
Obama said people want secure mobile communications, but NSA undermined that - justcommenting
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/02/20/obama-said-everyone-wants-secure-mobile-communications-but-the-nsa-worked-to-undermine-that/
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justcommenting
This is almost a continuation of the pattern from 2013 in which senior
officials made claims that were quickly and devastatingly revealed to be false
or misleading in comparison to what NSA and its partners were actually doing
in practice. It's not an exact continuation of the pattern, since we "just"
learned that NSA and GCHQ undermined what Obama claimed were shared goals on a
massive scale.

Maybe we were all supposed to infer from Obama's concerns about "a bunch of
people compromising that process" that he _really_ meant encryption was a
NOBUS (No One But Us) issue for the administration. Maybe we were supposed to
know that when Obama said "there’s no scenario in which we don’t want really
strong encryption" that he was talking about "really strong encryption _our
partners can 't compromise and share with us_."

I would have expected the administration to become much more cautious about
making falsifiable or undermine-able statements after these leaks started.

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001sky
_But a new report published by the Intercept alleges that British and American
spies actively sought to undermine the security features that protect mobile
networks around the world._

What were the dates of the security compromises relating to SIM cards?

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abecedarius
_It 's worth noting that the Intercept's report suggests some of the practices
of the company, Gemalto, may have also put the encryption keys at added risk
in the first place_

So, if you increment a counter in a public URL, you're a felon; if we snoop on
all private communications and find some opsec lapses, that shows they were
asking for it.

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Create
We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question
whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with
the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States
government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

[http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html](http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html)

Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism
itself.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999](http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999)

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yodsanklai
Obama always sounds like the good guy. He dislikes torture, war, the NSA,
drones... But doesn't he have at least some power to change these things?

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jqm
Not to bag on any one politician nor start a rant....

but either he doesn't really have the real power, (which is a problem), or he
says he wants to but really doesn't want to (which is also a problem), or
wants to but can't because of existing realities and so lies to everyone
rather than leveling about the situation (maybe the biggest problem)...

Either way, people are not being given enough information to vote wisely or
else plain not being represented. This isn't how it's supposed to be.

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yodsanklai
> Either way, people are not being given enough information to vote wisely or
> else plain not being represented

An american friend of mine showed me how he was asked to vote on local issues
(such as medical cannabis, water fluoridation, treaties with indians(!) and so
on...) by way of referendum. A lot of references were given so that voters
could make an informed choice.

This contrasts with extremely important questions such as waging wars to other
nations where voters barely have a saying. Furthermore, those issues are
addressed in the most naive ways in political debates ("we need to increase
our military spending in order to catch the bad guys out there, and to support
our troops").

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informatimago
I beg to differ. Those who undermined that are the people who decided to
centralize keys somewhere. That is, to build a system with centralized
control.

