On Thu, 2013-06-13 at 17:09 -0400, mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote: > However, I think many people do have impossible and unrealistic security > expectations, and if you ask a lot of them (including me) on 9/12/2001 what > would be appropriate, systematic cloud server intercepts and data mining > wouldn't have even made a ripple in the water for me. So there's a > alternative line of argumentation too that just isn't from today's batch of > news.
And it's not _merely_ the "we live in a post-911" world rhetoric, either. There's a deeper argument that we really _do_ want the NSA to stay ahead of the best state-funded and independent hackers all over the universe. Even those of us who claim to dislike being spied upon by our own government tend to ooh and aah when they see hints of the fantastic technologies developed by agencies like the NSA. Anyone who likes James Bond, Mission Impossible, GI Joe, CSI, Person of Interest, etc. should admit that up front. The fact that the NSA is building entire data centers devoted to exploring more occult network patterns is fscking fantastic. And, to an extent, they'd be stupid to "show their hand" every time they came up with a new algorithm that worked ... and we vassals would be stupid to _want_ them to do so. But the real mistake is the loss of the mystique. Secret work used to, and still should, carry that "I'd tell you but then I'd have to kill you" romanticism. In our new age of "lie like you mean it", with no hint-hint nudge-nudge know-what-I-mean know-what-I-mean, we've lost the deep, rich, language that allows us to know they're spying on us without knowing all the details. I'm a big fan of open-* (open source, open data, open access, etc). But there is a forcing toward banality that comes with it ... a dumbing down to a least common denominator. We've become so literal, it's kinda sad. We can't all be the "cool kids". Some of us have to be left out, bullied and victimized by them. Some of us have to be the pretenders who claim to know things they don't actually know. Etc. And some of us have to bear the burden of being the dork trapped in the cool kid clique (as Snowden wants us to believe he was). Without such a class hierarchy, our language becomes robotic and lifeless. -- ⇒⇐ glen e. p. ropella I have come undone ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
