NSA and FISA Courts + The Patriot Act = Snowden's Internet Gestapo
Tech Crunch has posted an excellent article that precisely describes exactly what happened that led to the end of free speech and the beginnings of "Good Speak" in America 2013. Just how did we go from the shining symbol of freedom and democracy to being afraid of talking in the same room as our xbox Connect? In less than ten years we willingly let the government surveillance juggernaut the NSA not so slowly roll up our right of freedom of speech, assembly and expression into a flag draped package to be stored in perpetuity. Nobody once asked or answered the glaring flaw in allowing the government to look into our metadata, listen to our calls, access our gmails or sift through our dropbox.
All of this data collection looked at the past. Not the future. Predictive analysis of the internet is not possible with today's technology so all the FBI can do is piece together what happened after the fact. Post Incident Forensic Investigation of data is unbelievably easy once you know what to look for that is why the DEA asked for, an got, access to our text messages and voicemail. Preventative or Pro-active enforcement requires talented analysts, lots of processors, great software, access to data and most importantly a set of Key Warnings and Indicators to flag in the system. Pattern and Link Analysis means you need all of the above AND Keystone Datapoints to anchor the sorts and sets of questions called PIR or Priority Intelligence Requirements to drive the assessment and control the collection efforts.
The US Intelligence collection today system was designed, built, managed and maintained by a generation of bureaucrats and political yes men. Its entire purpose and reason for being was the identification, capture and elimination of Osama Bin Laden and roughly 300 of his best friends. Now that Bin Laden is fish food and the rest are scattered in pauper's graves around the world what does this system do now? Like most bureaucracies it continues to churn until it becomes the weirdly familiar company in the movie "Brazil". In that world people die in avalanches of paper and the system never makes a mistake until it does…….. France learned the hard way when Hitler went around the Maginot Line. America learned the hard way when Snowden walked out of the most secure server room in the world with a portable USB hard drive….
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE
The Maginot Line: "the 1930s, on the eastern border of France. An impenetrable series of bunkers, tunnels, and garrisons built with the object of preventing a German assault. It worked wonderfully, of course — so wonderfully that the Germans decided they should go around it.
The Maginot Line is what I think of when I hear about efforts to secure electronic communications, generally via increasingly complex encryption schemes. The battle is over, everyone. Believe it or not, we lost! In fact, we were completely routed, so to speak. And yet it seems like all anyone can think of doing is shoring up defenses which hardly came into play in the first place!
PGP? People can barely manage the privacy settings on Facebook, much less a stable of random numbers and the means to deploy them. Zero-knowledge storage? Great until a court orders you to decrypt your own data (in violation of the 5th amendment, likely, but how long until a friendly precedent on that account?). Self-destructing messages? Print screen says hello, at least until someone finds a nice exploit. End to end encryption? Lovely, so you get flagged as suspicious by the NSA and all your data is stored for five years — plenty of time for them to squeeze the keys out of you or a friend (identified by metadata), at which point they breach a whole network of trust. Tor? The feds are watching exit nodes like prohibition gangbusters outside a speakeasy. 256-bit WPA2 keys? If the password isn’t ‘password,’ ‘admin,’ or ‘123456,’ it’s probably written on a post-it note stuck to the goddamn router! Come on!"
(Via.)
