Of course, as the government's own reports show mass surveillance doesn't prevent terrorism, and we are also seeing how poorly citizen data is being protected.
This feels very familiar. Instead of seeing a malicious organization, I'm just realizing its incompetent. Forget about Pokemon Go asking for too many permissions, your data is already lost.
I thought that at one point but DOD tried and nobody wanted the stuff. COTS, low-cost, and high-speed above all else even for critical stuff. Government kept trying with Common Criteria but almost all vendors and customers went for least secure stuff. NSA tried again with programs like SPOCK that evaluated Sentinel's HYDRA firewall. Defense contractors and DARPA/NSF-funded groups keep making stuff. Basically nobody buys it.
So, I blame the demand side instead of NSA. If market gave a shit, NSA would be working their butts off trying to get anything done in a memory-safe, type-safe, CPU-on-up system. But no... Least we're going to see another effort with the Dover to integrate RISC-V with SAFE architecture's PUMP. Both RISC-V and SAFE were U.S. government funded IIRC. Years of papers on both with no uptake in industry or FOSS for even SAFE's basic techniques until Dover.
Far as NSA, at least they still fund Rockwell-Collins' SHADE and Galois Inc's awesome work. CRYPTOL language & toolkit got open-sourced by Galois. Nobody uses it. Seeing a pattern?
That is the truth. But there is a chicken and egg a bit there as well. Common Criteria certification (say EAL4) is not cheap and takes years to achieve. RedHat even opted to do it in Germany by exploiting some international mutual agreement thing. RHEL 7 was out 3 or so years ago and it is still "in evaluation". Who has time for that?
https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/industries/government...
So I think the requirements and boilerplate needed is too much and too many hoops to jump through. A lot are not technical I feel but rather bureaucratic. I call it paper security -- security that exists only as rubber stamps or checkmarks in some checklist, which might not actually improve anything in reality. A lot of it is downright dangerous -- such as mandating installing an antivirus on a Linux server, which installs a kernel driver, which has a buffer overflow and so on, cue full on kernel level remote exploits ... as a result of a "security requirement".
> So, I blame the demand side instead of NSA. If market gave a shit, NSA would be working their butts off trying to get anything done in a memory-safe, type-safe, CPU-on-up system. But no... Least we're going to see another effort with the Dover to integrate RISC-V with SAFE architecture's PUMP. Both RISC-V and SAFE were U.S. government funded IIRC. Years of papers on both with no uptake in industry or FOSS for even SAFE's basic techniques until Dover.
And instead we get Intel ME. I seriously don't know what to think.. Certainly the later is a sub-system that 99% of users don't care for or want but will still happen to have (and all vulnerabilities associated). If opposite is possible why couldn't they shove a safer system down users-throats after all?
Maybe it's not treason, but it's definitely an abdication of their responsibilities as public servants.
It's not so much tyranny that we fear these days but rather the consequences of ceding more and more power to such a corrupt and inept bunch.
I don't think this has been the case for a long time. The US government is subservient to its own interests, and no other - like any other government, its citizenship benefits only as a coincidence of the actions of the government, not as an intentional boon to the citizens. Appeasements are made to keep a docile citizenship, and otherwise the condition of the country is made "just good enough" for those in positions of power to live the way they want, on the tax payer's expense. The system of checks and balances is a farce intended to give the illusion of control, but ultimately those with money or good connections (often one begets the other) live by a special set of rules.
The idea that the general public has the power to somehow control the Federal Government or even local State Governments is simply inaccurate - the Federal level is protected by its own allegedly self-correcting system which basically means that they decide their own fate, and the State level avoids problems simply by throwing more money than the citizenship can muster at any problem.
Individual public servants may enjoy helping their fellow person; bus drivers, postal workers, maintenance crews, I do not doubt they take pride in the work they do to improve the places they live and the people they serve. But the organizations themselves, the structures that these human workers live under, are machines designed to benefit a small elite few privileged enough to be part of the oligarchy.
This is how governments work - they're a soul-less tool used by an elite few, given legitimacy from the citizenship through the elective process, a largely ceremonial event at this juncture. Even a direct democracy still surrenders power and riches to a small few - the white salary from the contract may say one price, the perks and benefits though add up to something else completely different.
While it may seem like the corruption and cronyism that has grown rampant in DC and WallStreet is a result of organic self interest, almost every larger geopolitical and geostrategic move we make is focused on the immediate short term, with a complete ignorance of future blow back. At first this just seems like self interest combined with incompetence, but after years of trying to understand the bigger picture since I participated in the Iraq war, I have come to a different conclusion:
The Supranational oligarchy, in particular the British oligarchy of London City and the vestiges of monarchy around the globe, have infiltrated and subverted our government at the very highest levels in order to bring us down from within, and pave a path for the solution side of the hegellian dialectic to be to join global government.
I actually have plenty of references and citations to back this up, but to be frank I question if the turn key totalitarian surveillance state has already been given to much power, if that dissenting will become dangerous to life at some point when they install a dictator, break all the encrypted comma stored in Utah and Texas, and start walking the cat back.
As Hitchens said, The American Revolution is the only revolution left that still stands a chance. I think McCarthy, for all his antics, was actually onto something, but he went after low totem pole people and should have focusing at the very top of agencies.
An NSA equivalent to the star chamber and a CIA formed by the teachings of the British by WallStreet lawyers (which are almost all lackeys for London), would then start to fit the current picture state of things much better than simple Machiavellianism run amok.
This. Every time. Yet they point the blame guns at China without a single doubt regardless. Then media puts large Sinophobic and Communism-themed banners and images to top it off.
Seriously? Does it not sound like Beijing has become their favorite scapegoat, along the lines of say, I failed to secure system xyz because Beijing was behind the attack?
