Meh, they have nothing to blackmail me with at least. That being said, what
stops them from making stuff up? Nothing...

Luke

On Wednesday, January 01, 2014 2:59:14 PM Thomas Hartman wrote:
> 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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