What an incredible analogy.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2wwdep/we_are_edward_s...
Do I like the tools the NSA has in its possession? No. But I am happy they got there (and have access to them) before the Chinese, Russians or Arabs did. Are there going to be disasters like Hiroshima and Nagasaki thanks to these tools? I don't think so.
Will the NSA and the government misuse the tools and make mistakes? Definitely. Their effectiveness must be constantly monitored and questioned. (Huge respect for Snowden for making that possible.)
But these tools aren't going anywhere until all the embarrassingly smart technologists around here stop wasting their time pretending to be lawyers (the law and lawmakers aren't going to get us out of this hole) and design better tech to stop the next Boston bombing, Charlie Hedbo style attack or ISIS recruitment drives.
With that, no country would have the NSA's current capability. No such possibility existed with nuclear weapons.
What better tech are you hypothesizing? You've seem to have already come to the conclusion that the tech we have isn't enough, while preemptively declaring that policy can't solve the West's issues. I think that technical literacy amongst legal professionals and legal literacy amongst technical professionals are steps in the right direction towards a balance of safety and liberty, and are ones that do not immediately entail increasing the scope of surveillance programs.
There won't be any deterrent effect with tools that remain secret and unattributable after they are used. We've already seen that NSA dominance isn't going to lead to a truce in the style of the Cold War. For example, see the Chinese NSA counterparts who were recently indicted in the US, or the suspected Russians who can't be rooted out of the State Department network. The fact that the NSA is (probably) better at that kind of mayhem didn't stop them.
I fear the invention of electronic warfare will be more like the introduction of firearms than of nuclear weapons.
The moral justification for the bomb was a concern that Germany was working on a similar project after they stopped exports of uranium[1]. Japan and Russia had little to do with the decision.
In fact, several people working on the Manhattan project later commented they regretted the decision to develop the bomb, especially after hostilities ended in the European Theater abating the threat of Nazi Germany developing the bomb first.
Feynman has commented[2] specifically that his focus on the work had totally blinded him to this change in moral justification. "What I did immorally, I would say, was not to remember the reason I said I was doing it, so that when the reason changed, which was that Germany was defeated, not the single thought came to my mind at all about that; that that meant now that I had to reconsider why I'm continuing to do this."
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it should be done, even if there was a justification in the past.
Also, the tools that the NSA wields may not be as bloody - with some exceptions[3] - but the cost in terms of the number of people affected already exceeded the losses due to the bomb, and will continue to grow in the future. Personal-scale tools that can do their work mostly hidden from public view have very little cost to the attacker. People notice and might get angry about using the bomb, while blackmail, threats, and bribery can continue for years and years before enough people notice. (and small casual racism or sexism can continue for centuries, even after people start to think the problem is "fixed")
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1rd_l...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE#t=986
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-...
You're wrong on two counts.
1.) It's American foreign policy that created anti-american Islamic extremism. It's American foreign policy that must fix it. You cannot expect tech to fix the problems of that. Technologies are tools, nothing more. Terrorists and tax payers are technology users alike, and that will always be the case. (Sidenote: anyone who is intelligent should hate the word 'terrorism', it is blatantly doublespeak.)
2.) These spy tools are going to die, because we can make technology that makes them infeasible. Indeed, we already have. Tor is reportedly unstoppable by the NSA. GPG exists and falls under the same category. The way things are headed, the only thing that will change with time is that tech companies will embrace encryption and help the general population of innocents to stop being tracked.
Those that care enough (eg: terrorists, libertarians, anarchists, and nerds) have already taken back their freedom... And will continue to do so. And there's nothing those 3 letter agencies can do to prevent it, because they've shown their hand. Anyone who has taken a cryptography class / a theory class knows that it's an unwinnable battle to try to fight RSA... It's just a matter of time before someone persuasive enough gets the message through to policy makers.
That's a very reductionist analysis. The Muslim Brotherhood has existed since the 1920s. However, it was a secular, Marxist, anti-colonialist ideology that was most successful in the Arab world for the next few generations. Then these secular Arab states lost the Six Day War, and failed to provide either good governance or economic opportunities for their populations.
The reason that Islamists have become so powerful is that the governments of many Arab countries have proven themselves to be completely bankrupt. If you're young (and the population pyramids in places like Egypt are very fat on the bottom), and you have very few economic opportunities, and your society is incredibly corrupt, then a radical change becomes very appealing, particularly if the people advocating that change are seen as pure and uncorrupt. The fact that Islamist groups oppose the US is one aspect of their appeal, but it's really only one factor. The fact that Hezbollah and Hamas are actively opposing Israel, while Egypt made peace with Israel in 79 is also a factor.
