This entire event was a staged press op. Keith Alexander is a ~30 year veteran of SIGINT, electronic warfare, and intelligence, and a Four-Star US Army General --- which is a bigger deal than you probably think it is. He's a spy chief in the truest sense and a master politician. Anyone who thinks he walked into that conference hall in Caesars without a near perfect forecast of the outcome of the speech is kidding themselves.
Heckling Alexander played right into the strategy. It gave him an opportunity to look reasonable compared to his detractors, and, more generally (and alarmingly), to have the NSA look more reasonable compared to opponents of NSA surveillance. It allowed him to "split the vote" with audience reactions, getting people who probably have serious misgivings about NSA programs to applaud his calm and graceful handling of shouted insults; many of those people probably applauded simply to protest the hecklers, who after all were making it harder for them to follow what Alexander was trying to say.
There was no serious Q&A on offer at the keynote. The questions were pre-screened; all attendees could do was vote on them. There was no possibility that anything would come of this speech other than an effectively unchallenged full-throated defense of the NSA's programs.
Even the premise of the keynote was calculated to wrong-foot NSA opponents. However much you might want to hear Alexander account for the activities of the NSA, the NSA itself is not the real oversight mechanism for the NSA! My guess is that no pol with meaningful oversight over NSA would have consented to address a room full of technology professionals about NSA's programs; they were happy to send NSA's own supremely well-trained figurehead to do that for them.
I think a walkout might have been effective, had it been organized well enough in advance (perhaps with some of the same aplomb as the [I think misguided] opposition to CISPA); at least you'd get some stinging photos.
My main take away from your comment is that Keith Alexander is Enabran Tain & that I feel like the US is approximating the Cardassian Union more everyday.
The existence of nuclear weapons has rendered traditional warfare unprofitable, except against the very weak, and even in those cases only military contractors benefit.
We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories.
I expect in the long drawn out economic warfare to come that cyber espionage and surveillance to be critical advantages & well connected military contractors with access to the NSA's total information awareness database to profit handsomely from insider trading.
Update & Question:
I'm taking a short break from work and wondering why this comment has been down voted twice?
Instead of down voting & unless you just hate ST: DS9 references, can you provide a plausible argument against the inevitability that tapping the entire world's communications will not lead to insider trading?
There are so few terrorists in the world, and so many opportunities to profit from having early access to employment reports, corporate revenue numbers and other economic data.
Please give me a compelling reason why a wiretap on all the worlds communications is more likely to be used to catch terrorists than for simple greed?
"Ubiquitous surveillance prevents millions from speaking
freely. BlackHat keynote attendees, let's not let Gen.
Alexander speak freely today."
I anticipated the protest to be effective, since black-hat hackers have somewhat of a culture of booing presenters who they morally object to. See for example an undercover reporter that was booed out of DEFCON in 2007. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/undercover-nbc-dateline-reporte...
I think the thing that made this disruption ineffective is the majority of attendees weren't black-hat hackers. They were mostly corporate professionals. See Black Hat's own demographic survey http://www.blackhat.com/docs/bh-us-12/sponsors/bh-us-12-spon...
It's therefore not really surprising that most of the audience wanted to hear the general speak, and was annoyed by the disruption.
If, on the other hand, the general were speaking at DEFCON I think he probably would have been almost unanimously booed off the stage. But the feds are staying away from DEFON this year (for that reason).
So in retrospect, I think the disruption was a miscalculated PR move for the hacker community.
I agree with the basic argument that Alexander is a savvy SOB and knew what he was in for...
BUT, you're making it sound like getting heckled on stage was desirable. I don't agree. I think it is more appropriate to say that the NSA is between a rock and a hard place. They could either...
* Get heckled and look culpable, but maintain the illusion that they give a shit what the general public thinks, or...
* Not attend and completely look like assholes hell bent on violating civil liberties.
Keith Alexander didn't win any friends by getting heckled. He just made fewer enemies.
Agreed; his extensive infosec background and smooth-talking politician talents meant that he probably had full knowledge of how this was going to go down. What's interesting is why he attempted PR reconciliation at a relatively niche conference. Black Hat doesn't have much connection to the mass public, and trying to make yourself look good in front of a mass of angry hackers is pointless anyhow because hackers tend to stay angry about topics like privacy.
Now, if he had a full blown press conference with civilian attendees, then, well...
