> people have more respect for those who present themselves well
If presenting yourself well means driving a luxury car, or having an expensive home, then no, I don't respect these people more than others. There are no such 'rules of society' except for materialistic people.
Generally I respect people less for ostentatious displays of wealth (though a significant proportion of them have earned their money doing things I respect despite the sports car and bedrooms that outnumber even the guests).
Inverse snobbery is a very powerful thing too ;) But I'm probably an outlier
Yep. And reading the pdf for phase 1 of the audit, worth about $40k, the findings didn't seem very impressive. Specifically the readability portion where they give a critique of naming conventions in the code. I could see the developers figuring for that money they could've done a lot more good with it.
> NSA, which has been ~10 years ahead of private industry for the last couple decades, before which time they were even further ahead.
Do you have anything to back this up other than the old rumor that NSA (specifically their crypto) was ahead of private industry by 10 years, something even Bill Binney said is probably not accurate any more. And mind you, this old "10 year ahead" phrase was always specific about crypto, nothing else.
> In fact, I think it's likely that they're significantly smarter than any of us. Bear that in mind when you design your NSA-proof email applications.
I wouldn't bet on it. NSA and many other government agencies are full of incompetent or barely adequate people. Just look at our intelligence failures regarding terrorism and in both wars the last 10 years. NSA has a huge budget with billions of dollars to throw at their problems, so they get stuff done, sure, but smarter than private industry? Nah.
Yes, I do have things to back it up. No, I'm not simply referring to cryptography. NSA is a very large organization; Bill Binney's say-so doesn't mean a whole lot to me. Look at the kinds of people that "graduate" from NSA TAO, and note that that's the program they let us know about.
If you want to be wishful about this point, I won't stop you.
All of the truly remarkable intelligences I met, I met at NSA. There are certainly people that aren't (as with any organization), but the NSA is probably the only meritocracy in the USG. The pipeline for advancement is one of either taking a technical route or a management route. This means that you can reach the highest levels of the organization and pay grades simply by being good at what you do in an analytical sense or a leadership sense.
The thing that the average HN reader doesn't realize is how much responsibility is on the shoulders of those who choose to spend their time in service to the country (this could be for any country). I couldn't imagine the comments that I've seen about blacklisting former government workers and publicly shaming service men and women coming from anyone who has carried this kind of responsibility.
My sidelining aside, you're definitely correct about TAO people being very skilled. I would have definitely loved to join their ranks. They wanted to swap a couple bodies to trade for me, but my division head wouldn't let me go =\
I've met some genuinely sub-par-for-anywhere NSA people as well, though, although in the various letters which correspond to internal sysadmin support and the like.
If you believe government service has any value at all, you should also be willing to blacklist/ostracize when someone continues to support a corrupt/evil part of government. If I saw someone's resume from LAPD Rampart during certain years, I'd be quite suspect. Various foreign militaries. I'm suspect of CIA in the 1990s due to incompetence, not so much evil, DEA ~ever (which is lulzy because a lot of USG people at FBI and in LEOs in general moved from counterdrug to CT post-9/11), and while I think NSA pre-Snowden was quite defensible (and, indeed, honorable), I could imagine someone joining NSA today being viewed differently in a few years than someone who joined before.
> I couldn't imagine the comments that I've seen about blacklisting former government workers and publicly shaming service men and women coming from anyone who has carried this kind of responsibility.
I think the 'activists' that were derided are also working hard in the interest of the country. As for blacklisting and shaming former servicemen, see the aforementioned Bill Binney, and Thomas Drake, former NSA workers who dedicated decades of their lives to their country, and were blacklisted and prosecuted by their own government for daring to blow the whistle about violations of the constitution and Americans' privacy rights.
Bill Binney's complaint about the NSA was that they were wasting money on a system that did a poorer job of handling US-centric SIGINT. He was not himself opposed to collecting intelligence on US citizens; his own "ThinThread" system was designed to do exactly that, but with better technical controls over who could view the data.
The problem with the NSA's programs isn't that they lack technical controls; it's that they're allowed to supervise their own collection efforts and build their own controls in the first place.
