recently read a 150 page interview with one of founders of INFOSEC, Dr Schell, that showed his employer was the same way: ignored "COMPUSEC" as useless in favor of "COMSEC" solutions to all security problems. Schell, Karger, and Anderson's tiger teams smashed every mainframe and crypto using system put in front of them due to hardware and software bugs. They bypassed it.
Like Schell and Karger said for 30 years, what we need is to start deploying high-assurance security practices, protocols, systems, methods... everything that's proven to get the job done in various ways. We need them deployed pervasively. More private protocols and encryption by default, too, but who gives a shit if it runs on systems so insecure it doesn't need backdoors?
Let's go back to 1960's moving toward the 70's and 80's on hardware stuff. Burroughs stuff was tagged so everything in memory was code or data, pointers protected, arrays bounds-checked, arguments checked on function calls, and OS tried to isolate apps from each other. Some LISP machines had GC's for memory management. System/38 had capability-security & built-in database. Solo had safe concurrency at OS level. One had read-only firmware you couldn't change without physically moving it with a nucleus that handle protected functions that OS's built on. Two implemented a secure, Ada runtime that enforced the language's safety properties. SAFE (crash-safe.org), Cambridge's CHERI, and Sandia's SSP/Score processors follow these traditions.
Now let's look at how Schell et al said to do assurance. Precise, math/flowcharts/whatever description of functional and security requirements to avoid ambiguities & resulting vulnerabilities. Similar for design with attention to simplicity. Implementation in safest language you can with simpler subset and style easy to analyze. Every module proven to match a requirement/spec so no subversion (well, a start on it...). Strict modularity, layering, and interface checks all over the place. Success and failure states modeled then shown to follow a precise, security policy. If you can't state it precisely, then you can't secure it because you don't know what security means for you. Code review, tests of each function, formal proofs if possible, static analysis if possible, covert channel analysis of info flows, configuration management that assumes malicious developers, source to object code verification, trusted distribution of HW/SW to customers, onsite verification/generation from source, and configuration guidance. All of this independently verified by at least one set of professionals that know what they're doing.
That was security in 1970's-1980's. Far from red tape some here claim, every method above was proven by researchers, field users, and pentesters to catch serious problems. The only dispute was what caught most and where to spend most money. Even those questions had decent answers. Well, plus specific design and modeling decisions but INFOSEC was in infancy & that was evolving. I'm talking assurance activities: getting it done right whatever it is. Fast forward today to find that all the problems Schell, Karger, etc predicted have happened and consistently in systems that don't use those methods whereas systems that do avoid many more problems.
So, here's the solution: raise assurance of our systems across the board using methods that go back to 1961. That's right, Burroughs engineers were doing a better job on security before that was even a thing just trying to improve reliability. This is 2016. We have better specs, better languages, better static analysis, easier formal tools, automated test generation, tons of sample code, fast dev machines... you name it. There's no excuse, outside willful ignorance or apathy, for security-focused developers (esp in FOSS) to not use everything at their disposal that's proven to work at reducing risk. Even less excuse for the stuff they make to still be less secure than tech from the friggin 60's and 70's.
Shout out to the exceptions that are trying to do it right. Groups like GenodeOS, Dresden, NICTA/OKL4, Carlisle's IRONSIDES DNS, Bernstein's stuff, Galois, JX OS, ETH, INRIA, Secure64, Sentinel HYDRA (minus bodacion crap lol), Combex, and even NativeClient since they knocked off OP browser. Enough stuff like this and NSA will be begging us to ban INFOSEC books and shit since their info will dry up haha.
I agree that software bugs are a bigger concern than encrypting everything. I think the problem is that not many people are starting companies around "high assurance." How do you get people to turn their PL research into startups?
I have absolutely no faith in any government that gives the impression that they will add tighter controls or a reduction on the collection of personal data.
They've been doing this for many years before Snowden and will continue long after any new laws are passed to give us the impression of an improvement.
I'd love to be able to read this article, however popsci, in their infinite wisdom, redirect all Australian users to the .com.au site...which doesn't have the same articles. Sigh
I think the other part which he hasn't discussed is the rise of Cloud companies like Google, Facebook. We should really be working towards an internet where people can keep the data to themselves and decide how it gets used. But now, the default is for these corporations to own all the data.
Of course, govt can still access the data (which is what snowden is talking about) but that is a different problem.
"police and the government then have the authority to search through your entire life in your pocket just because you are pulled over for a broken taillight"
This is the classic Snowden formula. Establish a false premise that has no faith in the government or constitutional rights, then continue to paint a picture of a dystopian future.
This guy should be writing sci-fi novels...