>If you're young [...], and you have very few economic opportunities, and your society is incredibly corrupt, then a radical change becomes very appealing,
I recall looking at the revolts in Iran in 2009 [1] and what I saw was fundamentally different than what you see with ISIL. I saw people disenfranchised with the middle east governance and culture, but they were not angry or vindictive. They were productive and wanting to change things. I think that exists in the middle east, and I think that they're separate from Islamic extremists.
Meanwhile there's the anti-American camp... Is their hatred because of our actions?
* We funded Osama Bin Laden. [2]
* We trained people fighting for ISIL. [3]
* We killed 130k+ innocent civilians in the region in the past decade and a half. [4]
I think it's plausible. Sure, they might dislike us even if we hadn't done those things...
That being said, I think reasonable people in the middle east have reason to dislike America. (I think any reasonable person has reason to dislike America's actions.)
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_presidential_elect...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA%E2%80%93al-Qaeda_controvers...
[3]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/08/west-training-s...
When young people are angry in Iran, they're angry at a theocratic, clerical government. When young people were angry in Syria, they were angry at a secular, socialist strongman. If you're disaffected in a theocracy, you don't become a supporter of theocracy. If you're disaffected in a Baathist regime, then it's natural to become an Islamist.
To my knowledge there has never been much evidence that the US funded Bin Laden in the '80s. The CIA funded Afghans to fight the Soviets, and some Arab Islamists were also fighting the Soviets. My understanding is that the CIA did not fund the Arabs. (My source for this is Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll, which is excellent).
The Guardian article you're citing is actually talking about something completely different than US training of ISIL. There are many factions in the Syrian civil war. ISIL is one faction that emerged out of al-Qaeda's Iraq branch with some members from the dredges of Saddam's regime. These people have been fighting the US for over a decade. There are also groups that oppose both ISIL and the Assad regime. These groups are being supported by the West.
All of that being said, I agree with the fact that the invasion of Iraq produced extremism. However, the place to start when studying the Middle East is not "What did we do to these people that caused them to hate us." What happened is much, much more complex than that.
According the UK foreign secretary at the time: "Throughout the 80s he (OBL) was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."
I generally thought of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Jordan sharing the same political and cultural climates. It's very interesting to hear that they're so different, I had no idea.
What do you think that America should do / shouldn't do to try to stabilize that region? How do you think America should be fighting terrorism?
More importantly, as we're on HN, how do you think that NSA data collection plays into it all?
If we could resolve the Israeli/Palestinian issue that would be a great help. However, I don't think anyone is optimistic on that front. If the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program are successful (and it looks promising) then at least one very scary scenario will be on the back burner. Pretty much everything else looks very grim.
I don't think that the NSA stuff will have any lasting impact on US relations with the Middle East/perceptions of America in the Middle East. It may have an impact on our ability to understand what's going on in the region, but I think that's very hard to assess from outside the government.
To continue on what I said above,
* One can always increase the size of the key. There's no stopping that. The fact that they can intercept and understand the bulk of communication currently is only due to the fact that we're largely not using encryption. (The idea being, they can collect huge amounts of encrypted information and years down the line decrypt it with supercomputers... But we can always generate larger keys and increase the difficulty by an order of magnitude. It is much easier to generate keys than it is to guess them.)
Not that it's necessary. We have sufficiently large keys already. We just have to start encrypting. [1]
* The NSA has difficulty with GPG and Tor. [2]
[1]: http://security.stackexchange.com/posts/25392/revisions
[2]: http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7458159/encryption-standa...
I think that actually " all the embarrassingly smart technologists around here" need to spend their time designing and creating better tech that doesnt allow the alphabet soup agencies the option to spy on people in such a broad fahsion, making it expensive and difficult to spy on everyone means they have to spend more time looking for the people worth spying on and only spying when they think it is worthwhile and going to lead to something.
what happens now is they spy on everyone, then after an incident go backwards through the data to see what led up to the incident. Which is useless to all the dead and inujured and usually only works to point out where these agencies missed opportunities to prevent the attack.
To give you an example, the recent terrorist hostage taking in Sydney, there was no warning or raising of the terror threat prior to the incident by the Australian Secret Services, although they are fully involved in the spying and are linked with the NSA and GCHQ. After the event we find out that there were double digit warnings provided by members of the public to a information line put in place to act as a confidential way to raise a concern. If they didnt rely on spying on everyone they would be in a better position to investigate tips such as this and focus all (or more) of their resources on these individuals instead of spreading it thinly across everyone.
Isn't this Godwin's non-sequitur? Snowden was talking about physics as a whole, not bringing nationalism into it.