Two things you did not know before this post but know now:
* The IETF has a dedicated crypto review board, the CFRG, which approves or pokes holes in the cryptography used by other IETF standards.
* The chair of the IETF CFRG is an NSA employee (Kevin Igoe, one of the authors of the SHA1 hash standard).
I just learned these things a couple weeks ago. I am not generally a believer in the theory that NSA actively subverts Internet standards†. But even I think that it's crazy for an NSA employee to chair the CFRG.
In case you're wondering: Trevor Perrin is widely respected professional cryptographer. Most cryptographers work for university math departments. Perrin worked for years as a staffer for Paul Kocher, the godfather of side channel attacks, at Cryptography Research. He's the designer of the new forward secrecy ratchet for OTR (Axolotl) and the TACK TLS extension, and a behind-the-scenes contributor to other IETF crypto standards. Perrin wrote the pure-Python "tlslite" TLS implementation. If you were to draw a "family tree" of crypto know-how in the software security profession, a surprisingly huge chunk of it would be rooted in Perrin (and Nate Lawson and Kocher); for instance, virtually every modern TLS break came from ideas that Perrin popularized. 64 current Matasano Crypto Challenges, probably 50 of them I can trace to Perrin and Lawson. Trevor Perrin is someone you should pay attention to.
† (my best guess is that the standards NSA was actively subverting were about international telephony; subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft)
> subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft
This is a great point. The mailing list and public nature of the standards process makes it very difficult to subvert, without very high risks of getting caught and breaking trust in the community. These agencies need to keep hiring good cryptographers and ideally keep bodies working on standards.
Shows the importance of OSS in security and having people like Trevor Perrin keeping watch.
But at the same time - if the NSA was going to subvert encryption standards - I doubt they would subvert the process with someone who is known to work at the NSA. Intelligence agencies would operate covertly. Most likely by converting someone trusted in the community into an agent, or grooming their own agent straight out of high school/university and getting them to a point of influence in the community (over a long period of time) and only then having them damage crypto standards. < this is standard tradecraft.
Bullshit. Subverting the Linux kernel would easily be within the capabilities of the NSA.
Kernel contributors aren't background-checked so all you need to do is to pay someone to do some legitimate kernel hacking in a sensitive area. Then in one of their commits slip in a backdoor.
"But noooo the many eyes will see the backdoor!" you say.
This is clearly false. If it were true Linux would have no security bugs at all. Since old security bugs continue to be found, it follows that it is possible to have a security bug that goes unnoticed for many years. See also the underhanded C contest.
Hell maybe it has already happened. Who is to say the latest Linux security bug wasn't deliberately introduced by the NSA?
I don't think this is paranoia - it would be fairly easy for the NSA to do, very useful and almost completely deniable. I would do it if I were them. They certainly wouldn't not do it for moral reasons because they've shown they don't really have any.
But if people are going to use the argument that they'd never use an NSA employee to subvert encryption standards, as you are doing here, that clears them to do just that.
Furthermore, before the Snowden revelations, they weren't under suspicion for trying to do that.
I see what you're saying, but it still doesn't make sense not to use someone with no visible ties. If you're going to go that deep, you would use the official employee as a red herring. You don't even want people to think about the possibility of your real guy being an agent, even in this weird convoluted way.
On the one hand, a background check should reject anyone with such a visible a conflict of interest; On the other IETF is full of U.S. nationals, so it's only trustable for countries with common interests with the U.S. Either way, the IETF reputation will be exactly constant before or after a decision is made.
PAKEs ("password authenticated key exchanges") are a kind of public-key algorithm.
When two people use public key crypto to exchange a key in public, they need a way to "break the tie" in case of a MITM attacker. The conventional way to do this is with a certificate; that's how TLS works.
A PAKE uses instead a password; it does that by baking the password into the public/ephemeral key generation process. Alice & Bob can't agree on a MITM'd key if the MITM doesn't know the password; they just won't come up with the same numbers.
Dragonfly is a PAKE designed by Dan Harkins a bunch of years ago. Harkins got Dragonfly added to LEAP, the extensible authentication framework for 802.11 networks. He would very much like it added to TLS as well.
The trouble with that is, nobody knows why we would want to add Dragonfly to TLS. TLS already has a PAKE option, SRP. SRP is better than Dragonfly; it's designed to make it hard for an attacker who seizes a server to collect a database of passwords. SRP is also well-studied and well-understood; if it isn't particularly beloved of academic cryptographers, well, Dragonfly doesn't score any better. But more importantly, nobody uses TLS-SRP. No browser implements it. The demand for PAKE authentication in TLS is not strong.
It gets worse for Dragonfly. The protocol has problems. I'm going to get myself into a little bit of trouble summarizing, but here goes: Dragonfly can be made to work with elliptic curve key exchange. The process for mixing a password into an ECC key exchange involves a trial-and-error process for finding a valid curve point; a loop runs conducting these trials. A passive attacker could, in an earlier version of the Dragonfly protocol, discern how many iterations through the loop had happened to find a valid point given a password. Dragonfly is randomized: a nonce is mixed into every exchange. As a result, the same password might take a different number of loop iterations on every login attempt.
Net result: given a corpus of 232 passwords, 32-and-change passive observations of the key exchange might uniquely identify the password used!