[edit: I predicted at least 5 down votes as I typed this. Don't disappoint me ;-) ]
If authority figures that broke laws were appropriately punished, then it would be easier to trust in the rule of law. When police officers, politicians, judges, etc can all get away with things that "regular" people would not get away with, then the system is broken.
[+] [-] mirimir|10 years ago|reply
A few comments, however ...
> ... we had to go to the dark side to be able to confront the threat posed by bad guys. We had to adopt their methods for ourselves.
He's using "we" there in reference to the government. But it can also be read with "we" as you and me, and "bad guys" as the government ;) But then, I claim a broad "right to be left alone", one that doesn't concede any state monopoly on power.
> ... you can’t opt out of governmental mass surveillance that watches everybody in the world without regard to any suspicious criminal activity or any kind of wrong doing.
Well, sure you can ... as he goes on to explain ...
> You would need to act like a spy to pursue a career in a field like journalism because you are always being watched.
... and ...
> Instead of changing your phone to change your persona — divorcing your journalist phone from your personal phone — you can use the systems that are surrounding us all of the time to move between personas.
Right! Compartmentalization is for sure the way to go. There are numerous personas like Mirimir. Maybe I make it too distinctive. But I have no meatspace identity that goes on like Mirimir does. And Mirimir, ve has lots of vis personas. So hey, let's create a tangled morass of overlapping personas ;)
[+] [-] dcposch|10 years ago|reply
Are those typos?
You touched on the cyperpunk fantasy: using multiple online identities, all kept carefully separate from each other and from your real identity. (There's an excellent short story called True Names that explores this idea.)
For the majority of ordinary, nontechnical people, there are lots of simpler solutions.
* Use cash. In Berlin, many ordinary people have an awareness of and distaste for government surveillance. People remember East Germany. One result is that lots of people will just pay for everything in cash. In most other western countries, the norm is to leave an electronic trail of every single shop you visit.
* Use Signal or WhatsApp. WhatsApp rolled out strong end to end encryption to a billion people--most of whom have no idea what a "key" is and only the faintest sense of what "encryption" means.
The lesson I take from those projects is that whenever we can ship transparent, easy to use encryption that our users dont have to worry about, its a massive win.
If your app allows users to talk to each other privately, consider adding E2E encryption. It's the future.
If your app has some kind of cloud backup, like a password manager or a photo app, make sure that it's encrypted with a key that you don't have access to.
E2E comes with product tradeoffs. You may have to charge your users money, because you cant target ads against data you cant access. You'll need to make an installed app rather than a webapp. But its worth it -- and I think someday, hopefully soon, users will demand it.
[+] [-] randommodnar|10 years ago|reply
It takes a special kind of persistent, all-encompassing paranoia and effort. And as we've seen in the past, it only takes a single fuck-up, logging into the wrong server with the wrong account once, mentioning the wrong anecdote with the wrong persona, and bam, you're fucked. Once two dots are connected, they cannot be unconnected.
[+] [-] rpgmaker|10 years ago|reply
> But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consider to be a fairly forthright upstanding government was abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way.
This really does depend on who you ask.
[+] [-] toomanythings2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partycoder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|10 years ago|reply
Trust no one
With this sort of attitude you might as well give up on life. Society doesn't work without trust between people.
[+] [-] abandonliberty|10 years ago|reply
This author's conclusions seem quite sound to me. They collapsed it in a way to comply with a gag order while silently sounding an alarm.
https://forum.truecrypt.ch/t/my-analysis-of-what-really-happ...
Anyone operating in this space is eventually going to get the same option as Lavabit's founder: compromise or collapse.
[+] [-] oridecon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] djsumdog|10 years ago|reply
I think it's way more likely Snowden was intentional. He's still working for the Federal government and the leaks are intentional so that the Federal Government could announce to the world that they are spying on all their own citizens...and nothing happen. No real revolution, and no real end to the surveillance.
I mean yea, we have better security practices, more people use encryption, more people are aware about security ... but overall the landscape hasn't changed except in one crucial aspect: people are talking less publicly. People are afraid that what they say is monitored. There has been a chilling effect.
The Snowden narrative needs to be questioned. Since when does an NSA contractor working from home in Hawaii get VPN access to all the government secretes? Like...people actually believe that?
[+] [-] 0xCMP|10 years ago|reply
I guess so? Not me though. Snowden literally only proved what I had learned on my own.
> But we were confronted with documented evidence in 2013 that even what most people would consider to be a fairly forthright upstanding government was abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way.
Um. Who thought this? Ever? Since the 90s.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
This was censorship by business and security communities plus apathy by consumers. Plain and simple. The business communities didn't want to spend crap on INFOSEC. The ones that did faced two obstacles: (a) low volume meant real deal was ridiculously expensive with slower development; (b) mainstream INFOSEC conned companies with bandaids or fake security because they made more money that way. Constantly charging to fix problems they left in or upgrades people didn't need.
