Michael Hayden on the Effects of Snowden's Whistleblowing

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/07/michael_hayden.html

by aespinoza • 13 years ago

41 10 13 years ago

diminoten3• 13 years ago

I'm also tired of this argument:

    But it takes a special kind of arrogance for this young
    man to believe that his moral judgment on the dilemma
    suddenly trumps that of two (incredibly different) 
    presidents, both houses of the U.S. Congress, both 
    political parties, the U.S. court system and more than
    30,000 of his co-workers.

You might be tired of the argument, Mr. Schneier, but that doesn't mean the argument is invalid.

When you elect people to congress, you elect their whole selves, not just a collection of individual issues. It's things like these which make topics other than the direct issues valid questions in a campaign - you're trusting your congressperson to make decisions on your behalf. You need to know what kind of stuff he or she is made of so when they make decisions on things you're not aware of, you can trust them to make a decision similar to the decision you'd make were you in their position.

pstuart• 13 years ago

That's all great if the system operated in a "pure" manner as it is defined. But it doesn't. The system is corrupt and therefore makes whistleblowers one of the only avenues of defense against further corruption.

diminoten3• 13 years ago

If you think this system is corrupt, then you don't know what corruption is.

rbehrends• 13 years ago

Bruce Schneier's point wasn't that there's anything wrong with a representative democracy, but that this claim is massively overstating things: i.e. where a single secret court suddenly becomes the "U.S. court system" and a few legislators that were forbidden to discuss this matter with anyone (even where they saw problems, as Wyden and Udall did) suddenly become "both houses of the U.S. Congress".

diminoten3• 13 years ago

Yes, because it was classified. There are a whole lot of things judges and legislators are forbidden to discuss with anyone. The country runs on secrets, every country does. That's why you elect representatives.

So Bruce Schneier may not have intentionally taken issue with a representative democracy, but that's where his argument leads.

malandrew2• 13 years ago

Until they demonstrate otherwise by passing laws insulating themselves and all other representatives from lobbyist influences, I'm going to proceed under the assumption that we, the people, elect representatives that win a popularity contest and can be only trusted to make decisions on behalf of the lobbyists that are most likely to help them get re-elected in the next election.

That argument really is only valid if we have a functional democracy, which has slowly been dismantled by gerrymandering and lobbying.

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

But it takes a special kind of arrogance for this young man to believe that his moral judgment on the dilemma suddenly trumps that of two (incredibly different) presidents, both houses of the U.S. Congress, both political parties, the U.S. court system and more than 30,000 of his co-workers.

Conversely, it takes a special kind of arrogance for two (incredibly different) presidents, both houses of the U.S. Congress, both political parties, the U.S. court system and more than 30,000 of his co-workers to ignore the fact that 54% of people surveyed think this is a good thing.

http://swampland.time.com/2013/06/13/new-time-poll-support-f...

samstave• 13 years ago

Any enemy of Edward Snowden is an Enemy of the People of the United States of America.

trotsky• 13 years ago

"...the erosion of confidence in the ability of the United States to do anything discreetly or keep anything secret."

An amusingly worded statement perfectly delivered in intelligence speak. Because Mr. Hayden is so crucially aware of how improbable it is for anyone to keep anything secret at all anymore, he's only worried about people's misplaced confidence in secrecy being rationalized. The IC banks on people's impression that secrecy is still practical, but certainly once you realize that if the people most aware of the porous nature of data networks can't even stop their secure side documents from leaking en masse nobody less focused will consider their documents private.

It's a classic double edged sword - the intelligence community had been the primary driver of innovation in computer and network defense strategies. But somewhere between the beginning and the end of the development of TPM they decided that insecure computers were so valuable as an asset that it couldn't be risked that they might fund research that might accidentally result in some real level of defense.

If general Alexander spent a tenth the money on defense as he does on offensive teams and research and bugs maybe they'd actually have more advanced strategies than air gap and pray. But once the basic judgement was made that software quality issues appeared to make computer security np complete they basically gave up on the problem. Thus began the race to exploit and backdoor the world that we took an early lead in but has lead to a lot of blowback when not everyone was as concerned as we were with not sharing the benefits with private industry. Now the big states know more or less everything about each other, while US multinationals essentially have to horse trade for even basic information sharing about active intrusions on their networks. Meanwhile the only people left in the dark are members of the public that are trying to play by the rules.

Michael Hayden on the Effects of Snowden's Whistleblowing

Related Stories