NSA Leaks, Nuance & Me

[Galraedia]

I’m a pretty bad person to argue in favor of nuance. Historically, I’m more likely to take a hammer to an issue, rather than a scalpel. But for a second, I’d like to amble on over to Nuanceville.

I think that leaking classified information is clearly a crime, punishable by jail time and even worse in some cases (Bradley Manning, for instance). Ideally, real “whistleblowers” who want to alert us to abuses within the government should use the resources available to them to alert the proper people – often congressmen and the like – in order to have these issues addressed in a way that does not possibly endanger national security.

THAT SAID.

I think that Edward Snowden did, in fact, highlight an actual problem. I think the NSA dragnet of information is far too wide and indiscriminate. I don’t think that those arguing that this was previously known have a good case, because the wide net is still in place and may have in fact been widened. At the same time I honestly admit that I personally trust an administration led by Barack Obama to guard civil liberties more than one led by George W. Bush, because I think that Obama (and most leaders in either party) is more sensible and honest and patriotic than Bush on his best day.

Read more: http://thedailybanter.com/2013/06/nsa-leaks-nuance-me/

[bemildred]

1. The notion of cyberwarfare is an affront. And it's stupid, dumb as rocks.

Are we going to have lightning attacks on enemy servers? Destroy their email files? War is not about annoying your enemies, and nothing on the internet rises above that in real life. It's only really a problem because the silly fuckers decided they had to put computers in everything in the first place. Have we thought it over yet whether that was worth all the expense and trouble in light of the recent wars?

It is true that we need to think about defending our computer infrastructure, but that is not done by attacking someone else, that is done by making sure there is no means of attack, you can only attack a computer on a network if it LET'S you attack it. Our computers generally are attackable because users don't like the inconvenience of unattackable computers and it's expensive to fix that. So basically, we are too cheap to do it, both industry and the government, and too stupid to take them off the public net if they are that important.