Modifications to the protocol were proposed, some in the CFRG process, but they in turn resulted in a protocol with a side-channel weakness: the process of computing parameters for the key exchange leaks timing information.
Dragonfly has one sponsor that we know of: Kevin Igoe on the CFRG.
Trevor Perrin broke this down in amazing detail, mining posts out of several IETF mailing lists. Probably nobody is ever going to use Dragonfly in the real world, but watching people pick apart a new crypto protocol in public is amazing and hugely educational. I highly recommend reading this post:
But more importantly, nobody uses TLS-SRP. No browser implements it. The demand for PAKE authentication in TLS is not strong.
I'd argue that there's no demand for TLS-SRP because most of the people who could make use of it don't even know it exists. (Conventional thinking is that the only way to do authentication in TLS is with X.509. TLS-PSK has the same problem.)
But applications can't reasonably support TLS things that the TLS libraries they use don't support. Two of the three elephants in the TLS room, SChannel and NSS, don't support TLS-SRP. The other elephant, OpenSSL, has supported it for less than two years.
There's interest in (and patches for) adding TLS-SRP support to NSS, but they don't seem to want to implement anything that Firefox won't use:
(As an aside, I think NSS's position on supporting TLS-SRP highlights the biggest problem with chaining your code to a library produced by another entity for their own use: unless you have the ability to fork and maintain it yourself, your future use of that library is at the mercy of the other entity's interests. Fedora is porting all of their TLS-using packages to Mozilla's NSS, a project that exists for other Mozilla products' benefit. node.js is joined at the head to Google's V8, a JavaScript engine that exists for Chrome's benefit. My crystal ball shows both situations ending very badly when these projects' needs and directions get far enough out of alignment.)
You've already gave us background on who Trevor Perrin is.
Could someone shed a bit more light on who Dan Harkins is? He seems to be quite arrogant and does not address Trevor Perrin's criticism very constructively. See the other two threads started by Trevor:
My take on PAKE: it's a way to establish a shared key (KE), authenticating each other with a password (PA). The shared key could then be used to build a secure channel.
Believe it or not, I've seen many people thinking that KE alone is enough to build a secure channel. This misconception is probably as widespread as encryption provides message integrity. One needs to know he's talking to the right person, otherwise he's vulnerable to some man in the middle.
There are many ways to solve this authentication problem. A large number of TLS ciphersuites uses PKI, but there are also ciphersuites using pre-shared key or password such as TLS-PSK or TLS-SRP. PAKE protocols use a password to authenticate each other, e.g., if only Bob could know the password he's the only one could finish the protocol with Alice.
Recently I've worked on some authenticated key exchange problems not using a password, which could be fun to think about:
1) How to build a secure inter-app channel on iOS.
2) How to bootstrap keyboard-less devices to password-protected WIFI network.
"But more importantly, nobody uses TLS-SRP. No browser implements it."
And it is sad, even if it would be an interesting UI challenge to make it usable. However, I've seen TLS-SRP used in a machine to machine context (specifically home automation), where e.g. it would be too difficult to provision certificates or because a x509 library is just too big.
>The trouble with that is, nobody knows why we would want to add Dragonfly to TLS. TLS already has a PAKE option, SRP. [...] nobody uses TLS-SRP. No browser implements it.
SRP exists under a cloud of patent uncertainty. A lot of people would like to use SRP (perhaps not with TLS, but for SSH— for example) but deployment has been deterred by patent concerns.
I was intentionally a bit vague there because I didn't want to lend additional credibility to those concerns, especially without researching the current status.
Though IIRC only the limited form of SRP which doesn't provide bidirectional authentication (e.g. where you can't be MITMed even by a sever that knows your password or has stolen the server's 'hash' database) was covered under the royalty free grant. Implementation of the full protocol required a license from Stanford, https://ietf.org/ipr/31/
I'm in no way a cryptographer, so I don't understand the point of PAKE. The purpose is to build a secure channel between two entities, out of unsecure channels. But PAKE needs the reliable transmission of a secret information, so a secure channel has to be made before AND that secret needs to remain secret (duh)... What is the functional advantage over good ol' certificates (which still need the first, but are far less restrictive about the second) ?
The typical usage I've seen is one entity controlling both ends of the communication (e.g. an IP camera and a server). The secret being provisioned at the installation of the system.
I've never seen it used by humans, but there are contexts were the secure channel to establish the secret exists, e.g. most banks still have large brick and mortars infrastructures, so do tax authorities...
SRP used to authenticate sites and users would make phishing as we know it obsolete, but it would have to be implemented very carefully in the browser so there is no way whatsoever for a website to mimic its password entry UI...
But given the abysmal security record of the PKI model (were a few bad apple really ruin it for everyone else), the world could use a lot more SRP deployment...
What gets transmitted during key exchange is not the final symmetric key, but a kind of work-in-progress that both parties finish off to generate the final key, either by password, PK or any other method. No secure info is ever transmitted.
> I am not generally a believer in the theory that NSA actively subverts Internet standards†. But even I think that it's crazy for an NSA employee to chair the CFRG.
I am uncomfortable with the NSA / GCHQ being that closely tied to the standards process.
I'm much happier when they're noodling away with research in the background and providing support to universities.
