THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE on Monday blamed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for advancing the development of user-friendly, widely available strong encryption.
“As a result of the Snowden revelations, the onset of commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years,” James Clapper said during a breakfast for journalists hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
The shortened timeline has had “a profound effect on our ability to collect, particularly against terrorists,” he said.
When pressed by The Intercept to explain his figure, Clapper said it came from the National Security Agency. “The projected growth maturation and installation of commercially available encryption — what they had forecasted for seven years ahead, three years ago, was accelerated to now, because of the revelation of the leaks.”
Asked if that was a good thing, leading to better protection for American consumers from the arms race of hackers constantly trying to penetrate software worldwide, Clapper answered no.
“From our standpoint, it’s not … it’s not a good thing,” he said.
Technologists have been tirelessly working to strengthen encryption for decades, not just the past few years. But Snowden’s revelations about the pervasiveness of mass surveillance clearly accelerated its more widespread availability.
And technologists say the threat of law enforcement “going dark” has been overhyped. For instance, there are almost always ways to hack around encryption, even if you can’t break it.
Clapper acknowledged that there is no such thing as unbreakable encryption from his perspective. “In the history of mankind, since we’ve been doing signals intelligence, there’s really no such thing, given proper time, and proper application of technology.”
Top photo: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
He lied under oath, faced no charges for lying and as a result (who’d be afraid if there are no consequences?) is probably still lying today. The media still gives him a voice. The people still listen to what he has to say. The news reporters still spend time reporting his views.
This seems normal to you?
Yea, and Mr. Clapper sped up the demise of our supposed democracy by 7 decades.
Edward Snowden is a patriot to the Constitution. If that’s seen as a threat to this government, it tells you something about this government.
James Clapper is a traitor and should be in prison. And the spineless politicians who’ve done nothing after being lied to by Clapper regarding the undermining of our Constitution should be in prison right beside him.
This government has no legitimacy.
Clapper is an stupid liar and Brennan is a naive honest person.
What a couple…..
No wonder the terrorist are winning
When you make enemies, you live in fear.
What we know: Clapper & Co. got very little actionable intelligence via electronic snooping before Snowden. I strongly suspect that they are up to something other than their stated objectives- catching “terrorists.”
If Snowden has had an effect on the NSA & others having free reign to rummage through our personal lives, then it is just one more thing to thank Snowden for.
Wouldn’t it be nice if James Clapper would respond to a REAL CLAPPER? We could all CLAP TWICE and shut this bozo off. Clapper is a disgusting man.
“The shortened timeline has had “a profound effect on our ability to collect, particularly against terrorists,” he said.”
This terrorist thing is very confusing. Who are the terrorists; the Islamic radical groups that have taken 45 lives on American soil since 9/11, or the right-wing neo- fascists groups that have taken 49 lives on US soil since 9/11, or the US lead coalition that has taken well over a million Arab lives all over the Middle East in what is now becoming a never ending WWIII?
Those of the corporate/war mongering media that jam propaganda down the captured audience’s throats having to endure sound bites exclaiming “we value life more than our civil liberties and it’s temporary until the problem goes away.” Need to understand what “only temporary” implies. John Adams created “The Alien and Sedition Acts” that was the inspiration for The Sedition Act of 1918 which is still used to stifle citizen’s right, and was the further inspiration of the Patriot Act, and section 1021 of NDAA that took away rights granted as far back as the Magna Carta.
Temporary means for as long as they can take it from us, and how it helps them to eventually take more.
Sir, your perceptions are spot-on. Reality dictates and history proves that those in power will do whatever they believe they can get away with to maintain and expand their powers indefinitely. Power is not unlike a drug; addictive, causes dependency upon expedience that must trump morality & civic responsibility to get the next ” fix”, it is destructive of anything and anyone who hinders access to the next “high” sought by it’s addicts. Proof? “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Lord Acton
I am even willing to conced that I may be wrong: “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” -Aung San Suu Kyi
“The shortened timeline has had “a profound effect on our ability to collect, particularly against terrorists,” he said.”
Complete fabrication. Recent terrorist attacks (e.g. Paris) have exclusively used unencrypted communication like cell phone SMS.
I believe what you’re trying to say is that as a result of Snowden , violating your own laws and spying on the entire planet is now more difficult.
