Saturday, February 1, 2014

The Economics of Basic Social Operations ... Are Deeply Broken

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



Have you watched the videotaped interview of Ed Snowden in Moscow? The interview drives home the reality of a very simple fact.

The entire current state of computing is an abuse waiting to happen.

Every aspect of social information assurance has to be rethought, from the IP packet on up.

Yet our US media is censoring the Snowden Interview, while YouTube & websites block it? What don't our own government and corporations want US citizens to hear?
"the video has been taken down almost immediately every time it’s posted on YouTube"
The videotaped interview with Snowdon doesn't reveal anything new at all. It does, however, drive home some of the truly astounding "situational" facts that have already been reviewed at length in print.

Yet the whole context barely makes operational sense, once it's overwhelming implications sink in. Three aspects of our current context emerge, and they are worth stressing.

1) One agency's runaway capabilities have clearly compromised the entire workings of the US Congress, POTUS AND SCOTUS - not to mention the rest of the electorate. We HAVE no civil protections. They are ALL compromised! Completely.

2) How and why? Entirely due to a broken policy & personnel system, all eventually reliant upon political campaign funding from the very corporations angling for contracts to staff said agency!

3) All this has occurred WHILE that agency & those corporations employ truly juvenile IT/IS operations & controls which leave THEMSELVES totally compromised!

It's like one, huge, Heath Robinson STUPID machine!

We're extremely lucky that this hasn't ALREADY blown up into unimaginably bad outcomes. At the heart of it are completely archaic information-assurance methods, layered on top of a TOTALLY compromised personnel system. Even worse, both of those are layered on top of a near hopelessly ill-informed electorate. What COULDN'T go wrong?

Here's a good synopsis of the print & video details previously disclosed:
NSA "TURMOIL" is deep packet inspection 
(of any computer whatsoever, anywhere),
NSA "TURBINE" is deep packet injection 
(of info into any computer, including your account, at your bank!)
NSA "QFIRE" is their integration.

@#$%^&! When is enough more than enough?
It's like we've all caught the Clapper. Yet this is far worse than other social diseases.

"the NSA has in a literal sense retarded the process by which we would secure the internet"
That really hits home.

If we retard internet security, we're retarding our culture (and everyone else's too).

Forget endemic dash cams in Russian cars, this immediately puts pressure on all people everywhere in the entire world ... to store, verify and DOCUMENT every single IT packet that ever goes in to or out of their IT devices AND their home routers or cable modems ... purely for defensive purposes. Otherwise, anyone can be framed.

Does anyone smell a protection racket coming?

The entire current state of computing actually is an abuse waiting to happen.

As is the state of Democracy in the USA. We have democracy compromised.


5 comments:

Roger Erickson said...

Dan Fleming writes:

Solutions can be found in European Historical Memory Law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Memory_Law

Will the USA draft a New Law, to be passed when the House and Senate awake from their slumber? To Recognize the Victims of:

- Iraqi War
- Patriot Act
- Over Funding of US MIC- Security-Prison Complex
- NSA Spying
- Rendition
- Torture
- Turning away from the Geneva Conventions & US Constitutional Rights
- Wall Street exuberance
- Financial & Corporate Fraud

Roger Erickson said...

Chris Calabrese ‏@CRCalabrese

"Take a break from the NSA to learn about the hundreds of companies selling the most personal details about your life"

https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/senate-report-opens-window-hidden-world-data-aggregators

Roger Erickson said...

did someone say "protection racket?" ... or just MICC?

Sniper attack on Silicon Valley power grid spurs security crusade by ex-regulator
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/07/us/california-sniper-attack-power-substation/

"An attack by snipers on a Silicon Valley power substation last year is prompting the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to launch a crusade to better secure and defend the nation's electrical grid."

We "need" more security?

Roger Erickson said...

CIA Admits Using News To Manipulate the USA (1975)

http://www.minds.com/blog/view/54645/cia-admits-using-news-to-manipulate-the-usa-1975

Tom Hickey said...

Sen. Frank Church was a rare gem. Ironically, he was a former military intelligence officer, who was himself a "subject" of US intelligence while in office.

In a secret operation code-named "Minaret," the National Security Agency (NSA) monitored the communications of leading Americans, including Senators Church and Howard Baker, Dr. Martin Luther King, prominent U.S. journalists and athletes, who criticized the U.S. war in Vietnam.[20] A review by NSA of the NSA's Minaret program concluded that Minaret was "disreputable if not outright illegal." Wikipedia/Frank Church

Church was stunned by what the Church Committee learned about the immense operations and electronic monitoring capabilities of the National Security Agency (NSA), an agency whose existence was unknown to most Americans at the time. Church stated in 1975: "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."[38] He is widely quoted as also stating regarding the NSA: "I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge... I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."[38]

Commentators such as U.S. constitutional lawyer and columnist Glenn Greenwald have praised Church for his prescient warning regarding this turning around by the NSA to monitor the American people, arguing that the NSA undertook such a turning in the years after the September 11 Attacks.
Ibid.