1. What's the purpose of all the US spying? It obviously is not directed
2. against 'terrists' since the only real terrorist out there are the american
3. military sacks of shit and their accomplices. There are no 'foreign'
4. terrorists who want to attack the US. If 'terrists' really existed, we'd be
5. seeing real terrorist attacks in US cities every week. But there are none.
6.  
7.  
8.         So, are they spying on ordinary american subjects? What for? I mean, what
9. actual benefit are they getting from that? They are the ones who caught
10. DPR. But are they going to use their 'secret' information to put in jail
11. every 'criminal' in the US?
12.  
13.         Or are they spying on behalf of american business, stealing industrial
14. secrets and information from the competitors of american industries?
15.  
16.         Or are they mostly a useless bureaucracy that only steals and stores data,
17. not doing anything else, at least for the time being? Preparing to
18. transform  the US from a covert totalitarian shithole into an overt
19. totalitarian shithole?
20.  
21. ***
22.  
23. I think you hit it on the risk on head there.  Its like the stasi; stasi 2.0
24. - they are creating a risk to democracy, and even without exaggeration
25. civilization itself with their actions.  The Germans get it because they
26. remember the Stasi.
27.  
28. I expect they are doing it for geo-political influence to tap phones and
29. internet equivalent of intersting people, and economic-espionage to the
30. benefit of US companies, to exert political control, to be able to
31. selectively leak inforamtion to law enforcement (they admit this now).
32.  
33. Thats all internationally illegal, immoral, unethical etc, governments do
34. stuff that their citizens would reject on a daily basis under cover of
35. secrecy.  Its a systemic problem with the worlds current goverments.  They
36. also dont that well control even their own spy apparatus, it has somewhat of
37. a life and self-interest of its own, and inter-goverment allegiances
38. independent of the political sphere.
39.  
40. The risks are much worse however: Americans are traditionally ignorant of
41. lessons of history, look at Bush junior.  The Brits were furious with the
42. mismanagement of Iraq.  The Brits at least had some historically acquired
43. wisdom and common sense of knowing how to run an imperially controlled
44. government without enraging the locals more than strictly necessary.  As the
45. Iraqis said they had more freedom and independence of political rule under
46. British colonial rule than after american "liberation".  (ps I am against
47. imperialism whether former overt British imperialism or current American
48. disguised-imperialism).
49.  
50. If the Americans get an even worse government (and the Bush/Obama government
51. is pretty damn bad - drone assasinations, internationall illegal strikes,
52. wars, torture, rendition, guantanamo, persecution of whistleblowers on these
53. illegal activities, and suppression of press via legal threats).  They've
54. shown the world their democratic system is very vulnerable to Reichstag fire
55. like events, they have too much military power amassed, and stasi 2.0
56. dossiers on most people of interest on the planet.
57.  
58. I think the solution is encryption, privacy tech; lots of it, soon, widely
59. deployed.  You have rights - if you dont exercise them, illegal government
60. and/or spy organizations will remove those rights, regardless of what law
61. says, domestically, and certainly internationally.  The spy apparatus has
62. shown a strong willingness to bend rules, eg reciprocal arrangements, Brits
63. or Israelis spy on Americans and then provide the DB query engine to
64. Americans etc.  Or require the telcos to retain the information, and then
65. require them to provide an unmonitored DB query interface, or have NSA
66. mole telco "employees" be the only employees authorized to maintain and use
67. the system.  New US domestic laws will just result in the latter.
68.  
69. Its time to use encryption.  Its a use it or lose it situation, and its
70. important to civilization.  The law says you have rights of freedom of
71. speech, freedom of association, but you arent really exercising them unless
72. you're using cryptographically assured free speech (which means privacy
73. networks, encrypted emails, unobservable encrypted emails (hiding who is
74. sending to who) etc.  Subpoenas still work if individuals and businesses
75. have their own records.  But people have to stop using centralized large
76. business services; use p2p or end2end security and privacy sytems, cloud to
77. the extent you use it should be blind to your data and communication
78. patterns.  Subpoenas still work in the sense that targetted investigatins
79. succeed as now: present a subpoena to a car rental company and their
80. business recors will tell you who rented the car, even if the email
81. confirmation is identifiable only to the renter and the car company, etc.
82. This drives cryptographically enforced law: they can only do targetted
83. subpoenas, by getting a court to approve a warrant based on reasonable
84. suspicion, not drag net if there are no central entities to coerce, tap, put
85. moles into etc, because its too expensive to do it to every computer.
86.  
87. They never give up, so like with clipper, the former export laws, and their
88. 15 year diversion into hacking everything, and subverting laws; they will
89. continue.  Probably their next step beyond requiring telcos to keep records,
90. will be to up the ante on pre-emptive hardware hacking - requiring hardware
91. companies to put remote triggerable hardware backdoors in processors,
92. chipsets, firmware etc.  Time to buy chinese probably.  Pick your vendor
93. depending on your use-case.  If you're a big US business guy buy US, if
94. you're a US citizen probably buy chinese.  Hardware arbitrage.  They might
95. have a go at requiring licenses to write and publish code as Stallman warns
96. about.  I dont think that can flies in a notionally free society, but they
97. had a go at clipper, and export laws also.  I hope that common sense
98. prevails and that also fails.
99.  
100. Interesting times.
101.  
102. Adam
103.  
104. https://cpunks.org//pipermail/cypherpunks/2013-November/001971.html