Irreal

Bruce Schneier has a provocative article on CNN Opinion about breaking up the NSA. He begins by pointing out that the NSA has three types of surveillance programs:

1. Targeted Surveillance as exemplified by the actions of the Targeted Access Operations (TCO) group.
2. Bulk surveillance in which they vacuum up as much information as possible. The poster child of these operations is the bulk phone metadata collection.
3. Sabotaging of security by working to install vulnerabilities into crypto primitives and equipment. The reported insertion of a backdoor into the NIST certified Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator is the most notorious example of this type of program.

Schneier proposes breaking up these three functions into different organizations. Under his plan, the first program would be transferred to the U.S. Cyber Command, which would be separated from the NSA. The second, surveillance of Americans, would be moved to the FBI, which has traditionally performed this task and is subject to legal safeguards that the NSA routinely avoids or ignores. Finally, the NSA would no longer work to subvert security but would, instead, work to increase the security of our crypto and IT infrastructure, its traditional function before 911.

Schneier understands that none of this is apt to happen anytime soon but that something along these lines needs to be done to increase our security and reinstate trust in the NSA. It’s an interesting post and well worth a couple minutes of your time.

Over at Charlie’s Diary, guest blogger Ramez Naam has an interesting, and hopeful, take on avoiding a surveillance state dystopia. Naam makes the point that despite the doom and gloom we hear about the creeping encroachments on our freedom, we are, in fact, more free than we were in, say, 1984.

The reason for that is that the technology that enables government snooping is cheap and widely available to citizens as well. We can organize and inform each other in ways we couldn’t even a few years ago. One of the ideas that informed Orwell’s 1984 was the notion, taken from the events in Stalin’s USSR, that the government could lie to its citizens and thus rewrite history. The idea terrorized Orwell. Today, it’s much, much harder for the government to lie successfully.

Take a look at Naam’s post and the comments that accompany it. Perhaps you’ll feel better. At the very least, it’s thought provoking and will give you a new view on government surveillance.

New evidence suggests that Manning, Snowden, and Assange each used a powerful tool called monospace fonts.

— Parker Higgins (@xor) February 10, 2014

It sounds just like the nonsense coming out of the FBI and Mike Rogers. It reminds me of the customs agent (?) who was sure he had a cybercriminal because the guy’s laptop ran Linux and showed a terminal “like hackers’ computers have.¹”

For extra fun you can read the whole tweet conversation. Some of the replies are just as funny.

In a coda to the TSA’s war against Rahinah Ibrahim that I’ve written about here, here, and here, The//Intercept is calling out President Obama and the Department of Justice for their abuse of the state-secrets privilege.

Murtaza Hussain details how, despite their promises to invoke the privilege only in extraordinary circumstances and never to prevent the revelation of unlawful activity or avoid embarrassment, the government tried to bury Ibrahim’s case by invoking that very privilege. But how else would you characterize invoking the privilege to hide the fact that Ibrahim was placed on the no-fly list by mistake when an FBI agent checked the wrong box on a form?

The//Intercept, Glenn Greenwald’s new home, is off to a good start leveraging the revelations of Edward Snowden and pointing out other areas where governments falls short. Give this article a read; it demonstrates starkly how the U.S. government’s security industry is out of control and beyond being held responsible for its actions.

Update: Removed superfluous ‘that’