While I'm sure he's very capable and very much an expert in his field, I don't think he's this charming super politician that planned an elaborate scheme to sway the conference attendees' opinions by appearing to be sensible and calm in front of hecklers.
I mean, can you imagine how horrible this would have turned out if he didn't stay calm? It's basically standard procedure to stay calm and try to explain your way out of it. Sure, he got some applause, and the heckler got some applause too. I think anyone could have imagined something like that happening.
> There was no serious Q&A on offer at the keynote. The questions were pre-screened; all attendees could do was vote on them.
A joke in every sense, then. Audacious. He leads with a bit of humor, then says,
> and I do want to give a chance for you to ask some questions. Hopefully they'll be easy ones, and I have a crew here that can answer the hard ones if I need to.
> Alexander also noted the 6,000 NSA cryptologists who have deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, 20 of whom were killed in the line of duty according to Alexander. “Think about people willing to go forward to Iraq and Afghanistan, to make sure our soldiers, airmen and marines get the intelligence they need,” he said. “I believe these are the most noble people we have in this country.”
Having lost a brother who deployed as a signals operator in Afghanistan (to an IED), it always makes me cringe whenever they use forward-deployed soldiers as a defense of the higher-level states "nobility". There is nothing noble about mass surveillance or the invasion of privacy of non-enemy combatant nations/citizens.
The fact citizens signed up to risk their lives in combat-zones at the bottom end of the chain does not legitimize the actions of those at the top.
Hear, hear! When the top brass evoke these deaths, it's like they're saying "if our sainted dead soldiers followed these orders, how can you possibly disagree?" Frankly, the last general worthy of making that sort of comparison was Eisenhower, and he would have been the last man in the military to do so. He was already sickened at this leadership culture when he was President. If he were alive today he would cross the street to avoid a conversation with Alexander.
Hackers applauded Alexander? He really has played them like pipes.
You can argue all you want, but in the end, some boundaries have to be set. What the NSA did (does actually) is way past that boundary for most people, and I think with reason, but that's another debate. He hasn't supplied any argument that would make us reconsider the boundaries. All this terrorist talk is bullshit.
Despite the vaguely militant-underground name "Black Hat", it's a conference of mainstream security researchers, run by a large media firm (CMP Media, which also runs the Game Developer's Conference, and owns a bunch of magazines like InformationWeek). Many of the attendees are themselves in government positions, or serving as contractors. So I'm not sure I'd expect a particularly strong backlash. Heck, some attendees could well be in a position to have already known some of the things that were leaked.
There are not really any hackers at BlackHat. Some go to give a talk for their own interests, some go to see their friends talk, but the "hackers" largely skip the conference and go hang out on their company dime and go to the private after-parties. It's a running joke that the real conference is at the Galleria Bar.
Funny how Alexander says he's read the Constitution, and implores the heckler to do the same. If one can read the Constitution and square the NSA's mass surveillance with the 4th amendment then one can square a circle. There really is no point in debating people like this on the technicalities of the Constitution. What they understand is power. He has it and we don't. He knows how to pull the levers that matter, and which Congressman and executive branch bureaucrats to lean on to make sure his bailiwick is not reduced by a single inch. The rest of us, sadly, are left flailing around hoping that pointing to a piece of paper is an effective check on evil.
The NSA is filtering a public utility. The users of this utility choose what information they want to broadcast, and should do so with the full knowledge that this information is being bounced between dozens of routers every time it goes out, any one of which may be monitored by its owners. This information ultimately ends up at the destination IP address, whose owner is able to use this data in whichever manner he sees fit, including submittal of said data to a major governmental intelligence organization as occurs with PRISM.
The problem is that people foolishly assume that the plaintext packets they send online are private by default. As in real life, good privacy can only be assured by significant effort on the part of the communicants. Is it evil to observe something occurring on a public street corner? It is not different to observe something occuring on a public IP router.
My understanding is that their Constitutional dodge is rooted in Scalia's originalism: the 4th says "papers", which means specifically physical pieces of paper, not phone calls or emails.
What I've been wondering about though, is the legal definition of "effects" (noun, not verb). That term seems very broad to me, and should include emails, but I'm not a lawyer.
>the four-star general presented a timeline of terrorist attacks around the world, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the Boston Marathon attack.
Can anyone speak as to why, with the NSA's systems, they were not able to thwart an attack by the ass clowns in Boston? Russia even warned us about them and they made frequent contact with foreigners.