And you would like to throw him in jail forever for telling the world you can’t be bothered to follow your own laws, and for Clapper (or “The Clap” ) getting caught lying to congress and demonstrating that not even the USA Government has a clue what you’re doing.
https://ipsoscustodes.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/theintercept-spy-chief-complains-that-edward-snowden-sped-up-spread-of-encryption-by-7-years/
RCL
Even straight to your face liars and part-time manipulators are not deprived of conscious intent or sense of their survival needs and their own selfish reality. Of those, even the ones with no morally guided principles whatsoever are not totally deranged. They just make use of our collective shortsightedness and stupidity.
The reasons why they must: “Collect it All”, “Process it All”, “Exploit it All”, “Partner it All”, “Sniff it All” ™, with the believed ultimate purpose of “Knowing it All” in order to be able to entertain “playing God” illusions are because:
1) otherwise they would have to “Make Sense of it All” and, ouch!, that would be too hurtful to them (which they know), having to actually think, make sense of things, is way beyond what those so-called “intelligence” agencies can actually do;
In order to become police they make you sit I.Q. test and … no, it is not to screen idiots or survey their human capital, but to bar those deemed “too smart” (which to them would be like you were able to finish 6th grade), because they would be “too good to be true” and surely will be problematic in the long run
// __ nytimes + abcnews: Police Can “legally” Bar High I.Q. Scores …
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/09/nyregion/metro-news-briefs-connecticut-judge-rules-that-police-can-bar-high-iq-scores.html
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
Think of it, it is as if there were official, public regulations stating: “if you are a decent person you can’t work in Wall Street” ;-)
Neurobiologist Kent Kiehl has been extensively researching the brain of psychopaths. He has found a very high correlation between the size of the amygdalae (feelings) and the connection of interneurons between amygdalae and the prefrontal cortex (rationality, executive control). He asked to do the same with police and he was allowed to do so under the condition that he doesn’t publish his findings!?! ;-) I wonder if he extended his research to those kinds of psychopaths called politicians.
// __ How the Psychopathic Brain informs about Recidivism
youtube.com/watch?v=oAEYwgDre3g
// __ The Human Brain (full documentary) HD
youtube.com/watch?v=q_5myLhhzwE
(32:50): moral questions …
~
Now, I know all societies have a share of those kinds of folks in need of “occupational therapy”, what I think is very wrong is when we let them to take over and start acting the way they have been for way too long.
NSA folks don’t fair that much better. What they may have in computer sciences and psychology degrees, they sorely lack in decency and morality. Isn’t it telling that it took so long for one of them: Edward Snowden, to have moral pangs about the purpose of it all and come forward to denounce their lying @sses in ways that they couldn’t deny anymore?
2) since they are very essentially imperialistic, they must “Screw Us All”. USG simply can’t exist without messing with the world at large. At this point it is getting down to our own individual lives. They use all that tired talk about “freedom loving” and “democracy” to entertain themselves and come off as more senselessly diabolical which creates some exploitable conscious dissonance in your opposing targets;
3) current technologies make functional illusions of all-encompassing pervasive “awareness” so cheap and functionally easy that even “philosophizing about sophisticated nonsense such as ethical concerns” is a measurable waste of time to them.
Not long ago they would make some prisoners on parole ware bracelets 24×7. Now people not only pay for their TV sets, but most carry more than one cell phone (just in case one the bracelets missfunctions and for better triangulation) leaving a centimetrically detailed trace of your whereabouts (they also have 3-D data structures of whole cities) which they correlate with everyone’s else and keep for good. All people are talking about is being recorded, people are busy posting their “private” matters about their lives online and even abysmally entertaining selecting whom they would consider to be within their “private circles” while they are at it … they have started to market “self-driving cars” so that they have even greater control of our lives
// __ In Response to Theories on Michael Hastings’ Fatal Crash
youtube.com/watch?v=yUC3GFDoO4s
Now, try to convince those kinds of folks that they can’t do away with personal privacy and run an all invasive police state when, in fact, U.S. IT companies had been successfully running their proof of concept for years prior to the NSA realization of its potential.
Technically speaking, the NSA probably is the less wasting and probably most efficient (I would even say, -technically- (not morally by any stretch) speaking less corrupt) of U.S. agencies and companies. Primarily, due to Moore’s (hardware) Law, they have been consistently doing more with less and less and that will not change any time soon (or -ever- I would say). In a few years from now hardware will be so cheap that even on a personal level people will individually have more storage space that they will ever need so that even the cloud would not make any sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-assisted_magnetic_recording
The meaning of that “ever” stanza is becoming scarily true. It is not just a quantitative difference but a qualitative shift of paradigm.
