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As Obama Rejects NSA Changes – Need For A New Internet Arises
The still ongoing revelations about aggressive NSA spying on the world have led to hopes that some restrictions would be introduced to it. But that is not going to happen. All President Obama is going to do about it is holding a nice speech that promises to mostly kick the can over to Congress where any reform is bound to die. The NYT previews that speech under the somewhat misleading headline: Obama to Place Some Restraints on Surveillance:
President Obama will issue new guidelines on Friday to curtail government surveillance, but will not embrace the most far-reaching proposals of his own advisers and will ask Congress to help decide some of the toughest issues, according to people briefed on his thinking.
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The result seems to be a speech that leaves in place many current programs, but embraces the spirit of reform and keeps the door open to changes later.
Rejecting most of the advice of his own hand selected review committee will reinforce the impression that it is not the president that has upper hand over the security services but that the NSA itself is the one that sets the policies. Even the NSA collection of U.S. phone metadata, which in over a decade has not helped in even one terrorism case, will be kept in its current form.
The latest report on NSA hardware implants in computers and network devices claims that nearly 100,000 pieces of such equipment have been manipulated with NSA hardware devices. A number this high can not have been reached by snitching parcels from delivery services and manipulating those. Many of these implants will have been done at the factory level. U.S. hardware manufacturers will be the first ones to be hurt by this new information. The number also makes clear that this effort has mostly nothing to do with spying on "terrorists" or foreign politicians. There is no way that the throughput of so many devices could somehow be analyzed or even supervised by human beings. These implants are thereby not of defensive nature. Yes, some of them will be used for spying but most of these implents must be for outward aggressive action:
The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive. But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level.
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[T]he program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, according to officials and an N.S.A. map that indicates sites of what the agency calls “computer network exploitation.”
The European Union (ex Britain) should wake up and understand the currently U.S. dominated form of the Internet is a weapon against it. The German government's failure in its attempt to arrange for some deeper cooperation and a no-spying agreement with the U.S. showed that the U.S. can not be trusted:
"We are not getting anything," the newspaper quotes a source from within the German foreign intelligence agency. "The Americans have lied to us," said another source.
The NSA efforts to weaken encryption and to abuse software and hardware bugs instead of fixing them is endangering everyone's security, including that of the U.S. itself.
There is need for a new Internet based on open source and publicly reviewed hardware and software. Proprietary systems can not be trusted. The EU (ex-Britain) could launch a program to develop such a network. This would be a decade long public effort comparable to the development of the Ariane rockets and the Airbus industry. Both these projects succeeded despite U.S. efforts to sabotage them. A precondition of such a new program are EU laws for strict privacy and laws that forbid its own security services to preemptively try to manipulate the development of the new network systems. Only with such laws, and severe penalties in place, could such a development create the trust that has been lost in the Internet in its current form.
The process of political degeneration into an overt Police State is over: we are now there. bevin at 8. I agree.
Yet .., present technology and the possibility of tracking and recording interactions – voice phone (at least the tel. no. and cost), SMS, internet use, posts, messages, e-mails, not to mention GPS coordinates that are easily available? (plus banking, credit. criminal records, etc.) and more I suppose of which I am not aware, has lead to personal, small circuit, spying and control.
Ordinary citizens in the USA, parents, spouses, partners, employers, colleagues, nosy neighbors, small time decrepit vigilantes, spy on whomever they wish, very easily, and do it all the time, for personal hubris, hate, control, court-cases, using info for power, sex, etc.
Citizens delve into the personal lives of others, easy to capt, and use them for blackmail (e.g. I’ll post our naked porno pix if you don’t meet me tomorrow..I have the evidence of your sexts and divorce will be devastating for you .. We saw you indulging in inappropriate inernet act/speech, you are fired and can’t sue) by installing key loggers, spying on passwords, grabbing mobile phones, downloading whole discs, whatever. Always with the justification, I (we) have to find out the TRUTH, i.e. reveal and bruit about what was hidden, or use it covertly.
Rampant spying, with more effects as these deploy in a close, personal, work / family / etc., circle.
The Gvmt. and the ordinary citizens are doing exactly the same thing.
They mirror each other, and even egg each other on, in the sense of copy-cat and legitimization.
In intent – aims to damage, hurt, mock, push to suicide, demean, control, destroy, imprison, seek revenge on – if not in techno power.
