Not only is there the NSA, there is whoever is spying on the NSA.

Even if the NSA dissolves, whoever that is will persist. Concretely, I guess that means the army of contractors / outsourcers that currently run a lot of the infrastructure for… well, everything, government and not.

Yes, blackmail is on the table. I think that makes people squeamish. You're thinking about encryption keys and hardware security, and suddenly it turns sexual and what could you survive being public information that everyone knows about you, or if you're a woman naked pictures of you splashed everywhere, or so on.

That's what it means to be a high profile government or private person in 2013. The persistent knowledge that at any time, everything about your sex life and thoughts (google cache) could become public. If you step out of line, BAM.

I think it's interesting that as a society, as a result of ubiquitous porn and maybe other things, we have actually become a lot less sexually squeamish in the last twenty years.

On the one hand, there's a lot more blackmail material out there but on the other hand… can this really be used to maintain control? Is the threat really effective?

It seems to me sort of like the opposite of the nuclear threat. The more you use it, the less effective it gets.

Of course that's not the only blackmail vector, but it's a big one.

So anyway, I'll say it.

Part of de-clawing the NSA (and the even murkier powers that are being it) is continuing to evolve the global societal narrative about sex.

In polite society, it's industrial espionage this and network analysis that, but when you strip all that away and look at it in the raw it's just on the level of how do the kindergarten bullies control people. Cooties, is how.

Cooties is not an unassailable weapon.

That is why I am not ultimately afraid of the NSA.

On Jan 1, 2014, at 3:24 AM, Wendell wrote:

> I think the answer, as seemingly always, is to strive for openness and decentralization in everything we do, minimizing the risk of systemic failure by a kind of biomimicry.
>
> That said, if we really have to rebuild everything from the integrated circuit on up, it's going to be a long, hard slog indeed. I'm afraid that advanced at-home fabrication won't save us in time.
>
> -wendell
>
> hivewallet.com | twitter.com/hivewallet | pgp: B7179FA88C498718
>
> On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:28 AM, Manfred Karrer wrote:
>
>> I agree with all your points. To put energy to fight NSA via governmental control is a lost fight from the start. Fight in the technological level seems unfortunately also hopeless. What else could we do?
>
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