11-25-2015, 07:08 PM
Quote:Hey Ben, do you think that the NSA can monitor Tor as they wish?
Let me say that the perception that they can is what matters. Point too much attention into exactly what is going on with Tor and you are going to run into an even more robust and even more dynamic system. The NSA's blunder is so catastrophic for many reasons, but I'll get into them in a bit.
Quote:BTW, please take it easy on sniping SteelCrysis with every sentence, lol - you sure do realize that you're extremely confrontational in response to his jabs, but I think you're really going for the kill here!
If you read my posts I'm going after the NSA, not Steel so much. I will continue to bust his balls on the poison control center versus child porn point simply because I want to illustrate the flaws in his 'all data should be equal' line of thought. He was the one that said people who championed privacy deserve the death penalty- I'm simply pointing out to him that that line of thinking would have him on death row also. Tor is a wonderful tool to use in this discussion because the only reason a regular person would have to use Tor is because they didn't want the NSA illegally spying on them(which is precisely what they are doing) and due to the net neutrality boosters, pedophiles are being protected by people like Steel. Do I honestly think that Steel supports pedophiles? Of course not. Pointing out *on this very specific issue* his political stance does protect them will hopefully lead to him pondering his support of the death penalty for those that want privacy.
Quote:It has long been my assumption that we (citizens) don't get to know 1/1000th of what the government knows, and for very good reason:
I absolutely agree, here is why the NSA fuck up is so staggeringly catastrophic.
First off is they have now made things like Tor an avenue that some of our best and brightest are working on. People who have concerns about their privacy had their 'paranoia' confirmed due to the idiots at the NSA. Now stronger levels of encryption and a bigger presence of Tor type networks are a thing we have to deal with moving forward. The NSA made it so legit, intelligent and well reasoned people are dropping resources into making surveillance very difficult for those that are trying to keep an eye on things.
The outside contractor bit burns my ass so bad for several reasons. First off- fucking duh. Your entire operation was exposed. Now this outside firm was brought in to help sort the data because it was too much for the NSA to handle.
Think about that. They are collecting so much data they need an outside firm to help sort through it. If you have a car with a dead battery, you don't start off by grabbing every car in town and then outsourcing some other company to find one that has a dead battery. That *IS* the approach the NSA is taking, we know this due to the leaks. How effective could that *possibly* be? How stupid do you have to be to think that attempting to track *ALL* the data on the internet is remotely reasonable? They then go to an outside firm and fail to do anything close to proper vetting on the people who are going to be handling this data.
Now if it came out that the NSA was collecting all of the data from Muslims throughout the world, people would be outraged over how they could do such a thing. The thing is, that would reasonably carve out a *HUGE* sector of global internet traffic as unnecessary while maintaining the overwhelming majority of your likely terrorists. Again, that approach would be vilified in the PC realm, but let's be real- the terrorist threat is overwhelmingly from one particular ideological background. If you take into account the amount of overall data that those nations consume in relation to the Western world it is likely the NSA would have been working with a sample set that they could have handled, or at least much closer to it, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
So now we are in a place where encryption technology and creative networking schemes are being popularized by the NSA's exposure. This does a few different things- one is that it gives the completely straight and narrow top shelf citizens reasons to use and hence legitimize networks like Tor. Second is it gets the general populace to funnel money into things that have much stronger encryption levels and security features- exponentially increasing the difficulty of sorting through data for the double reason of encryption being far more commonplace, and the technology used advancing exponentially faster due to the NSA proving that there *was* a reason for people to use it.
If you truly care about security- forget privacy altogether, you should be flipping your shit over how fucking dumb the NSA is. If you wholeheartedly approve of their methods of data collection you should be enraged over their incompetence.
The simple fact of the matter is, if you think this through, now matter what your political angle is, you should be raging on the NSA.