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Like the Panthers used to say, scratch a liberal, find a pig. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/09/snowden-disclosures-nsa-bombshell-decryption [From the post:] [T]his is truly information that plenty of bad guys probably didn't know.... But now that's all changed. Now every bad guy in the world knows for a fact that commercial crypto won't help them.... For what it's worth, this is about the point where I get off the Snowden train. It's true that some of these disclosures are of clear public interest. In particular, I'm thinking about the details of NSA efforts to infiltrate and corrupt the standards setting groups that produce commercial crypto schemes. But the rest of it is a lot more dubious. It's not clear to me how disclosing NSA's decryption breakthroughs benefits the public debate much, unlike previous disclosures that have raised serious questions about the scope and legality of NSA's surveillance of U.S. persons. Conversely, it's * really* easy to see how disclosing them harms U.S. efforts to keep up our surveillance on genuine bad guys. * * * "our surveillance on genuine bad guys." A phrase that pretty much sums up this smug, self-satisfied white imperialist liberal's case. This Mother Jones blogger's name is Kevin Drum, and he's one of those liberals who was for the invasion of Iraq before he was against it. I would have imagined that it wouldn't take much more than a flea's intelligence to realize that when you break security and privacy measures, you break them for EVERYONE, not just "the genuine bad guys." Moreover, since the NSA budgeted $25 million last year to BUY information on security flaws from bad guys not in order to fix them, but exploit them, just because some bad guys may not have known doesn't mean other bad guys weren't using the very same flaws against us. And the real problem isn't that some bank may lose a few million. The problem is that if security equipment and protocols have been sufficiently undermined, it *may* be possible to stage an attack that would shut down foreign exchange markets, trading in an important commodity or a stock exchange. Especially if the attack altered who owned what assets or cash positions. The consequence could well be a paralysis of the world financial and trading systems, leading in very short order to a catastrophic collapse of the real economy on the ground ... with the most affected being the most advanced and computerized economies. Let us hope that what Snowden has done with this leak, by putting us on guard against the danger, may help avoid that doomsday scenario. J. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
