Irreal

If you’re like me, you probably enjoyed the spectacle of Tom Matzzie live-tweeting an overheard off-the-record conversation between Ex NSA Director Michael Hayden and a reporter. The hilarity was terminated when a colleague of Hayden called him to warn of the eavesdropping.

I snickered at the irony but didn’t think much about it. Now Bruce Schneier remarks that what this really demonstrates is that the government is monitoring the Internet in real time. The tweets, of course, are public so it doesn’t rise to the level of abuse of the NSA’a extra-legal activities but it still shows that those public feeds are being monitored and in real time.

Schneier says that he doesn’t think that this means that the NSA is monitoring the Internet; he believes it more likely that some PR organization assisting the NSA with the Snowden revelations was monitoring social media for names connected to the NSA. I’m not so sanguine but it doesn’t really matter if it was the NSA or some other government-connected entity. The government should have better things to worry about. Getting healthcare.gov running would be a good start.

Rick Falkvinge has a great article that makes an obvious point. We can know for sure that government surveillance has foiled exactly zero terror plots. We know this because planning, let alone carrying out, terror plots is a crime but there have been no trials or convictions.

In my first ever post about the NSA scandal, I noted that the NSA’s director, Keith Alexander, claimed that the surveillance had foiled “dozens,” later updated to “over 50,” terror plots. Of course no details were offered. But as Falkvinge says, where are the criminal proceedings?

That brings us back to my original question. Where is the press on all this? The government is clearly lying but there’s nary a word from the main stream press. If it wasn’t for The Guardian (and yes, lately, the New York Times) we wouldn’t know what the NSA was doing and why it matters.

Read Falkvinge’s article. It serves as an excellent reminder of how no government can be trusted to tell us the truth. As I.F. Stone famously said, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” The NSA scandal neatly illustrates this. Everything they’ve said about Snowden’s revelations have been shown to be lies. Believe them at your peril.

The U.S. Government’s overreaching has claimed another victim. The CryptoSeal VPN service has pulled the plug. These are good guys who did everything possible to provide a secure, private VPN service. They didn’t keep logs and could provide authorities only with user billing information.

In the aftermath of the Lavabit case they felt that the FBI or other government entity would use a pen register warrant as leverage to demand the site’s SSL encryption key thereby rendering all the site’s users vulnerable. As a result they have shut down their service and destroyed all customer records.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand their customers have been inconvenienced but are safe. In this regard, they are heroes; they shut down their business rather than be a party to what they consider crimes against innocent people by an out of control government. On the other hand, they are advancing the government’s cause by eliminating one more means for people who value their privacy to use the Web in a secure and confidential manner. That’s a tragedy that should concern us all.

This case shows, once again, how important it is to insist that the government knock off their thuggish behavior and start respecting citizens’ rights. They will, of course, scream “terrorist” and “think of the children” and all the other nonsense they always spout when they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar but it’s time to demand an end to their extralegal activities.