There are no such thing as “artificial intelligence” or probably “intelligence” departments would be the only ones believing such a thing possible (which I doubt). The Greeks were the first ones to use mechanical devices to “prove” theorems, but they would not kid themselves to the point of believing those devices to be “intelligent” “an sich”. They knew they were just syntactic devices through and through. Beep blue beat Kasparov simply because chess as a Rubik’s cube is a fully syntactic game and the Turing test is no prove of anything semantic:
http://brainmeta.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php?t21887.html
There is no “Abracadabra” incantation in so-called “Bid Data”
http://mailman.uib.no/public/corpora/2011-August/013543.html
“Artificial Intelligence” is the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” of our times.
RCL
with their erratic, compulsive, morally careless behavior; that is
if you want to, say, become a pilot, you must have perfect eye sight, because the lives of hundreds of people may be risked just by one untimely flicker of your eyes
When I see Obama proudly boasting about double taps (knowing well that no “terrorist” who can tie his shoe strings would get close to those areas, that it must be their family members compulsively reacting towards their loved ones and people just acting out their sense of humanity), I wonder what those “patriots” and all their acolytes carry in their minds:
// __ Obama Brags About Out of Control Drone Strategy
youtube.com/watch?v=vAah_HYFsgk
~
// __ Obama officials refuse to say if assassination power extends to US soil
theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/22/obama-brennan-paul-assassinations-filibuster
~
// __ Drone Strikes in Pakistan, Yemen & Somalia include targeting Rescuers and Funerals
youtube.com/watch?v=snWThfF1WXU
~
silly me is not trying to promote a “neurobiologically-based” classist society a lá Plato’s [email protected] Republic based on “virtue”
As all those smarty pants working for the NSA show having a degree in Psychology doesn’t make you a wholesome person, but if you can’t go as far as articulating the reality of what goes on in its proper dimensions and scope, you are less likely to gather any feelings about it?
Nobel Prize Richard Feynman, even if then too late, related to us the whole period of depression and moral pangs from which he never totally recovered after the baby he so proudly worked on was dropped in Japan, as instantly as indiscriminately, senselessly killing hundreds of thousands of people. If you don’t have any true sense of it, jingoistic feelings of “patriotic pride” kick in easier.
RCL
This guy claims he’s on your side, but he’s not he’s on the government’s side and I guess all the mafia that entails. Here he is complaining that the criminals in the federal gubbernut can’t hack their slaves, I mean citizens email as easily. Ha, thanks Edward Snowden :)
Some of the worst events in world history happen when government leaders violate their own rule book and own Constitution.
It’s not complicated, citizens are advertised a set of “rules of the road” to comply with (by both citizens and government servants).
When government officials violate their own rule book – advertised to it’s citizens – the consequences are always really bad in the end. These disloyal officials punish citizens complying with the laws – not law breakers – which discredits the legitimacy of the government itself.
The American Revolution in the 18th Century was about England violating it’s own rule book or contract with it’s citizens and colonists. The Founding Fathers created a Bill of Rights to “restrain” government authority. When we ignore this contract it’s extremely dangerous.
Another good follow-up question would have been, “So did the NSA’s 7 year estimate factor in the time and effort that they spend inserting backdoors into source code for vendor products (like what they did with Juniper’s VPN servers) and open source developers?” Because, if it weren’t for the NSA’s continuous efforts to compromise IMPLEMENTATIONS of encryption technology, we’d have already been a lot closer to better encryption solutions.
The doublespeak also ignores the fact that technological development follows the needs and wants of consumers. By classifying and hiding some of the vulnerabilities in poorer encryption technologies for as long as they have, the NSA actually PREVENTED the improvement of encryption technology for a long time.
So either way, the NSA numbers are every bit as sickeningly untrustworthy and tainted as is so much of what they say.
Oh, and don’t use AES unless you have no other choice.
One Word, GREAT !!!
James Clapper is the man who committed PERJURY and was NEVER even looked at twice. Edward Snowden is a hero and Clapper isn’t even worthy of spit shinning Snowden shoes!
Clapper is one that is helping DESTROY THE USA with these ENDLESS ILLEGAL WARS! It is thanks to Snowden that all of YOU GOT BUSTED! That is what Clapper hates. I tell Clapper to suck it up and get in front of the firing squad with the rest of his TERRORIST that are KILLING innocent PEOPLE around the WORLD! Obama should be right next to him.
Must be some kind of failure to communicate here, Jenna. You should have asked if it was a good thing for the NSA to be … penetrated.
*terminology notes:
Hacker = someone(s) who steals your money
Traitor = someone(s) who steals NSA crown jewels
Let me tweak that just a little…
Hacker = someone who breaks into your private information and steals from you.
Traitor = someone who exposes the fact that US intel agencies are just glorified hackers with no oversight or policing.
