Obama said people want secure mobile communications, but NSA undermined that | Hacker News Reader

Obama said people want secure mobile communications, but NSA undermined that

washingtonpost.com

This is almost a continuation of the pattern from 2013 in which senior officials made claims that were quickly and devastatingly revealed to be false or misleading in comparison to what NSA and its partners were actually doing in practice. It's not an exact continuation of the pattern, since we "just" learned that NSA and GCHQ undermined what Obama claimed were shared goals on a massive scale.

Maybe we were all supposed to infer from Obama's concerns about "a bunch of people compromising that process" that he really meant encryption was a NOBUS (No One But Us) issue for the administration. Maybe we were supposed to know that when Obama said "there’s no scenario in which we don’t want really strong encryption" that he was talking about "really strong encryption our partners can't compromise and share with us."

I would have expected the administration to become much more cautious about making falsifiable or undermine-able statements after these leaks started.

But a new report published by the Intercept alleges that British and American spies actively sought to undermine the security features that protect mobile networks around the world.

What were the dates of the security compromises relating to SIM cards?

It's worth noting that the Intercept's report suggests some of the practices of the company, Gemalto, may have also put the encryption keys at added risk in the first place

So, if you increment a counter in a public URL, you're a felon; if we snoop on all private communications and find some opsec lapses, that shows they were asking for it.

We begin therefore where they are determined not to end, with the question whether any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the Unites States government has led not only us but the world.

This should not actually be a complicated inquiry.

http://snowdenandthefuture.info/events.html

Surveillance is not an end toward totalitarianism, it is totalitarianism itself.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/europe-24385999

Obama always sounds like the good guy. He dislikes torture, war, the NSA, drones... But doesn't he have at least some power to change these things?

Not to bag on any one politician nor start a rant....

but either he doesn't really have the real power, (which is a problem), or he says he wants to but really doesn't want to (which is also a problem), or wants to but can't because of existing realities and so lies to everyone rather than leveling about the situation (maybe the biggest problem)...

Either way, people are not being given enough information to vote wisely or else plain not being represented. This isn't how it's supposed to be.

> Either way, people are not being given enough information to vote wisely or else plain not being represented

An american friend of mine showed me how he was asked to vote on local issues (such as medical cannabis, water fluoridation, treaties with indians(!) and so on...) by way of referendum. A lot of references were given so that voters could make an informed choice.

This contrasts with extremely important questions such as waging wars to other nations where voters barely have a saying. Furthermore, those issues are addressed in the most naive ways in political debates ("we need to increase our military spending in order to catch the bad guys out there, and to support our troops").

I beg to differ. Those who undermined that are the people who decided to centralize keys somewhere. That is, to build a system with centralized control.

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