True I shot from the hip, he does address the concerns later.
It happens.
I'm used to implementing technologies to solve security problems. It's just damn frustrating to have your hands tied in such a way that you can not and that's the position that I see myself and most other network ops in.
Maybe NSA has provided a marketing opportunity to get the public to demand real security.
Our customers decided at the ballot box that they didn't want protection and it was acceptable to entrust their privacy to the system. They seem to forget that decision when they ask if they are vulnerable to this type of intercept and what they can do about it. The answer is not much because I will not and can not break the law, it's unethical and wrong. I will encourage people to seek to change the laws to encourage true end to end security but the odds of that happening are near 0.
If everybody refuses to try, the odds are indeed zero. So maybe we should try.
Sam
-jsq
On 2013-09-06 06:47, John S. Quarterman wrote:
On 2013-09-06 05:57, Roland Dobbins wrote:
There are no purely technical solutions to social ills. Schneier of all people should know this.
Schneier does know this, and explicitly said this.
-jsq
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-in ternet-nsa-spying
Three, we can influence governance. I have resisted saying this up to now, and I am saddened to say it, but the US has proved to be an unethical steward of the internet. The UK is no better. The NSA's actions are legitimizing the internet abuses by China, Russia, Iran and others. We need to figure out new means of internet governance, ones that makes it harder for powerful tech countries to monitor everything. For example, we need to demand transparency, oversight, and accountability from our governments and corporations.
Unfortunately, this is going play directly into the hands of totalitarian governments that want to control their country's internet for even more extreme forms of surveillance. We need to figure out how to prevent that, too. We need to avoid the mistakes of the International Telecommunications Union, which has become a forum to legitimize bad government behavior, and create truly international governance that can't be dominated or abused by any one country.
Generations from now, when people look back on these early decades of the internet, I hope they will not be disappointed in us. We can ensure that they don't only if each of us makes this a priority, and engages in the debate. We have a moral duty to do this, and we have no time to lose.
Dismantling the surveillance state won't be easy. Has any country that engaged in mass surveillance of its own citizens voluntarily given up that capability? Has any mass surveillance country avoided becoming totalitarian? Whatever happens, we're going to be breaking new ground.
Again, the politics of this is a bigger task than the engineering, but the engineering is critical. We need to demand that real technologists be involved in any key government decision making on these issues. We've had enough of lawyers and politicians not fully understanding technology; we need technologists at the table when we build tech policy.
To the engineers, I say this: we built the internet, and some of us have helped to subvert it. Now, those of us who love liberty have to fix it.