Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

I'm entire unfond of the NSA. The existence of secret agencies, especially on a large scale, make a mockery of democracy.

At the same, government by congressional hobbling and sabotage also makes a mockery of democracy through agencies not ceasing bad behavior but rather a continuous war between congress and agencies being normalized in a way that makes agencies actually more autonomous from congress. The "Washington Monument Syndrome" is just one piece of the problematic situation [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome

View on HN

In a world where democracies have enemies, how do you not have govt secrets?

Security through obscurity is inferior to security through transparency. Imagine if every interaction with the government; every contract, negotiation, communication was a matter of easily searchable public record.

Try sneaking a little graft in there and get laughed at in public. It'd be great.

The reason the NSA conducts its activities in secret have little to do with "a little graft" and everything to do with the fact you don't show somebody you've broken their ciphers unless you have to.

If the NSA has broken them, they probably aren't the only ones. By keeping that a secret they're actually endangering national security.

They won't show what they have access to and actively use against adversaries. They have "NSA approved cryptos" such as TACLANES hardware that other countries can use at government level with their own crypto bases. Civilian level encryption was never meant to be Government level, we were only lucky that AES and such was opened up by US law in the 1990s.

I'm having trouble seeing how that makes any sense.

When the Allies in WW2 broke Germany's Enigma cipher, are you suggesting that by not telling Germany that the Allies could now read a large fraction of Germany's military communication they were endangering their own national security?!

That makes no sense whatsoever.

If the NSA has broken whatever cipher suite the GRU uses, or the Iranian RG, or whomever, please explain how keeping that fact a secret endangers the USA?

Keep in mind they share info with the other Five Eyes and select other allied nations.

> Security through obscurity is inferior to security through transparency

According to what exactly?

So if a foreign agent is providing us information about their government, that relationship should be in the public record? That seems like a really good way to ensure you have no human intelligence sources at all.

We should reveal every detail about our military's weapons systems so our adversaries can more easily build countermeasures against them?

It seems exceedingly unrealistic that any government, even a democracy, could keep no secrets at all and survive.

Sorry for any rudeness perceived:

1. Security through obscurity is different from secrecy. Not at all what we were arguing. You just pulled pop sci quotes from the crypo world.

2. > Imagine if every interaction with the government; every contract, negotiation, communication was a matter of easily searchable public record.

Democracies do have FOIA but it doesn't and shouldn't extend for foreign entities.

Security through obscurity is fine if everyone can do it.

Security for me, clarity into you, is a big problem. We should build unsurveillable homes.

You can't suspend democracy when you have enemies. That's just losing.

Thankfully, having secrets is not suspending democracy.

Unfortunately, "having secrets" is a way more innocuous strawman that the situation we are talking about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com