An example: GCHQ invented PK before Diffie and Hellman. They invented RSA before RSA did. They kept both of these secret for many years. GCHQ's RSA was not revealed until 24 years later. (About 20 years after RSA had been in use).
So, secret government spy agencies keep secrets. I think this is as alarming as secret government spy agencies spy. While they might not actively subvert crypto standards would they allow weaknesses to be implemented without comment?
No. I believe I know the specific people to whom Gilmore is referring, and I believe his observations to be a straightforward result of incompetence. You have to have read the IPSEC working group list posts of the time and see how the group treated real cryptographers to understand how unnecessary it would have been for NSA to have corrupted that standard.
No, I don't think NSA tried to subvert IPSEC, and especially not in the way Gilmore describes.
I dunno. Packing standards bodies with incompetents and then suggesting things to those incompetents that are apparently sensible but weaken security seems like a perfectly plausible way of subverting cryptographic standards to me. Also, it probably wouldn't be terribly hard to seed a culture of disdain for real cryptographers.
Did you just use a "slippery slope" argument to argue against "slippery slopes?" I'm gonna chalk this up to "tongue-in-cheek," though I may be wrong...
He's saying that Gilmore was attributing to malice what Thomas believes more likely to be due to incompetence. He's not asserting that Gilmore is incompetent.
> subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft
... and what kind of tradecraft, pray tell, is subverting a random number generator and planting it inside the BSAFE library after paying off RSA DSI with a $10 million dollar contract?
If the NSA is willing to do something like this, what is would it consider too unethical/immoral/bad tradecraft not to do?
It may be bad tradecraft to subvert IETF standards but it would be wholely inline with people trying to padd their yearly performance review. Given the questionable effectiveness of some of the programs, review padding seems very plausible.
subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft
Unfortunately the fact it might be "bad tradecraft" doesn't seem to be much of an impediment for U.S. intelligence agencies. They seem to have a knack for getting caught with their pants down over stunts that one would think that cooler heads would have prevailed against as being not only reckless, but to have had the potential for, at the very best, marginal tactical benefit.[1],[2]
Perhaps it's time for a new IETF default: No NSA employee should be chair of an encryption-related working group.
If the NSA wishes to change that rule in the future, it can publicly ask Congress to enact a law making it a federal felony for a government employee or contractor to try to subvert, compromise, or weaken public encryption standards. (That would still allow the NSA to subvert, compromise, or weaken proprietary Chinese or Russian military encryption standards, if it is capable of doing so.)
Until the NSA requests such a federal law -- and it's duly enacted -- it seems folly to encourage the participation of its employees in the IETF process, let alone granting them a position as chair of an encryption working group. Put another way, the NSA's signals intelligence mission has eclipsed its information assurance mission.
> No NSA employee should be chair of an encryption-related working group.
This makes me think: What is the basis of trusting any organization or person not to have their own agenda, possibly contrary to the group’s ostensible agenda?
The basis is this: We have a tacit assumption that all participants have realized that better standards (and strong crypto, more secure systems) will lead to the betterment of all. This is the default assumption.
However, now that the U.S. government, and the NSA and its collaborators in particular, have been shown to explicitly not have this goal – in fact, their goal has been to strive for less secure systems and more difficult standards – what should be done? The logical thing to do is to exclude any person or organization revealed to have an agenda explicitly contrary to the group.
The same argument could be made (and has been made many times in the past) for Microsoft to be excluded from any and all standardization committees like ISO, IEEE, IETF, etc. for the same reason – their repeated practice of Embrace, Extend & Extinguish among other things shows them to have an agenda contrary to the group, and their participation would therefore be a detriment, not an asset.
I'm as against the NSA's activities as anybody can be, but I don't think this is a fair statement.
> their goal has been to strive for less secure systems and more difficult standards
I don't think, specifically, that they're looking for weaker standards. Weaker standards would allow for competing governments to have just as much access as the NSA does. I think they'd prefer stronger standards, but that they _still have the key to_.
In short, I don't think they want cheaper locks, they want better locks, and master keys.
By the way, this submission is getting up so slowly (despite the upvotes) because its title contains "NSA" (which automatically penalizes the submission as revealed earlier).
It appears that any article with NSA in the title gets an automatic penalty of .4. I looked for other words causing automatic penalties, such as awesome, bitcoin, and bubble but they do not seem to get penalized.
I observed that many websites appear to automatically get a penalty of .25 to .8: arstechnica.com, businessinsider.com, easypost.com, github.com, imgur.com, medium.com, quora.com, qz.com, reddit.com, rt.com, stackexchange.com, theguardian.com, theregister.com, theverge.com, torrentfreak.com, youtube.com. I'm sure the actual list is longer.
Bruce Schneier is not a great pick for this role. The CFRG is an extremely technical working group; the CFRG chair needs to be intimately familiar with a broad selection of modern cryptography. By way of example, Schneier is avowedly unfamiliar with elliptic curve. Schneier is a great popularizer of cryptography, but there are much better choices for the person whose job it will be to spot errors in other standards.
Second DJB! Would be the perfect choice, especially now that more and more cryptographers are looking to his curves and protocols, so he already knows what the vision for the future of IETF should be. I'm actually quite excited about the possibility of him being named chair at IETF.