I'm sorry, but that terrorist event seems like low hanging fruit if their system really works to protect us.
The question is: Did they want to thwart the attack?
One obvious possibility is that the system that has been erected simply needs fear to be able to continue to exist.
Let some attacks happen (and some Taliban prisons break) from time to time and people can be and will be manipulated via fear, so the powerful stay powerful and the rich become richer. Same old, same old...
Next stop: Middle Class Gone.
Then, people will have nothing to lose again and wake up. Next, we'll have riots and one day, the old system is dead and history will repeat itself once more. So much for the long term.
The obvious conclusion to draw from this - and really, that anybody should be able to draw - is that the system doesn't work to protect regular people.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise, either. Surveillance is not effective for preventing crimes. It is somewhat more useful for investigating crimes after they've happened.
Because the NSA is dedicated toward detecting and gaining intel on organized terror collectives abroad.
Domestic terrorism is domestic and therefore under the FBI's purview. And despite what Snowden seems to think about mind-reading programs, unless either brother put out on the public Internet or phone communications what they were planning to do, there would have been no way for NSA to pre-emptively detect it even if they were warrantlessly monitoring all domestic communications.
So in a way your question is equivalent to asking why ASLR didn't stop that CSRF attack on the web page you just viewed.
> Can anyone speak as to why, with the NSA's systems, they were not able to thwart an attack by the ass clowns in Boston?
Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were granted legal permanent residence in 2007. Dzhokhar became a nautralized citizen in 2012. Tamerlan's application was on hold due to the DHS being a little suspicious of him.
If the system is working as it should, the NSA could have been prohibited from monitoring the brothers.
I don't care whether the director of the NSA is a bad guy, it just makes you look bad if you heckle someone on stage. There are probably few more scrutinizing audiences for the director of the NSA than a professional security conference. I would rather have him say what he has to say and be analysed by the many bright minds at the conference than for him to be childishly interrupted and waste time that could be spent talking about the actual role of the NSA in the security of the nation.
General Alexander doesn't have to act rude when he has the power of the NSA behind him. The only power we have in a situation like that is to be disruptive and to be rude. Why should we treat him with respect given all the disrespectful things that he's instrumental in?
Those in power keep trying to present this as a "conversation" or a "dialog," but that's absolute bullshit. They're not actually trying to have a conversation, so we shouldn't behave as if that's what's happening. The most powerful thing we could have done would have been to boo him off the stage.
> it just makes you look bad if you heckle someone on stage.
It also takes a lot of courage to do just that. And people with courage are rare. They need our support. People who are 2 inches away from getting loud need our support. Because they are the people who can start the chain reaction that is so urgently needed now and that will not happen if we collectively shut up and just stay polite. We have been seriously betrayed and we have now every reason, right and duty to break free from the rules which were appropriate for the times "when things were good".
So I think he did just what everybody should have done - in a perfect world.
> it just makes you look bad if you heckle someone on stage.
I disagree. It's important that we speak truth to power. If we don't then they won't hear our case. You don't think the president is wandering around Hacker News and Reddit looking for details do you? No. They employ PR firms or former employees of them to filter information back to reports which get filtered through various aides which finally makes it to the ear of the president.
However, when you stand and loudly speak your feelings, the message doesn't get filtered. That's an important part of the process.
I find particularly hard to believe the "6,000 NSA cryptologists who have deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq" part. Why would anyone want to deploy cryptologists into a war zone?
I also found disheartening the applause given to the general for his clever answers. "I have. So should you"?! I expected more from the Black Hat crowd.
And, finally, I applaud Jon McCoy for his sacrifice. His willingness to endure all the cavity searches he'll be subjected to before and after every flight inspires us all.
They aren't really the same cryptologists that we think of, and they aren't the same guys who are writing programs to go through our phone records.
The majority of cryptologists who are forward deployed are there to ensure that the cryptography is used correctly. Despite many years of attempts to make it easier to use, cryptography. especially for portable radios, is a pain in the ass to use. People have to be trained. Areas have to be made where crypto equipment is stored and secured. Deficiencies in use have to be identified. That's what those people are for.
With the fact that we've had more than two million troops deployed during the War on Terror, I'm actually surprised that the number of NSA cryptologists is at 6,000. They must be very senior people.
In the Air Force I was a 'cryptologic Russian linguist' (it had nothing to do with code-breaking, although it was an intelligence field). I wonder if he was referencing linguists.