They aren’t even very good hackers, they just have way too much funding and no rules
I’ll show James Clapper an unencrypted sign. In fact, I’ll give him two, just for the fun of it. Two big middle fingers right at you, James.
Wasn’t this the guy that committed the well publicised felony of lying to congress? They should rename him the Teflon Don – but then he probably wouldn’t risk being coated in that hazardous material. Just like Hillary, Crapper is seemingly immune from prosecution.
What is the point of this article, apart from causing readers reactions? Nothing M.Clapper says can be relied upon, and very little of it verified. The article, if it was necessary to publish at all, should have run:
M. Clapper produced sounds in front of journalists last week.
Clapper was on the Board of Booz Allen and Hamilton which is where Edward Snowden worked but then so did
R. James Woolsey head of the CIA
Caryn Wagner former Under Secretary in the Department of Homeland Security position,
Keith R. Hall – Director, National Reconnaissance Office,
Thomas S. Moorman Jr. – Commander, Air Force Space Command ,
John M. McConnell – Director of National Intelligence, formerly Director of the National Security Agency,
Jonathan S. Bush – President, CEO, and Co-founder of athenaHealth
Guilty of Lying to congress. Jail only appropiate new home for hin. Life sentence. Lying thief! Facsist!
Clapper is a liar and should be in jail anyway. Who cares or believes anything that he says, he has no credibility left period !
His statements about encryption may be somewhat true in that, it is all decipherable if you have the time and computing power. But the time can become so long that it does no good to attempt to decrypt it, even with incredible computing power. The mathematics are well know Mr. Clapper. Inadvertently!
Breaking a symmetric 256-bit key by brute force requires 2128 times more computational power than a 128-bit key. Fifty supercomputers that could check a billion billion (1018) AES keys per second (if such a device could ever be made) would, in theory, require about 3×1051 years to exhaust the 256-bit key space. Just short of forever with the right encryption.
Or just short of no time at all with quantum computing. But then again that would also be secure. Such machines will be made.
That said, the guy is an ass and should be living under a rock.
Thanks. This is good information that fills in some blanks for me. I was thinking dammit, not even encryption is safe. But, given this information, actually, it is.
Why isn’t that felon in jail? Oh right, we reward our elite criminals, including war criminals with pensions, consulting careers and media esteem. “Hillary for Head Criminal 2016″ !
In a system that genuinely values the rule of law, this spookazoid would be in a jail cell for the felony of lying to congress. But, as America is currently challenged regarding its value system, when he tires of this gig–and that seems remote any time soon, given the pure fun he must be having acting out his authoritarian impulses–he’ll just revolve right out of this government agency into the private world, where surely there will await a king’s (or a certain politician’s) ransom for his insider knowledge and expertise in fucking people over.
Meanwhile, back at the hood, little Jimmy just got his teeth cracked and a gun in his face for (insert petty crime here.)
Ain’t America grand!
Brilliant, just spot on.
Thanks, I appreciate your comment. It’s as if his lies didn’t even happen, isn’t it? And, both parties are complicit. If the law isn’t enforced, in effect, there’s no law. Thanks for not upholding the law–except against the powerless–valued representatives…
And THIS is the kind of idiots who run national intelligence. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. No wonder we (and other Western countries) are being attacked. A near total incompetence in charge. How do these fools ever get hired?
Major General Clapper took ten years to catch up with Osama bin Laden. He never caught up with Mulla Omar who is now frolicking with all the virgins (whose status have not changed as he has left his equipment behind). He doesn’t know where Aiman al Zawahiri or Abu Baker al Bagdadi are. He let Snowden and at least one more person escape with classified information. He is a miserable failure and should be court-martialed for incompetence and demoted to the rank of Cpl Clapper. He can’t catch terrorists and he cites Snowden as excuse for not doing his own job.
All he can do is beg Lt. Kim Jong Un for releasing our spies instead of nuking the damn country. Shameful character this fellow Clapper.
I can’t stand the bastard either, but Clapper knew OBL was dead long before 10 years later. Dec. 2001 in fact:
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/11/20/bin-ladens-obituary-notice/
the whole damn world, you meant?
RCL
As a sidetrack, which of these spooks do you think is going to be the Republican presidential nominee? Presumably Trump gets just enough votes to be nominated, but some fail to show up, vote the wrong way, some tricky dick maneuver. Cruz is not viable as a candidate. They need a dark horse, and in the time-honored Stalin-Bush tradition, that means they need someone from an intelligence agency. But who? Most of the Republican appointees are too old. My very tentative guess, based only on flipping through some Wikipedia pages, is maybe Keith Alexander. But does someone here have a more clued-in idea?