As IETF chair he may be even bring us the elusive "secure by default Internet" with his CurveCP protocol or a future evolution of it. The secure by default Internet has actually been declared one of the main goals of IETF at their recent meeting:
The irony of Daniel Bernstein chairing the IETF crypto review board is so potent that I got a small nosebleed just thinking about it. But, nomination emphatically seconded.
For what it's worth, Bernstein spends most of his time in Europe these days.
I think that's rather the point. Bernstein has had the constitution to call out the nonsense of the NSA-influenced IETF working groups before it was fashionable to do so. I don't think it'd be ironic to consider him as a replacement for an NSA employee on the way out due to that concern.
Of that list, looking at it now that I've written it, I think Kenny Paterson might be my favorite choice; he's done very important recent work on (breaking) TLS and is an eloquent and convincing writer and translator of the cryptographic literature.
I want to raise an issue that people often ignore. We put the government's fault onto an employee's fault.
But I will state my position clearly: I do think the resignation is a good thing. I don't agree with the word "removal".
The biggest problem to me is not about NSA involvement, it is how WE treat people who work at NSA and other government intelligence agency. If the fear of a single man is what makes the issue hot, I beg to differ. You can disagree with him and not pass the standard. If the whole committee thinks there is something fishy, I see no reason why the proposal would get through the internal draft. It is that distrust.
My school and many schools out there would send out internship notice; if you are a public school one of those would be government internship and among them is NSA and FBI.
How do we treat these kids in the future? How should we treat our future or current co-workers who had worked as contractor or done internship at NSA, FBI and CIA?
Do we trust them?
The fact that "NSA [employees] (edit, response to http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03556.h...) should not be in any position in the cryto committee" is too far. He should resign in fact, to avoid interest conflict; people don't trust NSA right now. But how are we treating these employees? Have we asked him privately? Should this email be in the public in the first place? Have they ever had a private conservation about this? I think like it is more of an attack and a warning to all NSA-title employees that they should never reveal their affiliations, even on resume.
Since everyone does things differently, some will never join NSA and some will for either money or technical development or patriotism, how do we as people treat these employees?
I am upset that when people look down at them and think they are rat. This is a stronger ethic issue that few notice. The whole "removal" sounds like "one ought not be an NSA employee." Being someone new to security and admire open standard and fear of backdoor, I think it is nicer and professional if that has been raised to Kevin Igoe first privately.
From the way the mail is phrased: it never happened.
The moral issue is about someone's affiliation with NSA makes him or her a spy, unworthy in the crypto community.
If people have different opinion when they were young (or in the case of a student who just want a god damn internship), it sounds like we will punish them and discriminate them in the future, given their past involvement with NSA.
In my personal opinion, that's just something that will have to happen before engineers start taking the subject seriously.
If a year or two of NSA interns have to learn the hard way that they'll never find employment anywhere else afterwords, too bad. You can bet your ass that, by the third year, nobody will be accepting those positions without fully intending on being there forever, and committing to the degradation of privacy.
Yes, I do warn my lower classmen not to get those jobs. But schools can mislead them and the "internship" experience can mislead them. It doesn't matter whether how we try to prevent them from doing it, the issue is how we the cryto community, how we Americans, and how we the society perceives and accepts NSA employees (ex/current). It is this "discrimination" I am questioning.
I don't think I can trust someone worked at NSA for many years either. I will give you that. But how should companies deal with these applicants?
> If a year or two of NSA interns have to learn the hard way that they'll never find employment anywhere else afterwords, too bad.
And that's exactly why my question is important to raise: how do we choose not to "discriminate" them.
As far as I'm concerned those kids made a choice. If they choose to help the NSA in any capacity, well then yeah I'd consider them tainted. They require a certain kind of person, and I don't think they have the best interests of worldwide privacy at heart.
FYI, you shouldn't have been downvoted, your argument has merit even if I disagree with it. Upvoted.
Off-topic/not related: out of curiosity, how are you aware that you're being downvoted? I didn't downvote you, FWIW, although I apparently have the ability to. Perhaps being able to see your {up,down}votes is one of HN's "incremental features" and I simply haven't been around long enough? Or maybe you track/watch your karma points? I can see mine, of course, but I don't think I've ever really paid attention to it.
it was -1 many hours ago. and now +7. And yes I can track by remembering how many points I get for each response. And next to logout tells me my total karma.
And we still need to resolve how to help people getting out of NSA and somehow get a job match their skill and experience. It is hard and it is hard for two reasons: 1) people don't trust them and 2) it is hard to justify their work outside NSA.
And I am interested in #1 how companies, particularly, big companies handle these issues, and do you as co-worker evaluate your new co-worker.
It is similar to any post-war country chasing the people who collaborated. In a sense, justice has to be made; in the other, the war courts usually assign surprising low penalties. The reason is, once the war is won, there's only revenge in penalizing losers.
... but the "war" of privacy is yet to be won. So chasing individuals for collaboration may be too early.
> I dont think we will punish them. We simply cannot trust them.
Will you risk your company's integrity and reputation over hiring someone who had worked for NSA? An undergraduate? A father who had three kids to feed and just took the job to make a living?
Not trusting often turns out to be punishing. And in many cases we simply just discriminate them.
You guys totally mistook the issue. The issue is that from the start we are discriminate everyone who is or was a NSA employee from the start.
