You can be a valuable asset and still clearly be working for a defense company or a government agency. Hell, when I left college I was two steps away from joining Raytheon (big nasty defense company that makes thing that go boom) because I really wanted food in my belly. I am pretty sure if I had gone down that path my tastes would be more or less unchanged, except I would be better at rationalizing how the government pouring gobs of money into the “defense” industry is a great thing.
Every time there is a Snowden article TGA expresses his skepticism that Snowden is a nice guy, argues the NSA know best, that it couldn’t be as bad as it sounds, etc. Now the NSA is caught with their pants between their ankles having poisoned RSA and endangering public security. The Snowden trove has yet to be shown even once to produce false data, and it has caught tens (hundreds?) of provably nasty things the NSA has done. The government has directly confirmed a nearly all of the leaks. It is pretty unambiguous. How the bloody fuck you can question it after the dozens of proven true leaks is pretty mystifying. I’m not accusing him of astroturfing. I am accusing him of massive cognitive dissonance that generally only comes from working directly in the field.
Tell me I’m wrong if I am wrong, but I really doubt it.
Same here. No idea what he is like. I have no idea if having a beer with him would be fun. You?
I’m in agreement with the sentiment that what Snowden has done is beneficial to the USA in the long run - I know absolutely nothing about him otherwise, and the standards of journalism and jurisprudence apply regardless: there must be corroborating evidence. Skepticism does not hurt a search for justice, ever.
There is corroborating evidence. Many cryptologist already suspected the NSA of poisoning public encryption based upon circumstantial evidence since 2008. Now we have documents from the Snowden trove backing up what was already suspected from a source that has been proven unambiguously to be authentic and true multiple times with exactly zero false hits. If that wasn’t enough, NIST, a fucking US government body, now considers everything the NSA to have touched to be poison. RSA hasn’t denied it was paid off by the NSA.
We have the body, the weapon, video from three angles, and a dozen witnesses. Those assholes are as guilty as you can get. There is absolutely no ambiguity here. The NSA paid RSA to poison itself.
It confirms what the rest of the world suspected. American IT companies are compromised. What goes around comes around. I hope/suspect this will cost the US IT sector billions of dollars in the next years.
Could RSA survive this? Is the domestic market big enough to sustain RSA?
Within the context of those remarks, you might be correct, But to assume that merely being employed by a defense contractor is some kind of evidence of agreement with what is being done now simply is not justified. Certainly, there are plenty like that, or this couldn’t even be happening. But, when you know enough of those people? No. Most often, they are just trying to support their families, same as you or anyone else. What any agency director says and what is said amongst those employees over lunch or after hours is often (usually!) extremely different. And some of those larger ‘big nasty’ defense contractors (like Lockheed, or Northrup Grumman) have long since gotten involved with contracting to non-DOD or DHS agencies.
From just what I’ve seen in a couple of different agencies, the worst of it happens in management - be that the direct government employees or the contractors. It’s the people in those positions who buy and sell and act politically. The tech people? No. Usually, they are nose-to-grindstone building and maintaining tools used for automating broader administrative tasks. You can be in pretty damned deep before you get side-swiped by finding something you worked on is being used abusively.
Just - use a narrower brush. If you don’t, it starts looking like the kind of broad swipes that label ‘potential terrorists’ - and we see how that’s working out.
FWIW, if you find my request for a crosscheck laughable – fine, laugh. I’d also be requesting crosscheck on assertions that systems were secure.
No, I don’t much like Snowden or how he’s handling the issues, and I don’t particularly consider him a hero who can do no wrong or make no mistakes.
Then again, I don’t think anyone should be treated as a hero who can do no wrong or make no mistakes. The fact that an item has his name attached to it is, or should be, mostly orthogonal to the facts. Yes, it may mean we should take it more seriously than a claim from a random wearer of tinfoil hats – but that means “investigate seriously”, not “immediately accept as proven”.
While I agree with the principle you espouse, noting that “Snowden been documented as correct in everything he’s asserted so far” isn’t exactly calling him “a hero who can make no mistakes”. At this point, yes, Snowden’s claim is reasonably strong evidence in and of itself - because he’s proven a tendency not to make claims that he can’t back up.
In this case, Snowden’s making a claim that everyone in the field has been vaguely assuming was true for years, so he is the crosscheck here.
Yes, the NSA is proving itself to be some kind of crypto-mole built almost perfectly to completely sabotage the American economy, specifically the US dominance of the tech sector.
I would blame the KGB if I thought they had been remotely competent or able to come up with this kind of plan. Instead, I think it is just a classic case of absurd hubris.
Right now, anyone buying ANY tech product from the US must assume it is compromised. That is because of NSA hubris. And it is quickly and effectively creating a market and demand for non-US tech products.
The one most important way in that they harmed the economy was the hubris of thinking only they could use the back doors. Any back door is an opportunity for criminals, after all.
I don’t think these revelations have Snowden’s name on them. He’s just the whistleblower. The documents actually have the *NSA’*s name on them. They reveal what the NSA itself says when they think no one else is looking. So we can have a pretty high degree of trust in their accuracy and authenticity…
I truly can’t understand those who don’t like Snowden or don’t consider him a hero. We’re in the midst of a massive, worldwide debate about ubiquitous, unaccountable totalitarian surveillance, some of which has just been declared likely unconstitutional in a U.S. court. The entire debate has clearly been kickstarted by Snowden’s revelations. How is he not a whistleblower and hero of the first rank?
Concerning the SSL side discussion, it should be noted that SSL is deprecated. It is actually TLS that we are using today. Since 2011 TLS isn’t even backwards compatible with SSL. If anyone you do business with is still on SSL, you may want to ask them to upgrade to TLS or find someone else to do business with.
