[liberationtech] NSA's 100% perfect internal audits...

[Case Black]

You are quite correct! Being in the operational side of intelligence
requires one to be adept at deception. And clearly the current NSA
leadership has fallen far below the standards of such predecessors as Bobby
Inman when comes to not injecting open deception into the arena of public
policy debate.

It's very useful to point out that fact; however, the members of this list
are uniquely qualified to influence that policy debate in terms of shaping
both hard and soft policy in far more substantial ways.

We can shape soft policy by expanding the selectorate[1] willing to
influence the political leadership to better circumscribe domestic
surveillance capabilities. It's important to keep the focus on capabilities
rather than intentions and assurances. And on the long range danger of
having these surveillance databases in existence and their inevitable use
to warp the political process in dark and dangerous ways[2].

Hard policy is shaped by changing the technological landscape...by altering
the very ground surveillance agencies stand on. The support of more and
better privacy and encryption projects with less juvenile sniping, less
"gotcha" behavior and more genuine mutual help and support for relevant
projects has the chance to fundamentally alter that landscape. It happened
during the Crypto Wars of the 1990's[3] and it can happen again.

There's massive experience and expertise on this list. Many of us have deep
crypto and technology backgrounds and many of us were foot soldiers on the
ground during the earlier Crypto Wars. And that war is CLEARLY NOT OVER[4].

---------------

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
[2] http://www.salon.com/2011/11/15/the_long_shadows_of_nixon_and_hoover

[3] http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars
[4] http://www.fipr.org/press/050525crypto.html


On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 11:36:37AM -0500, Case Black wrote:
>
> > Addressing the Black Hat convention in Las Vegas, an annual gathering for
> > the information security industry, he gave a personal example: "I have
> four
> > daughters. Can I go and intercept their emails? No. The technical
> > limitations are in there." Should anyone in the NSA try to circumvent
> that,
>
> Are you actually spending a minute of your time listening to a known
> liar? The spooks lie all the time. It's their job. Don't fall for it.
>
> > in defiance of policy, they would be held accountable, he said: "There is
> > 100% audibility." Only 35 NSA analysts had the authority to query a
> > database of US phone records, he said.*
> --
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