The huge irony with these events is that they are used as primary recruiting grounds for spying agencies.
The same people who are learning how to hack government/corporate systems on their own are the ones who the intelligence community wants to hire most. The benefits are many-fold: You get an extremely high-quality employee, and you remove them from a scene where they are capable and encouraged to cause damage, and you remove the opportunity for an opposing government to hire them.
There's some amount of philosophical resistance that these folks would have towards working for the intelligence community, but how quickly can $150-200k/year change your philosophy?
Moderately competent security/developer/etc. people do not have to work for the government to make $150-200k/yr.
I personally have no problem working for the government in certain roles, and am actually proud of the stuff I did to help the medical/etc. people in Iraq/Afghanistan. There are plenty of civilian agencies who have missions I fully support -- keeping medical records, nuclear power plants, consumer financial records, etc. safe is totally legit. I'd even do it for GS-wages instead of the 3x more I can make in the private world.
Infinitive wars that never end? Wars built on insubstantial concepts about who the enemy is and why they need to be fought? Wars without any specific goals or purpose?
Yes, fuck those wars. Everyone with honest thought can see how wars with those characteristics are bad, should not exist, and should booo at any politician who active contribute for its continuation.
I guess my point is this: until there is world peace, there will be spying. So if you are against spying you should work for world peace. Actually, come to think of it, even if there is world peace there will probably still be spying.
During the cold war, spying actually helped prevent war. I am absolutely fine with the USG spying on foreign governments, militaries, and to a lesser extent, specific war-related businesses (arms manufacturers, potentially energy and logistics companies, etc.) -- the spying on civilian firms should be firewalled off from any potential commercial utility, and should be purely passive and primarily through open sources, but even that seems potentially legitimate.
Spying on purely private people through blanket collection is wrong, both of US citizens and foreign citizens.
I'd be comfortable with foreign intelligence services operating under the same rules.
Intelligence != spying (covert human intelligence gathering) != surveillance
We can re-balance and go without some aspects of each and retain security. The US faces no existential military threats apart from the Russian strategic nuclear force.
As we saw in 2008, the greatest threat the US faces is economic collapse due to not accounting for some financial "black swan" event in a financial sector that continues to become a larger share of GDP. That, or gradual decline due to our education system.
NO NO NO. This is what makes the CCC events different from events in the US. This is not a recruiting event. There are no banners visible of sponsoring companies (and the sponsoring that is done is almost exclusively in lent equipment). The entire congress is organized by volunteers.
And the vibe that the intelligence community is the enemy is essential to these events. Usually, people are on the lookout for "Schlapphüte" (some of which are usually present), with the intent to mock them.
That was a great one. So was this by Jacob Appelbaum from last year, where he was already saying (pre-Snowden) that the chief of NSA is probably the most powerful man on the planet:
Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake & William Binney, "Enemies of the State: What Happens When Telling the Truth about Secret US Government Power Becomes a Crime": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDM3MqHln8U
This talk assumes we have won the War On General Computation (which seems likely, if we give it enough time. The tech used to win that war (or, "the tech society has to learn to live with, because it's not going away") will bring up some nasty sociological questions as it gets applied to other areas.
The current NSA mess is probably the first skirmish in that Civil War. It gets even nastier when you start adding in, say, medical devices:
* Can the NSA spy on the signal to your cochlear implant?
* What about if it was paid for by an insurance company or a bank, and you haven't paid it off yet - can that company give permission like AT&T does with phone records?
* What about when some company finally gets the "clever" idea to subsidize the hearing-aids so the poor have access to them - if they agree to listen to an advert every hour that you can't shut off.
* Oh, wait, you break the contract by figuring some technical way around the ads? Does that mean the bank can "repo" your hearing?
No great answers to these questions, unfortunately, but I agree with Doctorow that we need to start finding those answers NOW, because the questions are quickly becoming reality.
I just watched the Cory Doctorow talk. He has a really interesting hypothesis. It is a bit scary if true, so I am not too sure I want to believe it, or would rather sit here with my fingers in my ears shouting "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU". Yup, I think I'll do that for a while.
To be honest I tuned in really late :) But I am sure looking forward to watching all 30c3 videos in full when they're edited and uploaded, they never disappoint. Best part of winter for me.
They mentioned, just before this talk, that there are 6,000 people in the first room. edit: I guess I misunderstood, but it's still impressive that they filled the place up after just 2 years at this conference center :)
Actually, it was "6000 people at this site, today" -- he wasn't very clear. I think they're expecting another 2000-3000 to show up over the next days at least, making it biggest CCC ever by far. I'd estimate more like 1-3k in the room itself.
Tough talk from someone who can't even be bothered to use PGP. There are lots of people doing real good out there, like Moxie Marlinspike with BitHub, the kickstarter audit of TrueCrypt, and work in the CAB forum and the W3C on SSL and browser security. Glenn is just a talking head at this point, someone who ferried a few hard drives from point A to point B. He shouldn't be respected as someone who knows squat about the subject matter.
He's a journalist, and he's doing a great job as a journalist. He never claimed to be an expert in crypto, but he knows more about the governments' abuses of power and the media's pandering than you do.
Did you hear the applause when he talked about PGP being very difficult to use? Everyone in the room agreed with him on that.
It's fine that you didn't watch the talk, but you shouldn't comment pretending that you did. I think you just wanted to take a shot at Greenwald. He made some interesting points about PGP and OTR. Both of which he uses now.
We all get it that you think very highly of yourself, and belittling Glenn without actually having listened to his talk reinforces your feeling of superiority, but we don't care, so why don't you keep it to yourself?
The same people who are learning how to hack government/corporate systems on their own are the ones who the intelligence community wants to hire most. The benefits are many-fold: You get an extremely high-quality employee, and you remove them from a scene where they are capable and encouraged to cause damage, and you remove the opportunity for an opposing government to hire them.
There's some amount of philosophical resistance that these folks would have towards working for the intelligence community, but how quickly can $150-200k/year change your philosophy?