[Cryptography] Security clearances and FOSS encryption?

John Gilmore gnu at toad.com
Mon Jul 14 19:30:23 EDT 2014


Personally I take every statement by a known security clearance holder
with a grain of salt.  Prominent holders of such clearances have been
caught in major lies ("We do not hold files on hundreds of millions of
Americans") and when caught, they justify themself by claiming that
they were forced to lie by the security rules, rather than claiming
that they are just inveterate liars who were hired by the security
services BECAUSE they were good at lying.  They are specifically
trained in security-mindedness seminars to manipulate the public
perception of what they do -- by withholding relevant information at a
minimum, by distorting when information must be given ("I work for the
Defense Department" for NSA employees -- see Cryptome's copy of the
NSA employee manual), and by lying when neither of the above will
work.

I have personally been told some bits of information when they weren't
classified, by someone with a security clearance, and then later been
told, "Some of what I told you earlier has become classified so I
can't talk about it any more, nor can I tell you which part."  In my
personal opinion, knowing the content of our discussion, this
information was classified in order to cover up extremely high level
malfeasance, and/or to manipulate public opinion to be more favorable
to the US Government than it would be if the truth was known.  Neither
of these is a valid or authorized reason to classify.  But that never
matters to those who classify.  A decade later, that information is
still putatively classified.  The official investigation of the
incident by a responsible agency was stopped, and replaced with an FBI
"investigation" the results of which are still classified and unreleased.

> > If someone is a covert employee of the FBI on assignment to inflitrate your organization,
> 
> Right, this is not about the FBI.  They are investigating crimes.  This
> is about spooks, who are spying.  Very very different.

I think your comment was about the old FBI, whose jobs were blackmail,
theft, ruthless suppression of deviants and minorities, and
whitewashing their image to look like crimefighters.  See Rex Stout's
novel The Doorbell Rang for a fictional account of how the FBI was
acting in the 1940's and 1950's (from a great author with a military
background).  See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI
for a true account of what the FBI was doing in the 1960s and how it
was exposed.  Noam Chomsky republished a description of the 1000ish
files that these activists took from a small FBI office:

  According to its analysis of the documents in this FBI office, 1
  percent were devoted to organized crime, mostly gambling; 30 percent
  were "manuals, routine forms, and similar procedural matter"; 40
  percent were devoted to political surveillance and the like,
  including two cases involving right-wing groups, ten concerning
  immigrants, and over 200 on left or liberal groups. Another 14
  percent of the documents concerned draft resistance and "leaving the
  military without government permission." The remainder concerned
  bank robberies, murder, rape, and interstate theft.

The word has not yet come out about what the FBI was doing in the
1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, but we have seen plenty of nasty shit,
like going after CISPES, Judi Bari, thousands of innocent Muslims
imprisoned and/or investigated and/or discriminated against (look up
Rahinah Ibrahim for someone who took 10+ years of activism in court to
find and correct the FBI's erroneous record on her, which prevented
her from graduating from Stanford or pursuing her career, via FBI
putting her on the no-fly list and canceling her US student visa for
no valid reason), etc, etc, etc.

The new FBI is into "precrime", seeking to "stop terrorism before it
happens", and is also a major designated front for NSA (e.g. any law
that gives the FBI a power, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, is also giving that power to NSA).  Whenever NSA needs to force a
company to reveal customer data or keying material, somehow not the
NSA, but the FBI ends up applying to a court for an order requiring
that material.

The FBI's secret court filings are even blatant about "...and turn it
over to NSA at this location", largely I expect because they never
expected them to ever be seen by the public.  Thank you, Mr. Snowden!

The FBI is not your friend, and is not a crime-investigating agency.
It is the US's internal secret police agency.  But it has a big budget
for publicity and a lot of friends in Hollywood who help it whitewash
its image.

	John


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