

NSA - The Price of Hypocrisy - spdy
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwachung/information-consumerism-the-price-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html

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jcromartie
Kind of a silly tangent, but: it looks like Keith Alexander is wearing a Casio
F91W, which is infamous for being the watch of choice of terrorists,
particularly Osama bin Laden and numerous Guantanamo detainees. It's also
popular with hipsters and hackers. I wonder if it was some kind of dog
whistle? Or the same wardrobe people that put him in an EFF shirt to make him
appear "relevant" did it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W#Claimed_use_in_terro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F91W#Claimed_use_in_terrorism)

~~~
Shish2k
Kind of a shame that "using cheap, high-quality equipment" is now evidence of
criminal activity. As if I wasn't inadvertently on enough government watch
lists already :(

(See also: encryption, tor; next up, using any OS that isn't certified NSA-
backdoor-compatible?)

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blisterpeanuts
I have to say, this whole NSA Snowden revelation has shaken a bunch of us out
of our little fantasy bubble, and we have lost all faith in Google and other
internet services providers to protect our private information.

But the real catastrophe here is that these U.S. companies have suddenly and
irrevocably lost the trust of the rest of the world, as the article rightly
points out. Software is one of America's last bastions of competitiveness and
our stupid government has managed to undermine even that.

So long, Internet. It was fun while it lasted. I just hope there will still be
a few good paying jobs left after the crash, maybe in the field of
cryptographic communications; that seems like it's got a lot of potential in
our post-privacy era.

~~~
snitko
Why do you blame companies? If you were the CEO of Google and a government
official came to you with a request for a backdoor and a solid promise to make
life real hard for you if you refuse to cooperate, what would you do?

~~~
avoutthere
I like to think that I would react as did Todd Beamer and the other passengers
of Flight 93. Sometimes circumstances call for heroic action at the risk of
one's self.

~~~
snitko
I'll tell you what I would do if I was a government official. I'd smile and
ask you kindly if you are sure you don't want to cooperate. If you say you
are, I'd leave. Then I'd find every piece of evidence I have against you and
your company, get public opinion on my side, sue you, destroy your reputation,
give hidden subsidies to your competitors, accuse you personally of tax
evasion and your company of not acting in the interests of public. It wouldn't
destroy your company, but you'll lose plenty of money, the public wouldn't
listen to you because you'd have no evidence and because the public opinion is
on my side already. No one will ever know of your courageous act. More
importantly, by punishing you I'd show other companies what happens to those
who misbehave.

And don't be naive. The judges are in my pocket, public opinion is in my
pocket, I have power which your money can never buy and you are on your own,
as all of your competitors are just waiting for the chance to jump in and
destroy you.

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betterunix
"First of all, many Europeans are finally grasping, to their great dismay,
that the word “cloud” in “cloud computing” is just a euphemism for “some dark
bunker in Idaho or Utah.”"

It is not as though there were no warnings:

[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-
really-s...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-
serve.html)

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joseflavio
"the word “cloud” in “cloud computing” is just a euphemism for “some dark
bunker in Idaho or Utah.”"

I always said that and I believe that the "cloud" is just some intermediary
paradigm, in some time and hopefully soon, people will host all their data at
home and will only upload it encrypted to on line vaults to have them backed
up and redundant for accessing.

For now, I am really looking forward for an Evernote / Dropbox hosted outside
of USA/UK/etc to start.

~~~
Xylakant
I do not think so. Hosting your data at home is significantly more complex
than cloud hosting (dropbox, icloud) and will always be - bandwidth is the
smallest of all issues. There's absolutely no gain if data is stored on
shrink-wrapped boxes that are remotely administered by a provider because
then, all data will just be collected at home. So you'd need a trustworthy and
extremely simple and robust (open source?) solution that allows every, even
the computer-illiterate persons to set up a storage at home. I don't see that
coming soon.

~~~
jbattle
here's what you do - design a beautiful cube that has a few ports (USB,
firewire, whatever). It should also connect to the local wifi network. It'd
ship with Dropbox-like software so synching files to it over the home network
is dead simple.

Then, you make some sort of lifetime guarantee that you'll keep up with
changes in storage and interface technology. Guarantee that the thing will be
later upgraded to seamlessly translate people's wedding photos to the next big
image format. Guarantee you'll keep it forward and backwards compatible to
future OS updates. Guarantee it'll work with future phones and tablets, etc.

Maybe even build in some kind of automated off-site backups in case of fire,
theft, flooding.

If you made it simple, and if you earned people's trust that this is really an
_investment_ \- I think you could really clean up with local home storage.

~~~
DougWebb
Syncing over the home network wouldn't be enough; one of the big features of
Dropbox is that you can sync devices anywhere. Eg: my phone, my office PC, and
my home PC all share the same Dropbox folder.

Since we're not all IPv6 yet, the cube will need to set up a secure tunnel out
of the home network to a public endpoint, probably on a server run by your
company. All syncing would have to go through that server, preferably with
end-to-end encryption so the server can't access the data. (It can still be
captured for offline cracking, though.)

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Uchikoma
"It’s probably not a coincidence that LiveJournal, Russia’s favorite platform,
suddenly had maintenance issues – and was thus unavailable for general use –
at the very same time that a Russian court announced its verdict to the
popular blogger-activist Alexei Navalny."

This was news to me.

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w_t_payne
I am glad somebody else out there is interested in the debate that lies at the
intersection of the surveillance state and the "internet of things".

