NSA targets the privacy-conscious (opens in new tab)

It will be another system which grants permission at the whims of the department, one that absolves individual officers of blame, punishment and consequences for bias and abuse they'll continue to revel in.

Spam filtering also works in a very different context - the spam-to-nonspam ratio is something like 90% spam and 10% nonspam, which means that there is lots and lots of spam to filter out; if an important email slips through, people are bound to notice and either adjust their spam filter or do something about it. In the other setting, you have 99.99% or more of people who have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activities, and maybe one or two dozen (among tens of millions) who you are actually targeting. First thing, erroneously targeting a substantial chunk of your non-interesting population ties up resources - you're spending your time investigating people who are not terrorists - but since it's difficult anyways, at least you seem like you're doing something with all the money you receive, and nevermind if some of the data is used for industrial espionnage or hunting people that only poultry farmers and fracking magnates would call terrorists. And if you miss one of the two dozen other people, well, they won't do anything harmful this year or the next because they also have to fear regular law enforcement, and when they do it'll be in a moment that's probably suitable for you to ask for more money.

tl;dr: Because we don't have a large sample of actual terrorists on hand, it's hard to evaluate activities like the NSA's, which would however be desirable since we're giving large chunks of money to them that could be fruitfully used in making everyone safer if used to fight actual crime and not some fuzzy notion of terrorism.

> "It doesn't have to be perfect to be better." (Yes it does...)

The problem used to be approached by presuming innocence (demanding perfection), rather than with a willingness to accept false positives (20 years ago spam filters weren't available as an analogy...). It is always possible to wrongfully judge someone, but it was never a valid or acceptable outcome ("It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" - Blackstone). We accept that spam filters give false positives (not to mention that one person's spam is another person's opportunity), so I think comparing the justice system to detecting spam is a mistake, and more over that a goal of "prevention" itself is a red herring.

The goal of prevention encourages us to accept lower thresholds of guilt probability, and that is wrong. In other words, if prevention is an end, then it is worth deliberately (rather than accidentally) restricting innocent people on the basis of virtually any nonzero probability of guilt. 80% "guilty" by association (for using Tor for example), 45%, etc, would all be enough to justify legal action - and the thresholds would certainly depend on whoever is in power and has access to the database that week. This is a very different model than presuming innocence, and having not only a goal of 0 false-positives, but also providing satisfaction when the justice system is in error.

I think today we are mostly talking around the fact that a crime has to have been committed in order for it to deserve to be punished, and that, for that reason, prevention cannot be a valid goal in itself (but it's nice when it happens).

Rationalizing surveillance as a tool to "prevent" rather than to justly punish wrongdoers (which centralized surveillance does not do because it is centrally operated, due to the conflict of interest; everyone owning a camcorder on the other hand...) implies that the central database needs to go IMHO (and that individuals need to be empowered instead).

Yup, we don't have thinkpol yet (and hopefully we never will), but we do have a pretty damn good analogy to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_policing

..aaand the ones who get "caught" and are away with a slap on the wrist before you can say "this is a joke, I just cannot believe the hipocrisy of this, double standards much?" (because let's be realistic, it's not instant)

Pardon the bluntless, but it seems like an a priori conclusion that only people taking pains to hide their data/communications should be targeted. That is not because the vast majority of those people are innocent (they are) but because that is the only group that contains a subset that poses a real & present threat.

So, that ignores your slippery slope argument about personal liberties, which are totally valid. How do you balance national security and personal liberty in this case? That's the million dollar question.

Please let me know if you question my reasoning. I'm purely looking at it as a 2x2 matrix of (highly encrypts personal data, does not ...) x (seeks to harm people/nation interests, does not ...)

So only the people hiding their tracks that seek to harm are the ones to worry about. Those that don't hide their tracks are a lot less likely to be operationally successful</euphemism>.

However, I assume that the 99.95% of people that highly encrypt personal do not seek to harm anyone, and are collateral damage here.

Constitutional tradeoffs happen all over. Fire in a crowded theater, felons rights to vote, personal rights to own certain weapons, etc. This is another one that needs to be decided very carefully. But I think both sides have very valid concerns.

Just authorize. If you have perfect-forward secrecy, as long as you aren't being man-in-the-middled right now, you're safe.

It's better to have all people doing everything encrypted by default than not.

The goal isn't for one individual to be safe against a targeted NSA attack. That's insane--if the NSA wants you, specifically you are screwed; it simply has far too many resources to bring to bear.

The goal is to make it expensive for the big agencies to do pervasive surveillance. If everybody is encrypting all the time, random peon at Three Letter Agency has to get up from his chair and actually authorize a wiretap, get a warrant, etc. At that point, it's not going to happen unless you've actually done something very wrong.

  /*
  These variables define terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic
  Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by
  extremists on extremist forums.
  */

Journalists gotta journalize.

I'm also willing to believe that hackers who want to use encryption and other privacy-oriented technologies use and read about open-source technologies. Although my guess is that this includes nearly all serious security researchers, experts, and implementers.

That said, to claim that people who read LJ are extremists, or that the magazine is something of an "extremist forum," misses the mark in so many ways.

Please STOP spreading misinformation. The only two deaths from raw milk in the last 20 years were traced back to bad queso fresco. In fact, over the same time period, there were more deaths attributed to pasteurized liquid milk than to raw liquid milk[1].

It's amazing what 30 seconds of Googling can do.

[1] http://www.realrawmilkfacts.com/raw-milk-news/story/outbreak...

Electronic surveillance used to be more stigmatized in some ways, but it's becoming more culturally normalized as a basic government tool (at least in the culture of government agencies -- I hope not as much elsewhere). So you see it used in more and more contexts.

I'm totally unfamiliar with the raw milk regulations, but I think that people who are concerned about them could reasonably worry that electronic communications surveillance will be used to enforce them in the future. Likely not by NSA itself, but perhaps through something that's in part technological trickle-down from NSA development or procurement.

I'd love to see the evidence, and see it compared to other food sources.

I grew up in India. There all we got was raw milk from the cowherd; in fact, even today, my parents send the helper to get milk in a pail from the cowherd. It's always been raw milk, warm and fresh from the udder. And the first thing they do is to boil it.

If I were to conjecture, it's that the "no raw milk" diktat forces farmers to go to big distribution companies with the requisite facilities for pasteurization.