So a driver who drunk drive and lost their legs should have a tag "I was a killer killing fifteen people five years ago and don't build an accessible platform for me"? No of course we don't do that.
You can take the crown of lies off of your head, but it will always leave a stain.
Should we try to help those people with disabilities? Yes.
Should we go out of our way to help those who decided that they could drive under the influence, and kill 15 people because of their negligence? I think you will find that most people wouldn't even waste the spittle on that person's face.
You participated in deploying a creepy gigantic indiscriminate surveillance apparatus, and somehow you attempt to cast yourself as a poor victim. I don't think it is going to work. Maybe if your thoughts were toward denouncing the subversion of democracy and the violations of basic human rights as the consequences of such a creepy surveillance apparatus.
You picked about the worst possible example. Drivers like that are the kinds of scumbags that make me question my opposition to capital punishment. You're not going to get the result you want trying to compare them to NSA employees.
You are mistaken. To some, NSA employees are just as bad as the scumbag drivers. To redeem themselves, some might argue they need to be Snowden and face the public, have their knees down and apologize. The two examples are the same if we just think killing democracy is the same as killing someone's life physical (because now we can't trust anyone and we live with doubts and skeptics).
Do you hire those who worked as Los Alamos? People from the South? South Africa? People who worked at Facebook? The US Military? Paid taxes to the US govt?
I should add all of these to my CV just to avoid ppl who would irrationally discriminate (although I'd then be lying on my CV).
The man in question, and the employees in general, have unfortunately been tainted by the behavior of their employer.
For the moment, until or unless there's a sea change of public accountability and trust with respect to the NSA (which would likely take years if not generations), it's safest and most sensible to treat these employees as potentially suspect in any area where their employer has been shown to be an adversary.
"The whole "removal" sounds like "one ought not be an NSA employee."
It is not that one 'ought not'. It is that the NSA is spying on us all. It is also lying about what it is doing, and being deceitful about its tactics.
People need to make a choice about where they stand. If they want to stand with the NSA, that is fine.
Unfortunately from a practical POV, it means I cannot trust them.
On the bright side, I cannot think of any reason an ex employee of the NSA would be honest about their previous employment.
One can say such thing to Google, Facebook, Adobe or any company out there if they dislike that company. Any nsa contractor who depends on government contract to feed their families - is it wrong? If I can't find a job at private industry but NSA hired me for 3 months is it wrong that I did it for the money for my family? How would you know that was my story? You won't and you will just penalize me for being a contractor once.
And people have different degree of tolerance and standard for patriotism. i don't endorse what they do, but that's exact false attitude we have toward NSA affiliations. We put government's fault onto the workers and it is wrong.
"That's rather radical and unprofessional to say."
In what sense is it unprofessional?
"Any nsa contractor who depends on government contract to feed their families - is it wrong? "
in a moral sense? who knows. but from a practical sense it genuinely does mean I cannot trust you. hey, I understand what you are saying - and I sympathise, but at the end of the day there are clear, solid reasons why I cannot trust an ex NSA employee.
"And people have different degree of tolerance and standard for patriotism. i don't endorse what they do, but that's exact false attitude we have toward NSA affiliations."
working for the NSA is not patriotic. it is the opposite of patriotic. it is associating with sneaky people who deceive and lie.
Unprofessional because we put the government's fault onto an employee's fault. Let's take a secretary. There is no technical skill she did. She was just a secretary under some general at NSA. Sure she could be a spy.
So now every NSA employee is marked as "untrustworthy".
If I may allowed to be radical in my own response, isn't this what the red scared is all about. You are a friend to X who is a known communist and now I cannot trust you. You were a secretary for this communist spy, I cannot trust you even though you didn't know. You just deal his daily accounting.
There are simply people who work for NSA for reason like employment.
> working for the NSA is not patriotic.
Yes, I will agree that jeopardizing democracy and liberty is not patriotic. But I am saying from the guy who started out at age 20 and thought it was everything he could do for the country, and now he realized he was wrong. Now do you trust him?
The ultimate issue is again, we are equating NSA is untrustworthy == employees are untrustworthy people.
"The NSA" is a collection of people acting in a certain manner. It cannot be untrustworthy unless its members - its employees - are behaving in an untrustworthy manner. Associating with an entity that is known to be engaged in hostile behavior towards you should carry a reputational stain, even if it wasn't you that "pulled the trigger".
That secretary is facilitating the erosion of our personal privacy and liberty by logistically supporting the people who are doing the actual dirty work, and now, she knows it. At this point, her choice is "Continue supporting people doing bad things and carry the stain that comes with it" or "Stop associating with people who are doing bad things".
Persons who engage or support the kind of behavior that the NSA is engaged in are untrustworthy and should be treated as such. You don't have to be the actual guy tapping data lines to be complicit. Shoving it off of "the employees" and onto "the NSA" is a copout.
> Persons who engage or support the kind of behavior that the NSA is engaged in are untrustworthy and should be treated as such. You don't have to be the actual guy tapping data lines to be complicit. Shoving it off of "the employees" and onto "the NSA" is a copout.
