In Defense of the NSA

[SteelCrysis]

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/france-...30731.html
Here comes the FUD that "Ending encryption will hurt the economy and won't protect teh children!"

1. If you actually think that ending encryption as a whole will actually damage the economy when the security sieves that businesses are these days give much lower-hanging fruit to criminals, and that there is no such thing as restricting web encryption to ecommerce and other legitimate activities, TomCruiseLaughing.gif.
   
2. If you actually think encryption doesn't protect child predators, TomCruiseLaughing.gif.
   
3. If you actually believe their Chewbacca defense that a child predator will actually be able to use any of the information from toy leaks to actually interact with a child, TomCruiseLaughing.gif.
   

Anyway, to deal with BoFox's list:

It's all a delicate balancing act between organizational privacy and the governments of the world. Sure, certain governments can spy all they want, but then powerful organizations who do not want to be spied upon just build even stronger countermeasures. Sometimes, it's a good thing after all - especially if some of us just want some privacy. Government intrusion isn't always a good thing for security, as government does not always = security for every well-meaning citizen.

The same thing can be said for criminals evolving their methods to avoid law enforcement. I don't see anyone advocating for the wiping out of the vast majority of laws in any country.

It was the government that wiped out Native Americans, brought slavery to America, imprisoned millions upon millions of people for recreational marijuana use since the 30's, etc.. etc.. etc..

Except for all the Native Americans on reservations. You know, the ones we still have around. If you actually think the US government initiated the slave trade on the North American continent and that the slave trade wasn't actually initiated over a century prior by others, TomCruiseLaughing.gif.

"""Leaked documents showed NSA agents also spied on their "love interests," a practice NSA employees termed LOVEINT."""

Probably FUD.

"""The NSA was shown to be tracking the online sexual activity of people they termed "radicalizers" in order to discredit them.[142]"""

Nothing the FBI couldn't and didn't do in the 1960s to Martin Luther King Jr, among others. And look how much damage they did to counter-culture and civil rights.

"""German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said "spying among friends" [from the NSA spying on her] was "unacceptable"153]"""

Says the woman whose own country has run its own unashamed version of the NSA for the past 65 years, complete with its own noble aims: https://www.verfassungsschutz.de/en/abou...e-services

"""Following the revelation of "Black Pearl", a program targeting private networks, the NSA was accused of extending beyond its primary mission of national security. The agency's intelligence-gathering operations had targeted, among others, oil giant Petrobras, Brazil's largest company.[143]"""

OK, this is a grey area, and may or may not be appropriate. Such should be left to the bumblers at the CIA, but they are bumblers...

"""revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for "clandestine access" to their communications networks.[157]"""

I don't see why this is terrible, since it doesn't require backdoors in encryption.

"""Leaked slides revealed in Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, released in May 2014, showed that the NSA's stated objective was to "Collect it All," "Process it All," "Exploit it All," "Partner it All," "Sniff it All" and "Know it All."[160]"""
(^^^ Exploit my nakedness? A guy working at the NSA could force you to let him fuck your exotic wife once a month, or else set you up as a child porn lover.)

This is the same Greenwald who took part in/got duped by Snowden's lying about receiving special forces training. We've yet to see your scenario happen, so I don't think that words means what you think it means. It's still a possibility, albeit an incredibly far-fetched one.

"""In an August 2014 interview, Snowden for the first time disclosed a cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program would "automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack". The software would constantly look for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. What sets MonsterMind apart was that it would add a "unique new capability: instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement". Snowden expressed concern that often initial attacks are routed through computers in innocent third countries. "These attacks can be spoofed. You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?"[15]"""

A good counter: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/18799...ber-weapon

Of all the major NSA revelations, this has to be one of the most frivolous. Certainly, Snowden has a point that international aggression should not be automated, whether physical or cyber in nature. Still, there is a discreet change in function between revealing an illegal spying programs like Optic Nerve and something like this which is, in reality, exactly what the NSA is supposed to be doing. As scary as the name “MonsterMind” sounds, cyber missile defense is specifically what we should be supporting, so as to avoid giving the NSA the impression that it literally can’t do anything without being called tyrannical.

Snowden argues that the metadata analysis necessary to make MonsterMind work, even defensively, is too invasive — but sniffing for malicious transmission types is precisely what the NSA is supposed to be doing with metadata. Additionally, Snowden’s first worry is based mostly on the idea that the NSA wouldn’t know much about the sender or receiver of the transmission, and would thus be acting blindly. This seems like a trumped up issue.

Let’s keep the scale of these retaliatory cyber attacks in mind; Snowden uses the example of a Russian hospital as a possible mistaken target, but if this did happen the result would be minimal. Even if the NSA was incapable of noticing such an obvious ploy, most of these attacks are investigative or malware-installing — they’re not causing explosions or anything. While I respect the rights of world citizens to be secure from spying, the NSA is simply keeping pace with global trends here; they’re unlikely to get the US in too much hot water with other countries since by doing so those other countries would open themselves to the very same international criticisms in the future. This is a much more questionable use of the whistleblower label than Snowden has embodied until now.

Perhaps Glenn Greenwald and others held back on a MonsterMind revelation because they decided there wasn’t a great enough public interest to warrant the possible dangers — though perhaps not, given that the Intercept retweeted a link to the MonsterMind article. This ambiguity is exactly why Snowden left releases up to The Guardian and others in the first place: they have large teams of lawyers and experts (not to mention representatives from the government) to provide perspective and make these decisions in a responsible way.

Again, to criticize the NSA for this program, in the context of its prior transgressions, is to say that all intelligence work is equally illegitimate. This isn’t just basically unfair, it also makes abuses far more likely — if you’re accused of criminal activity no matter what you do, it’s very easy to create a culture in which virtually anything is permitted. There are definitely problematic aspects to the MonsterMind program, but this is ultimately a well-intentioned initiative with some weaknesses, not a fundamentally invalid one designed from the ground up to subvert domestic and international justice. Let’s keep that distinction in mind.

I have been never-endingly impressed by Snowden’s ability to stick to his convictions and maintain the moral high ground over the past year or so. A big part of that has been his decision to stick with (or, depending on your point of view, hide behind) the journalistic organizations he entrusted with state secrets. We don’t know the specifics that led to this Wired interview, nor what Snowden’s personal or financial situation is today. There could be any number of factors leading to this shift in behavior — but he needs to be careful. His integrity is all that’s kept him in the running for acceptance by the American public; if he loses that, he’s lost everything.