So, result was everything is shit security and stays that way. Neither proprietary nor FOSS learn from lessons 99% of the time. All due to what Schneier always called "perverse incentives" that keep bad stuff produced.
[+] [-] deepnet|10 years ago|reply
Without Stallman's foresight of the need for public domain open source software, there would only be proprietary software, all subject to PRISM.
Without the foresight of potential Government's to come the US founding fathers would not have written in such protections as still exist today.
Before Snowden there were many that suspected but now everyone knows.
>Um. Who thought this?
Snowden himself:
"I had too much faith that the government really would do no wrong. I was drinking the Kool-Aid in the post-9/11 moment. I believed the claims of government, that this was a just cause, a moral cause, and we don't need to listen to these people who say we broke this law or that law."
pre Snowden this was unopposable, the NSA's James Clapper lied to Ron Wyden in Congress about mass surveillance.
[+] [-] sp332|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xCMP|10 years ago|reply
> Um. Who thought this? Ever? Since the 90s.
To be clear this meant who thought we had "a fairly forthright upstanding government [not] abusing these capabilities in the most indiscriminate way" ever since the 90s.
[+] [-] partiallypro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmnvix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmptmp|10 years ago|reply
The terrorists are significantly different than many other criminals. In the sense that terrorists are not mainly driven by personal and earthly goals but they are driven by the goals set by their ideologies. Thus terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter.
Tell this Snowden to do (or at least talk) a little bit about the dire situation of people's freedom in the country he has chosen to flee to, namely, Russia. And the people who are criticizing US way too much should do themselves a favor by looking at countries run by tyrants like China, North Korea, most Islamist countries and Cuba. The way the Chinese government does the mass surveillance of its citizens on the Internet and the way the communists have installed the reward/punishment system based on it will make you realize that what is happening in US is hardly even annoying.
I am not to say that US is innocent person but it has been receiving criticism way too much.
Edit: typo
[+] [-] specialist|10 years ago|reply
Snowden got stuck in a Russian airport when his US visa got revoked. He then applied to many countries for asylum. Russia granted it. I've read that Snowden is still trying to find another host country.
[+] [-] mercurial|10 years ago|reply
Yeah, well, I don't think Cuban or North Korean spies are really at the forefront of anyone's concerns (apart from South Korea and Japan).
> Thus terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter.
Funny how pedophile rings are regularly dismantled (and made of "otherwise normal citizens" in majority). As for the "wolf in sheep's clothing" thing, it's not necessarily true (look at the profile of the attackers in France and Belgian, most of whom were linked to petty criminality - not to mention the guy who actually went to Syria).
> Tell this Snowden to do (or at least talk) a little bit about the dire situation of people's freedom in the country he has chosen to flee to, namely, Russia.
It was only a choice in the sense that the alternative was "kidnapping by the CIA". Russia was way down in Snowden's list of countries to flee to. What you don't seem to realize is that even if it's not abused now, it could very well be abused tomorrow. You want a Donald Trump nominating one of his cronies at the head of the US intelligence services and starting to dig into untold amounts of already-recorded communications?
And it's not only the US. Us Europeans are doing exactly the same thing, just with less money. The potential of it being abused by organizations which by their very nature have little to no external oversight (or by their political masters) is absolutely frightening. And that's compounded by the panopticon effect: if you're never sure of how much you're being watched, you will self-censor.
[+] [-] stevetrewick|10 years ago|reply
What's with 'we?' The various classes of technologists that I've been a member of - from the teen hax0r BBS days thru the crypto lists and Usenet groups to actual working professionals have absolutely believed this. It takes a truly spectacular amount of naivety to believe the contrary.
I have a deep and profound respect for Snowden, who has certainly sacrificed any possible semblance of a normal life in his native culture and likely narrowly escaped a worse fate, something he must certainly have known was a risk. It is his very naivety that made him such a perfect whistleblower : he's in there looking around and he's like "Holy crap! These guys are into some profoundly bad shit! I have to tell everyone!"
There's probably a hiring policy moral for black ops shops in there somewhere.
[+] [-] sievebrain|10 years ago|reply
But only a very small number of people picked up on AT&T Room 101 and Echelon and so on, and saw their significance. Unfortunately those things were more like news stories than events that redefined people's thinking. Mass surveillance simply wasn't a part of the conversation for the vast majority of technologists who mattered, i.e. the ones building the products we all use.
The NSA leaks changed all that. Now you have the guys running WhatsApp and Apple talking about this stuff. And even though for politeness reasons they sometimes talk in hypotheticals, "if we don't encrypt it could be abused by bad governments", it's as clear as day that what they really mean is "because we don't encrypt it is being abused by our governments".