No, that is not. You are making the same mistake that "because I work for someone evil it means I must be evil too." You are assuming every single person who have or is currently working for NSA must be evil. Just because someone accepts that having a job is important than public good at some point does not make them less untrustworthy. You can have someone who donates to good causes all the time, does a lot of community work and yet when he quits his job because he is sick of NSA or because he just want a better job and now he can't because he was with NSA.
This assumption is wrong; you are equating government to its workers. If so, should anit-war people look at our American soldiers evil too? Because people are following orders?
If I work for a Mafia boss, you know, take care of his house so that he can be comfortable and safe at home, am I supporting to the cause? If a German citizen was supplying raw materials to Nazi is that citizen a Nazi and evil when he was just making a living for his family while he absolutely hate Hitler and Nazi?
>If I work for a Mafia boss, you know, take care of his house so that he can be comfortable and safe at home, am I supporting to the cause?
In an ethical/moral, if not a legal, sense: yes. Absolutely.
>If a German citizen was supplying raw materials to Nazi is that citizen a Nazi and evil when he was just making a living for his family while he absolutely hate Hitler and Nazi?
Does it mean they were Nazis? No, Nazis were members of the NAZI political party. Does it make them a Nazi supporter, though? Yes.
Does it make the person evil? That's a moral judgement I don't think we can have a sensible argument about, but unarguably it does make the person a supporter of evil.
This is the key takeaway from the Milgram experiment, and the key point of Hannah Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil". We think of evil acts as things perpetrated by conniving, malicious villains, but the reality is that evil acts like the holocaust were not perpetrated by cackling villains, but only happened because enough regular, otherwise perfectly nice people surrendered any personal responsibility for the larger implications of their work and contented themselves to "just follow orders".
> No, that is not. You are making the same mistake that "because I work for someone evil it means I must be evil too." You are assuming every single person who have or is currently working for NSA must be evil.
No, I'm not at all. I'm assuming that some of the people working at the NSA are evil (that is, that there isn't some "The NSA" entity that is evil while the people employed there are not), and that the rest of the well-intentioned people working there now know about it, and have a choice to make about whether they are going to work with and enable these evil people to do their jobs or not.
A housekeeper with mob ties would be looked up with distrust. A person who supplied material aid to the Nazis would be rightfully branded a "Nazi supporter". Doing something to make a living isn't an excuse.
Let's put this into a more Valley-friendly context: You can't really work for a porn company in some non-porny capacity (sysops, let's say) and not expect that stigma to follow you around. You know exactly who you're working for, what they represent, and how other people would perceive that line of employment. Would you expect to be exempt from people making any kind of judgement about the kind of people you choose to work for since you're just making a living?
That's a super softball variant on what we're talking about here. Porn is something that doesn't bother some people and deeply bothers others, but "I contributed to your government spying on you and systematically eradicating your privacy (but just a little bit)" isn't going to play well anywhere, as well it shouldn't.
But it's also wrong to say that an institution and its members are completely separate. They aren't and can't be. There is no institution without members, and there are no members without an institution to be a member of. You've got to deal with them as entangled, and treat them as such. There are varying degrees of responsibility for acts that we attribute to an institution, because generally we're talking about institutions with internal hierarchies. So for example General Keith Alexander is much more culpable than a random sysadmin. But because of the responsibility-diffusing nature of institutions, no, you can't completely let members off the hook without also letting the institution off the hook.
By the way, about your Mafia/Nazi examples: a zealous prosecutor could easily charge the housekeeper, and the police and FBI would certainly lean on them a bit whilst investigating the boss. That's totally commonplace. Meantime, in the case of the literal Nazis, yes, there were in fact consequences for such people (leaving aside that you've constructed that scenario very poorly).
I never argue they are not morally responsible for what they do. But arguing that we need to look at the issue of discrimination being a current or ex-NSA. How would that affect employment. Will major employer like Google or open-source giant like Mozilla, reject people for the sake of being NSA?
That's my issue I want to discuss. If we are striving for a better society, discrimination should be minimized. If we keep discriminate them, penalize them, the only job they will ever have is NSA job.
I think now this point is clear why it is important to look at the effect and the moral issue of how we treat them.
And to many, it is NSA is evil, every NSA employee is evil. and that's a big issue.
> If we are striving for a better society, discrimination should be minimized.
Bullshit. Discrimination is the foundation of a sane society. Unjust discrimination with no bearing on one's ability to do a job (such as on the basis of one's genital configurations or preference of who you like to smooch) should be minimized, but you absolutely must be discriminating about you who choose to work with. After all, if we really wanted to minimize discrimination, we'd just hire people for any job without any consideration towards their capabilities, experience, or work history.
Being cautious about hiring potential employees because their work history demonstrates that they may be a threat to the security and reputation of your company is a damned good reason to discriminate.
That is how social reproach works! I feel like you're strongly missing the point. The institution of The National Security Agency is made up of people. The institution and its members are embedded in a social context. Institutions, among other things, are responsibility-diffusing machines. You can't reproach the institution without also reproaching its members, because otherwise the members don't feel any responsibility for whatever you disapprove of about the institution and carry on with business as usual. You can't make the disapproval stick without affecting the individual members. Or, to flip it around a little, when you scold the institution and let members off the hook because they're just following orders and trying to pay the rent, you are saying "those orders were okay to follow."
