Re: Help spread strong cryptography now!

Douglas A. Gwyn wrote:
David Wagner wrote:
Sadly, it's not clear that it works like that. Instead, we hear
allegations of government actions which involve collecting massive
amounts of data (including data on millions of Americans who aren't
trying to do any harm), and letting later processing sort them out.

If you think about it, since the system doesn't have any
infrastructure to support prefiltering, if one is going to
collect specific information without knowing in advance
just where it is, that general design is the only approach.

If you take it for granted that such a system has to support
fishing expeditions on millions of Americans (including those
with no prior reason to suspect them), then I can see how that
design would inevitably follow. If you want to collect data on
everyone, even on people where you have no prior individualized
suspicion of them, then it follows that you have to gather data
on everyone. And if you take it for granted that you have to
be able to conduct these fishing expeditions after-the-fact,
then maybe you have to store the data permanently. The core
problem is not the engineering; the problem lies in the goal.
If the goal is to perform fishing expeditions on millions of
US persons, that's the real problem right there.

Also, part of the problem seems to lie in the NSA, or in their bosses
(it's not clear which; media accounts tend to point to the latter).
If they were serious about the civil liberties aspects, there were things
they could have done that might have helped set some minds at ease.
For instance, they could have sought clear legal authorization from
Congress. They didn't, apparently because they were concerned that
if they asked Congress for authorization, Congress might withhold it.
It's hard for me to see how to reconcile that with a belief in democratic
control of our intelligence agencies.

Stricter oversight would be good, but I'm not convinced it would be
enough. When we have an administration or an agency that appears to be
deliberately trying to subvert such oversight by withholding information
from Congress to prevent them from objecting to a program that the agency
knew Congress would likely object to, we've got a bigger problem than just
inattention on the part of oversight committees. It's one thing to have
an agency that is well-intentioned but who occasionally needs independent
outside help to tell them when they've lost sight of the big picture or
let them know when they inadvertently go too far; it's another when you
have an agency or an administration that is deliberately trying to subvert
what oversight procedures we do have at the moment. That's frustrating.

So I suspect the problem may go deeper than inadequate oversight.
It's beginning to look like the NSA or their bosses are out of control and
acting to subvert our existing democratic institutions of civilian control
over the NSA, and I think they have to share some of the blame for that.
Stricter oversight would undoubtedly help, but it is starting to look
like we may need an oversight process that treats the intelligence
community and their bosses as entities who are prepared to act in bad
faith and prepared to try to subvert the oversight process, rather than
as partners whose good faith can be taken for granted.
.