{"id":2115,"date":"2014-03-10T12:11:56","date_gmt":"2014-03-10T20:11:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2115"},"modified":"2014-03-10T12:11:56","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T20:11:56","slug":"lawd-jesus-its-a-fire-nsa-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/?p=2115","title":{"rendered":"Lawd Jesus It’s A Fire, NSA edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

“We\u2019ve had tremendous intelligence failures,” Snowden said, “because we\u2019re monitoring the Internet, everybody\u2019s communications, instead of<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>suspects<\/em>‘ communications, and that’s caused us to miss leads that could have helped us.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, my days of not taking Fast Eddie Snowden seriously are certainly coming to a middle. \u00a0In today\u2019s SXSWI knob-slobber, a bunch of paste-eaters went crazy for a line that basically conveys the same sensibility as the middle-aged white women who were flabbergasted at being asked to take their Manolos off going through the security line at BWI in October 2001. \u00a0Why are you searching us? \u00a0Search the brown people! \u00a0Search the foreigners! \u00a0Search the terrorists!<\/p>\n

But setting aside the propensity of well-to-do white nerds for profiling-based solutions to crime, Snowden\u2019s other argument falls flat too – which is that there is a technological solution to technological surveillance. \u00a0That\u2019s where he\u2019s flat wrong. \u00a0There\u2019s not. \u00a0Oh, sure, you can run GPG on all your mail and never connect except through Tor and eschew iOS and Android for some sort of hand-crafted phone you build yourself from an Arduino-clone, but it\u2019s the same thing that keeps glibertarians with nine assault rifles thinking they can somehow stand up to the federal government. \u00a0The asymmetry is just too great. \u00a0What\u2019s going to save you from the evil eye of Big Brother is not shooting back or building a better cloaking device. \u00a0You\u2019ll be saved when Big Brother is no longer socially acceptable.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the thing: we as a society privileged catching the horrible evil superhuman Magneto terrorists above little things like privacy, and we did it for years. \u00a0There was one vote – one<\/em> – against the PATRIOT Act when it passed, and that Senator has long since been turfed out of office in favor of another paint-by-numbers Teatard. \u00a0People don\u2019t care about privacy. \u00a0If they did, Facebook wouldn\u2019t still have a half-billion users despite whoring your data out as if it were Miley Cyrus. \u00a0Doctors who constantly hear about the legal peril of HIPAA data loss wouldn\u2019t still be forwarding their mail into Gmail for convenience. AT&T would have paid some sort of price for the revelation eight years ago<\/em> that they were routinely sending everything to the NSA.<\/p>\n

I know that everyone at Nerding Man is convinced that they are the next wave of human evolution, and God knows I think I\u2019m superior to 99% of the human race, but guess what? \u00a0The rest of the human race still exists and votes. \u00a0It\u2019s not enough if everybody on your app.net client is in favor of strong encryption and robust privacy protection if Ed Earl Brown doesn\u2019t give a shit. \u00a0And right now, he doesn\u2019t, because he doesn\u2019t think he has anything to hide and he wants terrorists to be killed, and the fact that he doesn\u2019t see it working isn\u2019t going to make him think we have to pull the plug.<\/p>\n

It should be obvious, but apparently it\u2019s not: you can\u2019t fix cultural issues with technical solutions.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n


<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“We\u2019ve had tremendous intelligence failures,” Snowden said, “because we\u2019re monitoring the Internet, everybody\u2019s communications, instead of\u00a0suspects‘ communications, and that’s caused us to miss leads that could have helped us.\u201d \u00a0 \u00a0 Well, my days of not taking Fast Eddie Snowden seriously are certainly coming to a middle. \u00a0In today\u2019s SXSWI knob-slobber, a bunch of paste-eaters … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Lawd Jesus It’s A Fire, NSA edition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iwasmisinformed.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}