"Ninety-eight percent of society has issues with this"
"The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults, finds that 50% approve of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 44% disapprove. These views are little changed from a month ago, when 48% approved and 47% disapproved."
I highly recommend reading "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies" [1].
Even if polling shows a lack of discontent, it does not mean they were voting rationally. The emotional fear machine of terrorism will always sway towards totalitarianism policies. But if the majority of those citizens were honestly questioned about having their phones (and their entire families) monitored, I doubt they would be for it.
Irrationality and logical fallacies are flourishing on both ends of the spectrum (citizens and politicians), and there are few vocal voices in between correcting the bullshit.
What's missing are leaders (aka media) evaluating and promoting policies based on rationality reasoning rather than what emotional ploys that sell.
From the same poll: 56% say that the courts do not provide adequate limits on these programs, and 47% say the programs go too far in restricting civil liberties. It's about 50-50, but the trend lines are ALL in the right direction, whether you compare to 2,5, or 10 years ago.
I think it's possible for some people to broadly approve of the collection, but still have issues with it. Not sure where that 98% number comes from, but I think the 50% "approval" number is misleading on its own.
> “No, I’m saying I don’t trust you!” shouted McCoy.
I believe that's pretty central here. I don't see how we can ever be able again to trust an organism such as the NSA - or even the government.
Transparency is the only solution here. Will we get it?
If we don't, the only other solution would be to cut budgets so drastically that such an enterprise will simply not be possible financially, anymore.
And maybe, as a general improvement: Decentralize the government and give the States back their autonomy (and here you have your link between technology and politics - see the recent cry for less "political posts" on HN).
Looks like I'm a little late for this comment party, but I'd just like to highlight one comment from the Forbes website that I thought was good:
"In general I agree with McCoy in his ad-hoc debate with Gen Alexander as well as his post presentation remarks about the distorted perspective of national security. At the same time, I do conceed that the NSA is acting in good faith and ‘within the law’ as presented to them via the Patriot Act. I have similar feeling about the value of TSA, but whereas the TSA is a publicly disclosed program, my most pressing concern with the NSA is the secrecy of it. First, the secrecy presents an extremely high degree of risk (in terms of both the probabilty of occurance as well as the dangers) of mission creep. I doubt Congressional nor FISC oversight are adequate to mitigate this risk. Second, secrecy is not really a valid tool for deterence. Anti-terrorism programs are like a doomsday devices: it’s a good deterence only if it is widely known about (see Dr Strangelove). Moreover, while secret programs might be good for support of kill/capture programs, it is far from clear that such efforts reduce terrorism.
For all I know, the government spy/drone program is to terrorists as a hammer is to an ant colony. If you have a spilled pot of honey in the kitchen, it doesn’t matter how good you are at spotting and smashing ants. I want to know these things, so that I can help shape public policy through the ballot box."
--uspatriot2001
I think that's a good assessment of the high-level picture, and it's much more informative than "NSA BAD! Freedom good!" (not to belittle anyone's comments here) in that it reflects a road forward.
All things considered, it seems like Keith Alexander did a pretty good job of handling the situation. Personally I think the heckler sounded like a douche ("read the Constitution" sounds like a dumb thing to say to a 4 star general who probably has better knowledge of it than your average hacker), even if he (the heckler) had some good points.
It would have been easy for the situation to devolve into something much uglier, but fortunately it seems like things stayed pretty calm!
Wow, I am really, really surprised.
Especially as Gen. Alexander gave the keynote speech to DEFCON last year, and explicitly said, when asked after his speech:
Q: "[..]Does the NSA really keep a file on anyone? [...]"
No idea how accurate a depiction of the speech this is, but the article is -- contrary to the title -- portraying the speech as having been warmly received, applauded, with one lone heckler. Now, whether or not one agrees with General Alexander, there are more courteous and productive ways to express yourself than yelling "bullshit".
Keith Alexander's way of bending words, and his facility with swinging a crowd and lying skillfully under pressure once again reminds me disturbingly of accounts I've read about psychopaths, and of probable psychopaths I've encountered.
Those patterns could of course be stuff you pick up anyway as a top player for power, but I find the parallels highly worrisome.
For those who have never read anything about the subject, may I suggest browsing e.g. "Without conscience" by Robert D. Hare. The sections with court proceedings in particular illustrate well what I mean.