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
Like Schell and Karger said for 30 years, what we need is to start deploying high-assurance security practices, protocols, systems, methods... everything that's proven to get the job done in various ways. We need them deployed pervasively. More private protocols and encryption by default, too, but who gives a shit if it runs on systems so insecure it doesn't need backdoors?
Let's go back to 1960's moving toward the 70's and 80's on hardware stuff. Burroughs stuff was tagged so everything in memory was code or data, pointers protected, arrays bounds-checked, arguments checked on function calls, and OS tried to isolate apps from each other. Some LISP machines had GC's for memory management. System/38 had capability-security & built-in database. Solo had safe concurrency at OS level. One had read-only firmware you couldn't change without physically moving it with a nucleus that handle protected functions that OS's built on. Two implemented a secure, Ada runtime that enforced the language's safety properties. SAFE (crash-safe.org), Cambridge's CHERI, and Sandia's SSP/Score processors follow these traditions.
Now let's look at how Schell et al said to do assurance. Precise, math/flowcharts/whatever description of functional and security requirements to avoid ambiguities & resulting vulnerabilities. Similar for design with attention to simplicity. Implementation in safest language you can with simpler subset and style easy to analyze. Every module proven to match a requirement/spec so no subversion (well, a start on it...). Strict modularity, layering, and interface checks all over the place. Success and failure states modeled then shown to follow a precise, security policy. If you can't state it precisely, then you can't secure it because you don't know what security means for you. Code review, tests of each function, formal proofs if possible, static analysis if possible, covert channel analysis of info flows, configuration management that assumes malicious developers, source to object code verification, trusted distribution of HW/SW to customers, onsite verification/generation from source, and configuration guidance. All of this independently verified by at least one set of professionals that know what they're doing.
That was security in 1970's-1980's. Far from red tape some here claim, every method above was proven by researchers, field users, and pentesters to catch serious problems. The only dispute was what caught most and where to spend most money. Even those questions had decent answers. Well, plus specific design and modeling decisions but INFOSEC was in infancy & that was evolving. I'm talking assurance activities: getting it done right whatever it is. Fast forward today to find that all the problems Schell, Karger, etc predicted have happened and consistently in systems that don't use those methods whereas systems that do avoid many more problems.
So, here's the solution: raise assurance of our systems across the board using methods that go back to 1961. That's right, Burroughs engineers were doing a better job on security before that was even a thing just trying to improve reliability. This is 2016. We have better specs, better languages, better static analysis, easier formal tools, automated test generation, tons of sample code, fast dev machines... you name it. There's no excuse, outside willful ignorance or apathy, for security-focused developers (esp in FOSS) to not use everything at their disposal that's proven to work at reducing risk. Even less excuse for the stuff they make to still be less secure than tech from the friggin 60's and 70's.
Shout out to the exceptions that are trying to do it right. Groups like GenodeOS, Dresden, NICTA/OKL4, Carlisle's IRONSIDES DNS, Bernstein's stuff, Galois, JX OS, ETH, INRIA, Secure64, Sentinel HYDRA (minus bodacion crap lol), Combex, and even NativeClient since they knocked off OP browser. Enough stuff like this and NSA will be begging us to ban INFOSEC books and shit since their info will dry up haha.
[+] [-] hnhnhn3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selimthegrim|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mouzogu|10 years ago|reply
They've been doing this for many years before Snowden and will continue long after any new laws are passed to give us the impression of an improvement.
[+] [-] Daneel_|10 years ago|reply
US proxy it is then!
[+] [-] educar|10 years ago|reply
I think the other part which he hasn't discussed is the rise of Cloud companies like Google, Facebook. We should really be working towards an internet where people can keep the data to themselves and decide how it gets used. But now, the default is for these corporations to own all the data.
Of course, govt can still access the data (which is what snowden is talking about) but that is a different problem.
[+] [-] awqrre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yoz-y|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolidaisuki|10 years ago|reply
>You are receiving this error message because your ip (89.234.157.254) is listed in the StopForumSpam.com database.
>You can check the status of your IP and have it removed by visiting http://www.stopforumspam.com/removal. Thank you.
It's kind of ironical that they are quoting Snowden and their own site blocks Tor.
E: didn't HN used to have markdown quoting?
[+] [-] maxerickson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellbanner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krapp|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewvijay|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tahirtaous|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brokenforwhom|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] known|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voidz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matchagaucho|10 years ago|reply
This is the classic Snowden formula. Establish a false premise that has no faith in the government or constitutional rights, then continue to paint a picture of a dystopian future.
This guy should be writing sci-fi novels...
[edit: I predicted at least 5 down votes as I typed this. Don't disappoint me ;-) ]
[+] [-] pyre|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whiskers08xmt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crpatino|10 years ago|reply
Why do you think 'faith' is required in a logical argument?
What future?