[Cryptography] Kindle as crypto hardware

John Kelsey crypto.jmk at gmail.com
Mon Dec 16 13:09:04 EST 2013


On Dec 14, 2013, at 1:47 AM, "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote:

> On 2013-12-12 04:59, Bill Frantz wrote:
>> Note that many business organizations might be quite happy knowing that
>> NSA could read their traffic as long as NSA maintains its "Never Say
>> Anything" reputation. NSA's mistake was passing information about
>> criminal activities to law enforcement rather than sticking to national
>> security. That change of policy scared many businesses, since a clever
>> prosecutor can find something illegal in almost any activity.
> 
> What he said.
> 
> Also, direct NSA involvement in politics, for example spying on General Petraeus.  This suggests that if you are republican politician, your emails, and your political consultant's emails, are likely to end up being shared with your Democratic party opponent's political consultants.

The war on terror has always relied, for its popularity, on the idea that it's not being done to *us* but rather to *them*.  Spying on, disappearing, infiltrating, torturing, or killing scary Muslim foreigners (even if they're US citizens on US soil, like Jose Padilla) is something that can be sold to the American people because they don't think it will ever be done to them or people they care about.  And we've had awful stories about nasty things we've been doing in the war on terror for years now.  But since those were mostly being done to Muslims, and both parties were reassuring us that it was all done for our safety, there wasn't much outcry.  

But handing over the spying data to the DEA and IRS, it's kinda hard to spin that as only targeted at other people.  

--John


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