The notion that Binney is a staunch opponent of PRISM-style surveillance is revisionist.
> his own "ThinThread" system was designed to do exactly that, but with better technical controls over who could view the data.
That's plainly false. His system was specifically designed to throw-out private data, that is, never to store it. There is no data to view if it's not stored. See his 29C3 technical talk where he goes over it. [1]
>The notion that Binney is a staunch opponent of PRISM-style surveillance is revisionist.
This ignores nearly everything Binney has actually said when asked about why he came forward to blow the whistle on NSA's spying activities. Also, see above.
Pilot tests of ThinThread proved almost too successful, according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “It was nearly perfect,” the official says. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” Though ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S. This was a big problem: federal law forbade the monitoring of domestic communications without a court warrant. And a warrant couldn’t be issued without probable cause and a known suspect. In order to comply with the law, Binney installed privacy controls and added an “anonymizing feature,” so that all American communications would be encrypted until a warrant was issued. The system would indicate when a pattern looked suspicious enough to justify a warrant.
But this was before 9/11, and the N.S.A.’s lawyers deemed ThinThread too invasive of Americans’ privacy. In addition, concerns were raised about whether the system would function on a huge scale, although preliminary tests had suggested that it would. In the fall of 2000, [General Michael Hayden, the director of the N.S.A.,] decided not to use ThinThread, largely because of his legal advisers’ concerns… .
I'm sure it discarded some things, but the basic technical control that ThinThread appeared to have that Trailblazer (and PRISM) lacked is cryptographic authorization controls.
The New Yorker's Mayer is paraphrasing an anonymous source, which she then counter-points in the very next sentence of the article with a quote from NSA historian Matthew Aid, who says: “The resistance to ThinThread was just standard bureaucratic politics. ThinThread was small, cost-effective, easy to understand, and protected the identity of Americans.” [1]
I think if you read my comments you'll find that I'm not denying that ThinThread had a goal of protecting the identity of Americans. The problem is that the collections programs underpinning PRISM and XKEYSCORE also have that goal. The problem isn't the technology.
Such as? Bill Binney, having actually been one of the top mathematicians at NSA for 30 years, carries more weight than you do, unless you want to share specifics that back up the regurgitation of the "10 year ahead" phrase.
Binney and Wiebe left NSA at what I think was the low point of the agency, after losing political battles internally and getting marginalized.
TAO, the shift to attacking IP networks, the shift to active attacks on commercial technologies (vs. spending years to defeat a decade-long-lifecycle foreign comm or cryptosystem), etc. mostly happened after they'd left.
You shouldn't get your news from corporate media. Corporate media don't like unions because they fight for living wages which cut profits from the few who benefit from them.
Economists don't like protectionist unions. Who determines a "living wage"? Should someone working as a cashier in Walmart be able to afford an apartment in Manhattan?
Someone working as a cashier in Walmart should be able to afford shelter, food, and necessary non-emergency medical expenses. A 'living wage' is just that -- I work for you, you pay me at least enough to survive employment. What that amounts to, obviously, depends on the standard of living in any particular area.
If it's impossible to survive in (or on, whatever) Manhattan for less than that, then yes. But I suspect there's a more flexible reality to the market than your question implies, given that people there already work for less than that and aren't dying in the streets as a result.
A minimum wage just means you can't decide one day that sales are down and now everyone makes 2 cents an hour to cover costs [1]. It means there should be an implicit minimum cost to maintaining a human workforce, because people need to eat.
If Wal-Mart had to pay a "living wage" (and who defines what that is? Certainly not the worker.) they would not exist. You may think that's good, or bad, but most of the Wal-Mart jobs would not exist at all if they were forced to pay an artificially high wage to their employees.
In Australia in the past there was a national industrial court that did this. In Germany regular courts did something similar. Courts are expensive, so why not use a computer program from MIT:
> most of the Wal-Mart jobs would not exist at all if they were forced to pay an artificially high wage to their employees
People would still buy things. Something like this happens:
> With minimum wage laws, the increased costs are passed to employers who in turn charge consumers higher prices if possible. Faced with higher prices, consumers purchase fewer goods thus leading to a redistribution ....
