That’s what makes CALEA so toxic. Any covered comms must be effectively-plain-text, or it doesn’t work. Once you impose a plain-text architecture, a mass-breach is inevitable.
2,413 karma · joined July 23, 2020
And now we have China using CALEA-crippled systems to slurp up the entire USA network. Exactly as predicted.
And this - "outside of the norms of what we see in the espionage space" - LOL. ROTFL even. The NSA tapped Google's backbone! Have we forgotten Room 641A? MAINWAY? Poindexter and TIA? Palantir?
The NSA used to play defence and offence, and has gone full-offence for a generation. Did anyone really believe that only the USA could play offence?
Morons.
A central question of business is market - who am I trying to reach, and who do I exclude? Trying to sell to every one is doomed. Ignoring market segments as unprofitable to reach or server is smart business.
But for government this is completely wrong! They are obliged by law and justice to serve everyone. Or "equal protection" is just words on paper.
This is the organization that pushed code-signing as their security posture for a decade.
The USA 100% has this, it's just secret and much less useful for it. The SSA is 95% there.
You are completely correct that civil law jurisdictions have already solved this: Germany, Estonia, and many others have the all the requirements: a register of all persons available to the central authority, and crypto infrastructure to make it work.
What's missing from the UK, Canada, USA, etc. is the first part! It is hard to believe if you live in Germany, but there really is no big master list of people in those countries. There are many (many, many) lists, linked badly by many different ids. The tax registry, pension registry, drivers license registry, and visa registry are some of the big ones.
Things could be so much simpler if we had such a thing, but the politics between here and there are basically impossible.
Letting people use autopilot in unsafe conditions is contributory negligence. Given their marketing, that's more than worth 33% of the fault.
That they hid this data tells me everything I need to know about their approach to safety. Although nothing really new considering how publicly deceitful Musk is about his fancy cruise-control.
But you might find a historical/journalistic/investigative angle more profitable.
I heard a software product pitch from a small law practice who were outside investigators for abuse/policy-violation claims in a unionized workforce. They had a solid procedure: start with the main event. Interview all witnesses, and identify other interesting events. Then cross-reference all witnesses against all alleged/interesting events. That gives you a full matrix to identify who is a reliable witness, what sort of motivations are in play, and what stories are being told, patterns of behaviour, etc. Their final report might actually focus on another event entirely that had better evidence around it.
In that sort of historical investigation, a single obviously false claim undermines all claims from that witness. Pure logic doesn't have that bi-directionality of inference. Sometimes your sources just flat out lie! That's half the work.
The key difference is between a full matrix of claims vs sources/evidence, while good math is all about carefully plotting a sparse inference graph that traverses the space. What is called "penetrating minimalism" in math is called "cherry picking" in history or journalism.
We passed on the pitch. Didn't see how it scaled to a product worth building, but their process was appealing. Much better than the an internal popularity-contest or witch-hunt. Probably better than the average police investigation too.
Just think: If I "only" steal names and address from the psych ward, that's still a breach.
Trump was just shaking them down. He was never going to actually fight money.
Regan really is the beginning of all of this.
Then a post-review for things not used, things missed, etc.
If the senile and the crazy can vote, why not 16-year-olds?
You can see the bones of a stronger limit during drafting (as "required" by warrants), but then weakened to allow mere "administrative requests".
> Law Enforcement Purposes. Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes under the following six circumstances, and subject to specified conditions: (1) as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; (2) to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person; (3) in response to a law enforcement official's request for information about a victim or suspected victim of a crime; (4) to alert law enforcement of a person's death, if the covered entity suspects that criminal activity caused the death; (5) when a covered entity believes that protected health information is evidence of a crime that occurred on its premises; and (6) by a covered health care provider in a medical emergency not occurring on its premises, when necessary to inform law enforcement about the commission and nature of a crime, the location of the crime or crime victims, and the perpetrator of the crime.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
That turns the laptop + fingerprint into your extra factors.
The sleazy (edited - shouldn't call this standard) playbook for old oil wells is for the operators to sell them to a shadier operator company and transfer the risk. The shady firm then siphons the money out and declares bankruptcy.
The standard cycle is that they pump while the money is good. Then when commodity prices crash, those shell companies are insolvent. Industry lobbies for easements on their cash reserves as a favour during the "temporary downturn". The shady guys just walk away with their pockets stuffed full of money, and the regulator is left holding the bag.
Most operators are responsible, and decommission the wells. But the industry has to maintain a whole insurance policy for "orphan wells", and it is always under-funded. Alberta alone is going eat a couple of billion in orphan cleanup.
This process only gets harder when the satellite is "owned" by a shell-company domiciled in Mauritius.
The actual solution is a series of international treaties. The USA government has signed a global promise that they are directly liable for any object launched by any actor in the USA . All treaty signatories are on the same hook. The government in turn then has to track them all, else how do they manage their liability?
How could a private company possibly play this role in a global treaty process? Over decades?
https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/lia...
So now what? Do you try to make every company in the world with a sat to post a damages bond? Held by who? The UN? Adjudicated by which courts? This is naive.
Collective action problems are real, and this is one of them.
How can you blame someone for pulling away when grabbed?
And just like Iraq, they didn't like the story coming out of the CIA that the USSR was a decrepit aging empire that was struggling to maintain parity with NATO. Cheney and Rumsfeld were SURE there were whole secret programs, with secret bases, and secret funding. So they badgered Ford into appointing a parallel team to produce different estimates. That was the whole "missile gap" scare.
Sound familiar? And guess what? It was all bullshit. Just like Iraq turned out to be.
I believe in conspiracies. The 20c was defined by conspiracies! Bolshevism, Naziism, Fascism, Maoism, Scientology, Heavens Gate, etc. The soviets really did fund post-modernism. The CIA really did run the National Review. Those are well documented.
What I don't believe is that Iraq every had even the beginning of a nuclear weapons program. Nobody with any sense did either. All the evidence came from known liars.
As for Powell's evidence: he was a lib, trying to keep the post-war order intact, while Cheney and Bolton were working to blow it up.
Powell knew it was bullshit, but he thought it was a better grade of bullshit that wouldn't make him look like such a moron. All he needed was enough of a figleaf to get either the UN or a compliant Nato to join in. Turns out, the yellow-cake story was such low-grade bullshit he'll never live it down.
There is no fancy latin name for giving known paranoids fantasists like Cheney and Rumsfeld the benefit of the doubt. But there really should be.
I'll grant that Cheney and Rumsfeld have networks in the agencies they could lean on to muddy things. And that deservers the name deep-state. Invisible, and unaccountable.
But you can't really call the gang that led this deep state when they are confirmed by congress, and go on TV.
The CIA was very clear that there was nothing there, and the publicly appointed leadership (Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, etc) badgered them until they gave in and made some wishy-washy statement that Powell could pretend was real.
The war was led from the top - Sec Def and VP. That Bush was a moron and appointed liars to Sec Def and VP is on him. Cheney and Rumsfeld had a long history of making things up, going back to the 70s.