[+] [-] tptacek|12 years ago|reply
Heckling Alexander played right into the strategy. It gave him an opportunity to look reasonable compared to his detractors, and, more generally (and alarmingly), to have the NSA look more reasonable compared to opponents of NSA surveillance. It allowed him to "split the vote" with audience reactions, getting people who probably have serious misgivings about NSA programs to applaud his calm and graceful handling of shouted insults; many of those people probably applauded simply to protest the hecklers, who after all were making it harder for them to follow what Alexander was trying to say.
There was no serious Q&A on offer at the keynote. The questions were pre-screened; all attendees could do was vote on them. There was no possibility that anything would come of this speech other than an effectively unchallenged full-throated defense of the NSA's programs.
Even the premise of the keynote was calculated to wrong-foot NSA opponents. However much you might want to hear Alexander account for the activities of the NSA, the NSA itself is not the real oversight mechanism for the NSA! My guess is that no pol with meaningful oversight over NSA would have consented to address a room full of technology professionals about NSA's programs; they were happy to send NSA's own supremely well-trained figurehead to do that for them.
I think a walkout might have been effective, had it been organized well enough in advance (perhaps with some of the same aplomb as the [I think misguided] opposition to CISPA); at least you'd get some stinging photos.
[+] [-] willholloway|12 years ago|reply
The existence of nuclear weapons has rendered traditional warfare unprofitable, except against the very weak, and even in those cases only military contractors benefit.
We invaded and occupied Iraq and didn't even get any oil, just a trillion or so in national debt. At least in the time of Rome citizen soldiers were titled large swaths of land in the conquered territories.
I expect in the long drawn out economic warfare to come that cyber espionage and surveillance to be critical advantages & well connected military contractors with access to the NSA's total information awareness database to profit handsomely from insider trading.
Update & Question:
I'm taking a short break from work and wondering why this comment has been down voted twice?
Instead of down voting & unless you just hate ST: DS9 references, can you provide a plausible argument against the inevitability that tapping the entire world's communications will not lead to insider trading?
There are so few terrorists in the world, and so many opportunities to profit from having early access to employment reports, corporate revenue numbers and other economic data.
Please give me a compelling reason why a wiretap on all the worlds communications is more likely to be used to catch terrorists than for simple greed?
[+] [-] mikegagnon|12 years ago|reply
I think the thing that made this disruption ineffective is the majority of attendees weren't black-hat hackers. They were mostly corporate professionals. See Black Hat's own demographic survey http://www.blackhat.com/docs/bh-us-12/sponsors/bh-us-12-spon...
It's therefore not really surprising that most of the audience wanted to hear the general speak, and was annoyed by the disruption.
If, on the other hand, the general were speaking at DEFCON I think he probably would have been almost unanimously booed off the stage. But the feds are staying away from DEFON this year (for that reason).
So in retrospect, I think the disruption was a miscalculated PR move for the hacker community.
[+] [-] fixxer|12 years ago|reply
BUT, you're making it sound like getting heckled on stage was desirable. I don't agree. I think it is more appropriate to say that the NSA is between a rock and a hard place. They could either...
* Get heckled and look culpable, but maintain the illusion that they give a shit what the general public thinks, or...
* Not attend and completely look like assholes hell bent on violating civil liberties.
Keith Alexander didn't win any friends by getting heckled. He just made fewer enemies.
[+] [-] kunai|12 years ago|reply
Now, if he had a full blown press conference with civilian attendees, then, well...
[+] [-] MisterWebz|12 years ago|reply
I mean, can you imagine how horrible this would have turned out if he didn't stay calm? It's basically standard procedure to stay calm and try to explain your way out of it. Sure, he got some applause, and the heckler got some applause too. I think anyone could have imagined something like that happening.
[+] [-] arh68|12 years ago|reply
A joke in every sense, then. Audacious. He leads with a bit of humor, then says,
> and I do want to give a chance for you to ask some questions. Hopefully they'll be easy ones, and I have a crew here that can answer the hard ones if I need to.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlrobinson|12 years ago|reply
(the whole keynote is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvVIZ4OyGnQ)
[+] [-] dmix|12 years ago|reply
Having lost a brother who deployed as a signals operator in Afghanistan (to an IED), it always makes me cringe whenever they use forward-deployed soldiers as a defense of the higher-level states "nobility". There is nothing noble about mass surveillance or the invasion of privacy of non-enemy combatant nations/citizens.