I agree that it's not fully accurate to say "The NSA is untrustworthy, Bob worked for the NSA, therefore Bob is untrustworthy" - but because of how institutions work, if you want the institution to pay attention, then yes, there must be impact on its members. There is no way around this.
Maybe I was maybe others were. We are not saying NSA employees should not feel bad for what they did, for following orders. I am arguing that when someone is titled NSA employee, the first instinct is "I don't like this guy and I don't him near me" when all he wanted to do was to say Hi my name is Bob and I had this interesting problem I want to solve with you guys."
And to those who left NSA either because they hate it or because they realize it was wrong.
So if the solution is to be snowden, declare publicly that he does not endorse NSA, it is the equivalent to saying "you must face a public trial, you must tell the world you do not and will not endorse nsa anymore upon exit." Everyone ought to be a hero.
I do understand the institutional constraint. If all NSA employees rage quit today, will we just forgive them? But that is not going to happen, for various reasons.
We might be talking past each other. I'm saying - yes, the burden should be on current and former NSA employees to explain why they're trustworthy. People can set their standard of "acceptable explanation" however they like - however, I feel strongly that someone who worked for a deeply compromised institution, should bear the burden of explaining.
When Bob just wants to introduce himself and people say "You worked for the NSA? Go away, spy" -- that is a sign that effective social punishment of the NSA - the institution - is taking place. I see you worrying about the scenario where no amount of explanation Bob can give is enough to get him in the door. That's fine. But I'm arguing that Bob should have to do some explaining, and I'm arguing that if you do want the NSA - the institution - to suffer effective consequences, then you must accept that individual members will also face some gnarly consequence, because that's how institutions in a social context work. You cannot meaningfully punish the institution without also punishing its members. It does raise moral issues, yes - but if you have already decided, "we must punish the institution," then you fatally compromise that goal by adding a lily-livered "but let's not make things too hard for the members."
Yes. Indeed, but how many will accept that? How many of us here will bother to look at it and say "he sounds genuine." We should evaluate what things one can do to help people to get out of NSA and still receive some degree of respect/human treatment.
If by punishing is by not giving them a chance because, as some have declared, "I will not trust them at all anymore", these poor souls will have no jobs but NSA jobs.
And let me restate my position: I don't endorse NSA and I believe they are morally responsible for the work they do (everyone should, regardless of whether NSA or Adobe leaking password). But let's focus on what one can do to make the transition easier. What makes them part of us again.
When we say Mr. Foo Bar, NSA cryptographer, publishing a paper for his next talk, sure, the chair will just throw that away and say "fuck it, no one would want to hear bs from NSA." As you can see, even though some people say "I have no problem with individual contribution", some probably left the part "but I will remain skeptical and uncomfortable with them being around, and making changes to Linux kernel." And to some they just never want to see those poor souls on IRC anymore.
I'm not sure this is equivalent to the red scare. If you have a friend who is a known communist (assuming for the sake of argument that communism is bad here), then it might be you have tolerated that friend for the sake of other good qualities.
However, if you work in a place, there is the Buddhist question of "right livelihood." I'm sorry that I don't know any better way to put it. Given that the NSA has been doing some things that seem objectionable, shouldn't everyone who contributes to that effort begin examining their conscience? And yes, a secretary does contribute to that effort.
Now it might be that the latest report will make some well-needed changes. And heaven knows, countries need intelligence to combat things like terrorism. But still. If you were part of the NSA, two things would today be true:
a) You knew what went on, and agreed with it. Well, maybe your ethics are not what we would all like.
or
b) You didn't know what went on, and aren't impressed now you do. I suggest it's now time for you to consider whether this is an enterprise you should contribute time and effort towards.
And if that comes at odds to feeding your family, well, maybe you can't just resign. But you certainly can look for more ethical work, or take part in internal conversations about how the organisation can become more ethical.
> And if that comes at odds to feeding your family, well, maybe you can't just resign. But you certainly can look for more ethical work, or take part in internal conversations about how the organisation can become more ethical.
And we continue to be scared because of their background, previous involvement.
> a) You knew what went on, and agreed with it. Well, maybe your ethics are not what we would all like.
Not everyone is a saint and some are utilitarian and some are not. People also change they way they perceive things.
>Unprofessional because we put the government's fault onto an employee's fault. Let's take a secretary.
I suggest reading and considering Hannah Arendt's famous work, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" for a different perspective on this.
Our typical idea of a perpetrator of evil is this malicious, moustache-twirling, cackling super-villain. The reality of how very evil acts are perpetrated is typically much different, though. It has more in common with what we see with the Milgram experiment: lots of small cogs doing highly compartmentalized, abstract work that simply adds up to something ghastly. Paper-pushers who simply "do their jobs" without bothering to examine or take responsibility for the ethical implications of their work output, preferring instead to shift that ethical responsibility to the superiors/authorities who handed down their orders.
I probably will mark that as one of my to-read list. I enjoy works on ethics.
But the issue people keep on missing, or not in sync with me, is practically, how do we minimize discrimination, how do we handle future employments? All I am hearing is "they are still morally responsible." If for the sake of discussion, assume yes they are morally responsible, my actual questions are still unresolved. And we just keep saying "yeah it sucks to be them, but what can we do?" That's the exact attitude we always have and won't eager to fix on;y because we dislike what the NSA has done.
> Any nsa contractor who depends on government contract to feed their families - is it wrong?
