blogjou

These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion...

These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion if a media campaign, were shocking demonstraions of the state’s situational approach to secrecy: a seal that must be maintained for the government to act with impunity, but that can be broken whenever the government seeks to claim cedit.

Kids used to be able to go online...

Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is the only environment in which you can grow up - by which I mean that the early Internet’s disassociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiflty punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.

I'd briefly jam a network...

I’d briefly jam a network, causing its legitimate users to be booted off-line; in their attempt to reconnect, they’d automatically rebroadcast their “authentication packets”, which I could intercept and effectively decipher into passwords that would let me log on just like any other “authorized” user.

Ira "Gus" Hunt, chief technology officer...

Ira “Gus” Hunt, chief technology officer of the CIA in front of US journalists (2013):

Technology is moving faster than government or law can keep up. It’s moving faster…than you can keep up: you should be asking of what are your rights and who owns your data.

The agency's internal policies...

The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as your legally protected personal property, nor regarded their collection of that data as a “search” or “seizure”. Instead, the NSA maintained that because you had already “shared” your phone records with a “third party” - your telephone service provider - you had forfeited any constitutional privacy interest you once mau have had.

There is simply no way to ignore privacy...

There is simply no way to ignore privacy. Because citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up for convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have […]. You assume that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about […]. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peacefully assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning for you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor […].

The IC had come to understand...

The IC had come to understand the rules of our system better than the people who had created it, and they used that knowledge to their advantage. They’d hacked the Constitution.

This led to the practice...

This led to the practice called LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysys used the agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection - reading their emails, listening on their phone calls, and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only the dumbest analysts were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in any type of surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade, none in the agency’s history had been sentenced to even a day in prison for the crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly prosecute them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you refuse to admit the existence of the system itself.

Diverse motives and approaches...

Diverse motives and approaches can only improve the chances of achieving a common goal.

Would you rather let your coworkers...

Would you rather let your coworkers hang out at your home alone for an hour, or let them spend even just ten minutes alone with your unlocked phone?