On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 1:16 PM, Hannes Tschofenig <[email protected] > wrote:
> The good thing is that Jörg Ziercke is not the only person to decide. > > To quote Bruce Schneier: > " > The FBI believes it can have it both ways: that it can open systems to > its eavesdropping, but keep them secure from anyone else’s > eavesdropping. That’s just not possible. It’s impossible to build a > communications system that allows the FBI surreptitious access but > doesn’t allow similar access by others. When it comes to security, we > have two options: > - We can build our systems to be as secure as possible from > eavesdropping, or > - we can deliberately weaken their security. > We have to choose one or the other. > +1 I have met the senior management of the NSA. My take is that they are generals fighting the last war. All they understand is attack or threat of attack as the best form of defense. Threat of attack does not work against terrorism but it can work against state sponsors, at least to some degree. Ghadaffi funded many of the European terrorist organizations, he supplied the IRA with the Semtex explosive used in the attack on my family. Ghadaffi stopped supplying the external groups after Reagan's bombing attack on Tripoli but he also downed two civilian airplanes in retaliation killing hundreds of people. At this point the traditional terrorist strategy is conspicuously bankrupt. The terrorists can't gather in sufficient force to be a significant threat unless they have a state sponsor or a failed state they can operate from. The new terrorist concern is that there will be a group of hackers with the sufficient skills and motivation to attack civil critical infrastructure. Water, electric, etc. And some of the proposals for how to deal with that threat are worse than the threat. Bombing Iran at the first sign of attack (which would give Netanyahu an easy way of achieving his objective). Declaring martial law at the first sign of a critical infrastructure attack. The last should worry anyone who remembers the Peter Aspinal/James Goldsmith attempt to organize a coup in the UK. It was a harebrained scheme but they approached the head of MI5 (who immediately reported the plot to the PM and the Queen). The US has no shortage of politicians mouthing treason and they have a whole news infrastructure telling them how right they are. So yes, I do worry about terrorism. But I also worry about the people in charge of this surveillance infrastructure being the threat. I certainly do not think we can trust people who spend their time telling each other fairy stories about the President being illegitimate because he is not a US citizen. -- Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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