Anyone who chooses to work (directly or indirectly) for the Government should realize that the public good (not to be confused with "good for the government") must come above "feeding the family".
It is very easy to fall into atrocities and "following orders" when you do things in the name of "feeding the family". For example, spend a few hours playing "Papers, Please"[0] (or, even better, watching other people play it) and you'd be surprised how easily people start looking at the characters crossing the border as adversaries.
Realization and reality are two things. If we want to give people a second chance after they have committed a crime (the same argument that public good over 'feeding the family' or self-interest), do we say the same to the ex-NSA employees? I do realize what is meant to have virtue ethics (Hursthouse's paper on abortion is a great paper).
> That's rather radical and unprofessional to say.
Radical, certainly. Unprofessional? Professions usually have ethical codes of conduct. If you violate those ethics, you're not a professional. We don't have a unified professional ethical code, but ethics is absolutely an important part of professionalism.
All this arguing about blacklisting ex-NSA/US intelligence misses the point. Ex-NSA will just lie about being NSA. A system of shunning will be pointless, or worse. Then it becomes a witch hunt. You have to start shunning based on just suspicions.
Just like Google or Facebook, or any other organisation that you might care to mention, the NSA is a group of people, human beings, and fellow travellers on our annual circumlocution of Sol. I don't want to spit vile hatred, nor make any man my enemy, but I do want to communicate the depth and breadth of my concern for the things that we do, and the situations that we end up sleep-walking into. These matters are serious enough that I would implore individuals to consider their own position, and to deeply reflect on what their actions mean in a broader context; to step outside their mental comfort zone and seek another - any other - perspective with which to view their actions. If such reflection reinforces their sense or purpose, and the righteousness and justice of their mission, then so be it. If it causes them to question, and to ponder, and to debate, then so much the better. It is too much to ask for people to turn through 180 degrees - and perhaps the wrong direction to pick, also, but it is not too much to ask for a conversation that goes beyond mutual recrimination and hatred.
That just fills the NSA with worse people. If the NSA is broken, it must be fixed or destroyed.
Will draining the NSA of its ethical population improve it? Perhaps -- by hastening its demise -- but that is not the obvious result. Needs further analysis and argument.
I trot this out every few years or so; it's worth thinking about:
A professor of mine who was active in the peace movement in the eighties was talking to me about employment at defense contractors like Boeing or Lockheed. He said "If ethical people always choose to not work for defense contractors, then only non-ethical people will be working for defense contractors. Do you want defense contractors to be composed solely of non-ethical people?"
Any employment-offering entity (EOE) $foo can be substituted in the pace of Boeing or Lockheed in that argument: "the mob", "the Stasi", "revenge porn sites", etc.
So it really does boil down to intrinsics, after all. If we're going to commit ourselves to ending perennial abuses perpetrated by EOEs that seem entrenched and averse to wisdom and self-reflection (like large military contractors, or our so-called intelligence agencies)... then perhaps it should no longer be socially acceptable to work for them.
> The biggest problem to me is not about NSA involvement, it is how WE treat people who work at NSA and other government intelligence agency.
An organization is made up of people. If you don't like what the organization is doing, you start by holding the people accountable. I see nothing wrong with shunning people who, in their professional capacity, are a part of machine that uses said capability to undermine my rights and privacy.
It's been interesting watching the reactions to these revelations from the more skeptical folks. Tptacek, have there been any stories (besides this one I suppose) that have really surprised you and struck you as unreasonable overreach?
Uh, I think pretty much all of it is overreach. The FISA 215 metadata stuff was particularly bad.
The only stuff that doesn't upset me is genuine foreign intelligence. The NSA can listen in on the Israelis as much as they want, as far as I'm concerned; the Israelis sure as shit listen to us.
the thread is just warming up... I'm half-expecting Kevin Igoe to "reveal his true form" and turn into that giant NSA octopus clutching a shit load of ethernet cables that they thought it was a good idea to paint somewhere.
* The IETF has a dedicated crypto review board, the CFRG, which approves or pokes holes in the cryptography used by other IETF standards.
* The chair of the IETF CFRG is an NSA employee (Kevin Igoe, one of the authors of the SHA1 hash standard).
I just learned these things a couple weeks ago. I am not generally a believer in the theory that NSA actively subverts Internet standards†. But even I think that it's crazy for an NSA employee to chair the CFRG.
In case you're wondering: Trevor Perrin is widely respected professional cryptographer. Most cryptographers work for university math departments. Perrin worked for years as a staffer for Paul Kocher, the godfather of side channel attacks, at Cryptography Research. He's the designer of the new forward secrecy ratchet for OTR (Axolotl) and the TACK TLS extension, and a behind-the-scenes contributor to other IETF crypto standards. Perrin wrote the pure-Python "tlslite" TLS implementation. If you were to draw a "family tree" of crypto know-how in the software security profession, a surprisingly huge chunk of it would be rooted in Perrin (and Nate Lawson and Kocher); for instance, virtually every modern TLS break came from ideas that Perrin popularized. 64 current Matasano Crypto Challenges, probably 50 of them I can trace to Perrin and Lawson. Trevor Perrin is someone you should pay attention to.
† (my best guess is that the standards NSA was actively subverting were about international telephony; subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft)