Bruce Schneier, now separated from BT, asks "who can we trust"? regarding the NSA stuff.
And the answer is: not him.
Because he is not trustworthy in terms of the kind of free society you would want to live in.
The other day I was arguing with someone on Twitter with a name like @drunkeconomist about the problem of binary thinking, literalism, the geek culture, the code-as-law problem which I have outlined here in an essay on CP Snow's Two Cultures.
I really urge you to read it because I spent a long time writing and rewriting it and trying unsuccessfully to place it last year during the anti-SOPA mania.
Basically, there are three things wrong with how geeks approach governance:
o they don't understand how a bill becomes a law and don't believe in the process
o they don't understand how cases get prosecuted and how evidence has to be presented and the differet parts of the judicial system operate in checks and balances;
o they don't get how judicial review works to determine constitutionality.
And all of those things are predicated on the basic geek stinkin' thinking' that revolves around these core problems:
o if there is even one percent of a factor in negating a premise of 99 percent, then the factor is invalid; 60% won't do and even 94% won't do.
o law executes like a guillotine, never with any adjustments
o civil law -- spelling out law in detail to explain what is allowed -- versus common law -- adjudicating based on principles and identifying only what is not allowed (to give a very, very rough-and-ready definition) is the choice for geeks as closer to code-as-law. Therefore unless every single edge-case, hypothetical, problem is identified, spelled out, and remedied, nothing can stand.
There's lots more, but that sums up a lot of it.
Accordingly, you get these really, really brittle egomaniacs and perfectionist nerds like Snowden. They go into a rage-fit if they can't get their way on some bug find, and the devs won't fix it for them. They can't work through due process, or the "bill-becomes-a-law" method of principles, debates, adaptation, compromise, etc.
So I think that's why they do these enormous hacks -- to temper-tantrum and get their way. They don't understand or see how they could use the regular levers of organic society to advance a premise through negotiation, so they overwhelm with hacks to coerce their way.
That's why I think they are awful, dangerous, destructive, and must be stopped.
I noted to that @drunkeneconomist that someday, the National Guard will be sent in to pry the geeks away from their keyboards because they won't listen to common sense. But that isn't my idea, it's Ed Castronova's idea, and he isn't viewed as anyone on the loony fringes, he's a mainstream economist by day and a game economist by night. His premise was merely that if enough people escaped to virtual worlds, and wouldn't partake of normal society anymore and fulfill their obligations and duties, that the government might intervene. This was by way of a very far-out hypothetical, because usually before "the state" intervenes with the National Guard, more mundane if tragic things happen -- couples allow their babies to die while they play games; people die of heart attacks even at the age of 15 from playing games for days on end; people murder a spouse because they took away their games; etc. etc.
Most people don't immerse in virtual worlds all day -- and that could be Facebook or Twitter as much as Second Life -- because they have to "go to the bathroom" or "go to work" or "go meet their boyfriend" or "make dinner". You know how it is!
And that keeps the National Guard at bay! But seriously, there is a class of extremists -- and Greenwald, Snowden and the rest are part of it -- who have decided that no normal way works, and their way or the highway works. Because it does. Then they can claim that their destructive coerciveness "started a national conversation" or "brought about much-needed reforms".
Schneier writes that the IETF is blocking the NSA co-chair. See, it started with kicking the NSA out of Defcon, and here we all are - all on the basis of a claim (no yet proven in my view) that the NSA undermines encryption standards to enable back doors for surveillance.
So, we went from having DARPA and such and the US government controlling the Internet; then people bitching about this and the creation of non-governmental bodies like IETF and ICANN which at least cooperated with the government; and now those entities going rogue and locking out NSA/government completely. So I urge you to consider what it would be like having these folks as your overlords.
Schneier's claim that trust is shattered is overblown. The cloud business, the whole Big IT business, the whole spy business, they've all pretty much continued on their way. Yes, there was that one story that claimed that Cisco took a beating in the Chinese market over the NSA and these estimates of the losses in cloud-computing in the EU due to the NSA mania. But this isn't proven in really hard reporting, it's speculation.
That bullshit of Schneier's -- and all of that gang -- that "voters need to know what is done in their name" truly grates. We know already. We're not stupid. What's worse is that people like Snowden believe they can arrogate the name of the people by their hostile and destructive actions based on their own sectarian notions.
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