The fact citizens signed up to risk their lives in combat-zones at the bottom end of the chain does not legitimize the actions of those at the top.
[+] [-] jessaustin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|12 years ago|reply
In another context they might be called human shields. Shields in the PR war.
I'm sorry for your loss.
[+] [-] norswap|12 years ago|reply
You can argue all you want, but in the end, some boundaries have to be set. What the NSA did (does actually) is way past that boundary for most people, and I think with reason, but that's another debate. He hasn't supplied any argument that would make us reconsider the boundaries. All this terrorist talk is bullshit.
[+] [-] _delirium|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawnchair_larry|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcescalante|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixothree|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlrobinson|12 years ago|reply
Still, pretty disgraceful.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vijayboyapati|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|12 years ago|reply
The problem is that people foolishly assume that the plaintext packets they send online are private by default. As in real life, good privacy can only be assured by significant effort on the part of the communicants. Is it evil to observe something occurring on a public street corner? It is not different to observe something occuring on a public IP router.
[+] [-] lukifer|12 years ago|reply
What I've been wondering about though, is the legal definition of "effects" (noun, not verb). That term seems very broad to me, and should include emails, but I'm not a lawyer.
[+] [-] IanDrake|12 years ago|reply
Can anyone speak as to why, with the NSA's systems, they were not able to thwart an attack by the ass clowns in Boston? Russia even warned us about them and they made frequent contact with foreigners.
I'm sorry, but that terrorist event seems like low hanging fruit if their system really works to protect us.
[+] [-] northwest|12 years ago|reply
One obvious possibility is that the system that has been erected simply needs fear to be able to continue to exist.
Let some attacks happen (and some Taliban prisons break) from time to time and people can be and will be manipulated via fear, so the powerful stay powerful and the rich become richer. Same old, same old...
Next stop: Middle Class Gone.
Then, people will have nothing to lose again and wake up. Next, we'll have riots and one day, the old system is dead and history will repeat itself once more. So much for the long term.
[+] [-] nhaehnle|12 years ago|reply
This shouldn't really come as a surprise, either. Surveillance is not effective for preventing crimes. It is somewhat more useful for investigating crimes after they've happened.
[+] [-] mpyne|12 years ago|reply
Domestic terrorism is domestic and therefore under the FBI's purview. And despite what Snowden seems to think about mind-reading programs, unless either brother put out on the public Internet or phone communications what they were planning to do, there would have been no way for NSA to pre-emptively detect it even if they were warrantlessly monitoring all domestic communications.
So in a way your question is equivalent to asking why ASLR didn't stop that CSRF attack on the web page you just viewed.
[+] [-] McGlockenshire|12 years ago|reply
Dzhokhar and Tamerlan were granted legal permanent residence in 2007. Dzhokhar became a nautralized citizen in 2012. Tamerlan's application was on hold due to the DHS being a little suspicious of him.
If the system is working as it should, the NSA could have been prohibited from monitoring the brothers.
[+] [-] mjfl|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moxie|12 years ago|reply
Those in power keep trying to present this as a "conversation" or a "dialog," but that's absolute bullshit. They're not actually trying to have a conversation, so we shouldn't behave as if that's what's happening. The most powerful thing we could have done would have been to boo him off the stage.
[+] [-] northwest|12 years ago|reply
It also takes a lot of courage to do just that. And people with courage are rare. They need our support. People who are 2 inches away from getting loud need our support. Because they are the people who can start the chain reaction that is so urgently needed now and that will not happen if we collectively shut up and just stay polite. We have been seriously betrayed and we have now every reason, right and duty to break free from the rules which were appropriate for the times "when things were good".
So I think he did just what everybody should have done - in a perfect world.
[+] [-] mr_spothawk|12 years ago|reply
I disagree. It's important that we speak truth to power. If we don't then they won't hear our case. You don't think the president is wandering around Hacker News and Reddit looking for details do you? No. They employ PR firms or former employees of them to filter information back to reports which get filtered through various aides which finally makes it to the ear of the president.
However, when you stand and loudly speak your feelings, the message doesn't get filtered. That's an important part of the process.
[+] [-] rbanffy|12 years ago|reply
I also found disheartening the applause given to the general for his clever answers. "I have. So should you"?! I expected more from the Black Hat crowd.
And, finally, I applaud Jon McCoy for his sacrifice. His willingness to endure all the cavity searches he'll be subjected to before and after every flight inspires us all.
