[grabhive]

The NSA continues to be viewed as a shadowy government agency, limited in its capabilities by federal law. But what do we really know about that? Besides trivial inconvenience, is there any real disadvantage to taking the most paranoid and defensive stance against it?

I continue bringing this up whenever a submission like this appears, because I am very much afraid that the technical community will accept a congressional victory as "okay, let's continue business as usual", when we need to be reinventing everything that has made mass-wiretapping possible in the first place.

[krapp]

when we need to be reinventing everything that has made mass-wiretapping possible in the first place.

Are you suggesting we somehow roll back the last sixty-odd years of telecommunications and information technology? What do you suggest we replace it with?

[grabhive]

It probably isn't necessary to replace the hardware infrastructure if privacy and security again become fashionable in software development. A great deal of important peer-to-peer, encryption and general data-obfuscation research has been done already. The trouble is, as Schneier so eloquently put it, that spying is the business model of the Internet.

But we can take another approach.

If this REALLY matters, we should be directing our attention not to some nebulous and almost certainly unenforceable government action, but rather to the eye of the storm: the very things we are building.

This is good mind-fodder if you have a moment to spare: http://zeroknowledgeprivacy.org/