By artificial I mean "different from a market outcome".
There is quite clearly an asymmetry in information and market power between Wal-Mart and individual employees.
This will inevitably lead to artificially low wages.
So raising them with a law will return them to a free market level, where free market implies complete information, interchangeable goods and services, and lack of market power
Do you say this for any reason outside of not agreeing with him politically?
Looking at the man's resume, combined with the fact that he has run multiple political campaigns - including one for POTUS, which is no cake-walk - tells me the guy is a pretty hard worker.
I'm not going to comment on the "fairness" of the relative wages, but implying that a McDonald's employee and Mitt Romney are equally productive, or work equally hard, is nonsense regardless of your political stance.
> b) a 30 year old person stuck in a Russian airport who has appointed himself the ultimate arbiter of what is leakworthy and what is not, what programs are legal and good and which are illegal and evil.
No, he's not the ultimate arbiter, that's what the US government tried to be, in secret, until Snowden stepped up. And others with access are free to step up as well.
How is Snowden possibly lying? He's reading verbatim from the NSA documents which use the words "direct access". Also he isn't "maintaining" this, this is part of his original interview from over a month ago.
Which ones? The PRISM slides said "collection directly from the servers of..." which is not the same as 'direct access'. Are there different NSA documents, if so it would be useful to see the context of the wording in that case.
Your quote is accurate, "direct access" is not verbatim. Though "collection directly" and "direct access" seem semantically the same to me in the context of the slide. [1]
The relevant slide is talking about two types of mechanisms the NSA analyst should use. The "Upstream" and "PRISM". It's within the the Prism description that the words "collection directly from the servers of.." is used. So it's not referring to raw data collection through neutral access points, as that's what the "Upstream" is. It's explicitly saying the NSA has direct access to these companies.
> It's explicitly saying the NSA has direct access to these companies
It's explicitly saying that the NSA has access to data that would come directly from the relevant company servers, as opposed to having to intercept that data during transmission across the network. (Edit: an intercept is what 'upstream' collection would imply)
The companies themselves are still the ones who end up providing the data to NSA though, just like the fact that my browser obtained your comment "directly from the servers of Hacker News" does not imply that I have direct access to the server hardware underlying HN.
> The companies themselves are still the ones who end up providing the data to NSA though
Well that's certainly what the companies are saying. Whether they are telling truth (personally I think they are) or not is something else. Snowden is definitely not the one lying about this, since at worst his interpretation was very sensible, and at best it is the very interpretation intended by the author.
> Snowden is definitely not the one lying about this, since at worst his interpretation was very sensible, and at best it is the very interpretation intended by the author.
"His interpretation"?
Snowden is the one who actually has experience within the Intelligence Community. I managed to figure out what it meant with a little background in computer and networks knowledge and no background with IC work. Snowden has superior qualifications in both, and you're saying that Snowden might have made an honest mistake?
He knew what NSA jargon meant; he knew what the slide meant. The only thing you can say for him 'at best' is that he allowed journalists to come to a sensible conclusion based on what they knew, but that is still manipulative.
And in the actual event he even claimed that they could see the very thoughts form in your head, which is something beyond even mere manipulation.
> I managed to figure out what it meant with a little background in computer and networks knowledge and no background with IC work.
We still don't know what exactly is going on, or know if direct access really exists, so this is premature.
Secondly, your earlier example of using your web browser to collect directly has nothing to do with the actual slides, which talk about getting special access from the companies, and the document includes a timeline indicating when each company finally signed on to the Prism program.
He said "direct access" and the document says "collection directly from the servers of..".
> He knew what NSA jargon meant; he knew what the slide meant.
The NSA is a huge organization with a budget of tens of billions of dollars and employs tens of thousands of people. Snowden of course does not have complete understanding of everything, nor does Keith Alexander, nor does James Clapper, the DNI who blatantly lied to congress about collecting data on millions of Americans.
Placing any kind of blame on Snowden for directly paraphrasing a NSA document makes absolutely no sense.
Edit: 'paraphase' is far too kind. It's nearly the exact words, with the addition of 'access'. That NSA has special non-public access is something even the companies admit.
