Snowden and the Stupidity of the Security State
Back in 2006 Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, in The Starfish and the Spider, contrasted the way networks and hierarchies respond to outside attacks. Networks, when attacked, become even more decentralized and resilient. A good example is Napster and its successors, each of which has more closely approached an ideal peer-to-peer model, and further freed itself from reliance on infrastructure that can be shut down by central authority, than its predecessors. Hierarchies, on the other hand, respond to attack by becoming even more ossified, brittle and closed. Hierarchies respond to leaks by becoming internally opaque and closed even to themselves, so that their information is compartmentalized and they are less able to make effective use of the knowledge dispersed among their members.
We can see this in the way the national security state has responded to leaks, first by US Army PFC Bradley Manning and now by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Hugh Gusterton, in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Not All Secrets are Alike, July 23), notes that the government is taking measures to avoid future such leaks by segmenting access to information so that individual analysts cannot avail themselves of so much, and by giving fewer security clearances, especially to employees of contractors.
This approach is doomed. Segmentation of access runs counter to the whole point of the latest intelligence strategy, which is fusion of data from disparate sources. The more Balkanized the data, the less effective the intelligence. And
intelligence agencies are collecting so much information that they have to hire vast numbers of new employees, many of whom cannot be adequately vetted.
Meanwhile, the internal witch hunt atmosphere in the U.S. security apparatus is alienating the very contract-work hackers whose skills it is increasingly dependent on. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sticker on Snowdens laptop wasnt a deviation the NSAs leadership failed to catch. Its typical of the cultural pool from which the NSA, of necessity, recruits its contractors. Such people read the news, and they arent impressed with the governments draconian treatment of people like Aaron Swartz, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. Recruiters are running up against increased skepticism among those with the skills it needs; the chilly reception NSA chief Keith Alexander met with at DefCon is symbolic of this new atmosphere.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/12/snowden-and-the-stupidity-of-the-security-state/
xchrom
(108,903 posts)KoKo
(84,711 posts)bemildred
(90,061 posts)They don't listen. They view the public as the enemy (first mistake) instead of making the proper distinctions, and they think they can deal with the web top-down (second mistake) instead of bottom-up. In other words, their attitude is fundamentally coercive, and therefore it will fundamentally fail on the web because it will not scale up. Coercion does not scale up well, size does matter, but not the way they think.