You know, if the NSA was really that good, then why did the snowden leaks happen at all?

They may have a lot of people and money, but the battle they are fighting is asymmetric, and were on the easy side. The political will is such that the NSA and their ilk needs to conduct their activities in secrecy; we don't accept widespread wiretapping when the evidence is out there in the open. We also don't accept systems that we know are insecure - we fix them.

This means that all we have to do is force their activities out into the open. MITM attacks leave evidence, which means we can fight back with encryption. Deep hardware attacks are only possible because the hardware is insecure, and we can fight back by exploiting that hardware to scare people into fixing it. We can also build our own and do it transparently with open source firmware and hardware. Sure they'll try to bug our components, but attacks are brittle; designing attacks that aren't brittle are a hard AI problem.

Finally recruitment is already down significantly at the NSA. We know that their employees are actively working to sabotage security; their employees know their future employers know that. Why would you hire a guy with a resume tainted by black ops who might be there only to make your products insecure? If you were there, why wouldn't you leave while you still can?

Wendell <w@???> wrote:
>We have absolutely no idea what all of their sources of funding are,
>and it probably doesn't matter anyway: with total information awareness
>comes total power, because there is no person on Earth that couldn't
>potentially be blackmailed. A global network of powerful people who
>desire to protect their dirty secrets could easily be a source of
>revenue far in excess of some official budget.
>
>Besides, once this infrastructure is fully rolled out, who knows how
>many people they will really need to employ. As you may have noticed,
>powerful technological advances largely have a habit of destroying
>jobs, not creating them.
>
>-wendell
>
>hivewallet.com | twitter.com/hivewallet | pgp: B7179FA88C498718
>
>On Jan 1, 2014, at 5:52 AM, Bruce Chastain wrote:
>
>> I think I've seen somewhere that the NSA budget is somewhere over 10
>billion usd a year, without that I don't think they would exist. Maybe
>a few would be able to use their skills to run shady business, but in
>large the organization itself would dissolve. When the people stop
>getting their pay checks, I don't think they'll keep coming in the
>office anymore. And I don't think 99.99% of the nsa as an org has the
>business chops to make it without straight up stealing money from the
>people. I'm not suggesting it's easy or even possible, I'm only saying
>that until it happens, I don't see any way of really "winning".
>>
>> That makes me think of the one small positive thing in this whole
>situation, we have the advantage that we are working because we really
>believe in what we are doing, 99% of the folks working over at the nsa,
>they just want a easy life with a fat pay check. If that pay drys up,
>their gone.
>
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