[+] [-] omegaham|12 years ago|reply
They aren't really the same cryptologists that we think of, and they aren't the same guys who are writing programs to go through our phone records.
The majority of cryptologists who are forward deployed are there to ensure that the cryptography is used correctly. Despite many years of attempts to make it easier to use, cryptography. especially for portable radios, is a pain in the ass to use. People have to be trained. Areas have to be made where crypto equipment is stored and secured. Deficiencies in use have to be identified. That's what those people are for.
With the fact that we've had more than two million troops deployed during the War on Terror, I'm actually surprised that the number of NSA cryptologists is at 6,000. They must be very senior people.
[+] [-] cenazoic|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|12 years ago|reply
"The national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted July 17-21 among 1,480 adults, finds that 50% approve of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 44% disapprove. These views are little changed from a month ago, when 48% approved and 47% disapproved."
http://www.people-press.org/2013/07/26/few-see-adequate-limi...
[+] [-] dmix|12 years ago|reply
Even if polling shows a lack of discontent, it does not mean they were voting rationally. The emotional fear machine of terrorism will always sway towards totalitarianism policies. But if the majority of those citizens were honestly questioned about having their phones (and their entire families) monitored, I doubt they would be for it.
Irrationality and logical fallacies are flourishing on both ends of the spectrum (citizens and politicians), and there are few vocal voices in between correcting the bullshit.
What's missing are leaders (aka media) evaluating and promoting policies based on rationality reasoning rather than what emotional ploys that sell.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-ebook/...
[+] [-] bendoernberg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomelders|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] northwest|12 years ago|reply
I believe that's pretty central here. I don't see how we can ever be able again to trust an organism such as the NSA - or even the government.
Transparency is the only solution here. Will we get it?
If we don't, the only other solution would be to cut budgets so drastically that such an enterprise will simply not be possible financially, anymore.
And maybe, as a general improvement: Decentralize the government and give the States back their autonomy (and here you have your link between technology and politics - see the recent cry for less "political posts" on HN).
[+] [-] northwest|12 years ago|reply
And WTF was that, now?
EDIT: I guess this is true because actually, he lied to the chairs in the room. Or some coffee mugs that were also present.
Is that how one evades a lie detector, btw?
It really can't get any sicker. We have now reached the bottom.
[+] [-] kyzyl|12 years ago|reply
"In general I agree with McCoy in his ad-hoc debate with Gen Alexander as well as his post presentation remarks about the distorted perspective of national security. At the same time, I do conceed that the NSA is acting in good faith and ‘within the law’ as presented to them via the Patriot Act. I have similar feeling about the value of TSA, but whereas the TSA is a publicly disclosed program, my most pressing concern with the NSA is the secrecy of it. First, the secrecy presents an extremely high degree of risk (in terms of both the probabilty of occurance as well as the dangers) of mission creep. I doubt Congressional nor FISC oversight are adequate to mitigate this risk. Second, secrecy is not really a valid tool for deterence. Anti-terrorism programs are like a doomsday devices: it’s a good deterence only if it is widely known about (see Dr Strangelove). Moreover, while secret programs might be good for support of kill/capture programs, it is far from clear that such efforts reduce terrorism.
For all I know, the government spy/drone program is to terrorists as a hammer is to an ant colony. If you have a spilled pot of honey in the kitchen, it doesn’t matter how good you are at spotting and smashing ants. I want to know these things, so that I can help shape public policy through the ballot box." --uspatriot2001
I think that's a good assessment of the high-level picture, and it's much more informative than "NSA BAD! Freedom good!" (not to belittle anyone's comments here) in that it reflects a road forward.
[+] [-] dutchbrit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonFish85|12 years ago|reply
It would have been easy for the situation to devolve into something much uglier, but fortunately it seems like things stayed pretty calm!
[+] [-] replax|12 years ago|reply
Q: "[..]Does the NSA really keep a file on anyone? [...]"
A: "[..] Frist, no, we don't [...]"
Absolutely astonishing!
listen/watch here: http://youtu.be/tz0ejKersnM?t=33m2s
[+] [-] podperson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etiam|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] generj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YellowRex|12 years ago|reply
Boing Boing has the same coverage with a much more reader-friendly site design: http://boingboing.net/2013/07/31/nsa-capo-heckled-at-black-h...
[+] [-] rinon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abalone|12 years ago|reply
The crowd's reaction was definitely mixed.