Posted by: Noirette | Jan 15 2014 18:20 utc | 14
Looking for Control baby!
QUOTE“If you read my blog, you’ll know that I predicted Jacob’s next move would be to protect corporate intelligence assets at the expense of full-time NSA spooks. That’s exactly what happened at 30C3, ad nauseam.
Why does this matter? Because the really important part of Snowden’s revelations was that private corporate entities are working with the NSA/GCHQ to spy on you. Appelbaum’s strategy is to paint these mega-tech companies, the corporate sponsors who can afford tickets to his talks, as the victims of stupid/malicious government. Give ‘em another chance, Joe Voter, so that we can salvage these invaluable, once-in-an-empire, intelligence assets. Watch the video. Appelbaum repeats the meme “It’s not the companies fault’ at least five times. I’m going to let him talk with a few quotes:
“This is part of a constant theme of [NSA] sabotaging and undermining American companies and American ingenuity. As an American, though generally not a nationalist, I find this disgusting, especially as someone who writes free software and would like my tax dollars to be spent on improving these things and when they do know about them [the vulnerabilities in Windows] I don’t want them to keep it a secret because all of us are vulnerable. It’s a really scary thing.”
And, in case you forgot who the bad guys are…
“Emperor Alexander, the head of the NSA, has a lot of power. If they want to right now, they’ll know that the IMEI of this phone [holds up his iPhone] is interesting, it’s very warm, which is another, uh, funny thing, and they would be able to break into this phone almost certainly and then turn on the microphone. And all without the court. So that to me is really scary. And I especially dislike the fact that if you were to be building these types of things, they treat you as an opponent if you wish to be able to fulfill the promises that you make to your customers. And as someone who writes security software, I think that’s bullshit.”
And tough-love, Tor-style…
“Now we’re going to name a bunch of companies, because fuck those guys for collaborating when they do. And fuck them for leaving us vulnerable when they do. And I mean that in the most loving way, because some of them are victims, actually. It’s important to note that we don’t yet understand which is which. So it’s important to name them so that they have to go on record, so that they can say where they are, and so that they can give us enough rope to hang themselves. I really want that to happen, because I think it’s important to find out who collaborated and who didn’t collaborate. In order to have truth and reconciliation, we need to have a little truth.”
Jacob refuses to believe Apple is evil…
“Do you think Apple helped them [the NSA] with that [iPhone targets]? I don’t know…. I don’t really believe that Apple didn’t help them with that.”
“Either they [the NSA] have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning that they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves. Not sure which one it is. I’d like to believe that since Apple didn’t join the PRISM program until after Steve Jobs died, that maybe it’s just that they write shitty software. We know that’s true.”
Stop attacking Microsoft, NSA!
“How many people from Al Qeada use Solaris, do you suppose? This tells you a really important point. They [the NSA] are interested in compromising the infrastructure of systems, not just individual people, they want to take control and literally colonize those systems with these implants. And that’s not part of the discussion. People are not talking about that because they don’t know about that yet, but they should, because, in addition to the fact that Sun is a US company, which they are building capabilities against, that to me, it really bothers me, I can’t tell you how much that bothers me. We also see that they are attacking Microsoft and other US companies, and Linux and Free USB (?) where there are a lot of people from all over the world who are building it, so they’re attacking not only collective efforts and corporate efforts, but basically every option you possibly can, from end-users down to telecom core things, um…”
Finally…
“I want to really harp on this. Now it’s not that I think European companies are worth less, I suspect especially after this talk that won’t be true, in the literal stock sense, but I don’t know. I think it’s really important to understand that they are sabotaging American companies because of the the so called ‘home field advantage’.
The problem is that as an American who writes software, who wants to build hardware devices, this really chills my expression and it also gives me a problem which is that people say: ‘Why would I use what you’re doing? What about the NSA?’ Man that really bothers me! I don’t deserve the Huawei taint. And the NSA gives it.
President Obama’s own advisory board, that was convened to understand the scope of these things has even agreed with me about this point. That this should not be taking place. That hording of zero-day exploits cannot happen simply without thought processes that are reasonable and rational and that have an social and economic valuing where we really think about the broad scale impact.”
So, yeah, Jacob’s on a mission to save that special relationship between Silicon Valley and the US intelligence community.”
UNQUOTE
Posted by: LMAO | Jan 17 2014 14:07 utc | 48
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