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
– CIA Director William Casey, February 1981, when his new boss Ronald Reagan asked what he saw as his goal as director for the CIA.
What a head case. Literally. Bill Casey was the chief CIA spook who chose have elective brain surgery right as “Iran contra gate” was hitting the congressional
fan just shortly before “Bud” McFarlands suicide attempt (if memory serves?)
We already know.
Great documentary on the US Gov agencies (AFOIS & NSA) providing disinformation to a useful idiot via various “perception management campaigns”. I’ve never seen anything like it before, but since it’s about UFOs most people won’t get to see how government agencies operate at this level to protect their interests. I think it’s one of the most insightful movies about disinformation.
Mirage Men (2013) – ”Tagline: How the US government created a myth that took over the world.”
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_management
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Also, the UK TV series Spooks (2002-2011) (aka “MI-5” in the US market) is as good as it is annoying, with their self-righteous overstep.
Could that mean that this truly abominable example of Murphy’s Law has already run through the 50 Billion dollars he was given and needs another 50B?
His Department seems to simply needs to listen to everybody, Gestapo-style, but has apparently not stopped anything from all of its listening in on the world’s communications. He should be fired. There must be someone of greater competence in DC, but then he’s at the top rung of our Deep State government.
Notwithstanding my aversion to ending a sentence with a preposition… I suggest that with reference to Clapper, the a “sentence” should be carried out and it end with
“…should be ‘fired upon’ “.
Clapper is a coward, a liar and a traitor and should be in jail. Snowden is 100x more of an American than Clapper ever could be.
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF METADATA,
ENCRYPTION OFFERS LIMITED PROTECTION,
It is more important where I live, what domain I go to, who I call, when I call them, how often I call them, where my phone goes, etc. When they say its only metadata, they mean it is everything but content.
They don’t collect metadata because it is useless. They collect it because it is more powerful.
If I am going to call you about terrorizing a Target store, I would be afraid and say something in a coded and casual way, “Want to go to the mall, I heard there is a sale going on today”. I would never do this, I do not support anyone who would do this. But you see what I mean, content is hard to analyze, store, and look through, but Metadata can’t easily be encrypted.
Lets be honest, if they want you they can hack you. They have tools like TURBINE.
They freak out about encryption, but I have a feeling they are a step ahead of us. It is the powerful, vs the Nimble. The powerful have strong tools, big storage, and complex systems. But we, the Nimble, have the ability to dash between tools, we don’t have their power, but we can run faster. It is TheNimble VS TheMighty.
I still have no idea how much crypto has been accelerated by Snowden’s whistleblowing. The Clapper leaves the actual GOAL which has supposedly been reached 7 years early as an undefined variable. This makes The Clapper’s complaint meaningless.
Consider: maybe NSA predicted a big change. Maybe they predicted a small change. The Clapper’s not saying.
Did NSA predict that 95% of American businesses would finally use good encryption routinely in 7 years? That would be worthy of consideration. Or was the prediction just a 5% increase? That would actually be good news for spies, but The Clapper’s wrapped it up and made it sound scary.
What is clear is that The Clapper is a hysterical clown, and no reasonable person can believe anything he says. If someone shot him in the chest, it would be wise to be skeptical even of the sucking sound coming from the wound.
and we all know that Clapper and company never lie which is a really big help for making assessments and decisions.
All manner of bad guys have been using encryption since its inception. The only thing Snowden accelerated is the adoption of encryption by ‘everyday’ citizens to safe guard their privacy.
It appears each and everyone of us now has a dossier from our childhood Facebook posts until old age. Anyone that participates at all in the democratic process is guilty. This is extremely dangerous because it allows government bureaucrats (and contractors) to become the “Thought Police”.
You may be punished for attending the wrong church or may be punished for not attending church at all – nobody knows the rules so each bureaucrat can decide who to punish without any risk of criminal prosecution for the bureaucrat.
What’s makes it dangerous is you can be punished, defamed or destroyed for being law abiding! You could be punished for being a Democrat during a GOP administration until the other party takes power. When your party is in power you are rewarded when the other party is in power you are punished. Sort of like the Bolshevicks in Russia or the China citizen scores.
It’s sort of like the “Double Secret Probation” on the movie “Animal House” except far worse than the movie’s justice system. In this system you never get arrested or receive a trial and can never defend yourself.
The state you live in has at least one “Fusion Center” usually operated by your State Police. You can file a Freedom of Information to receive a copy of your own dossier.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2016/04/21/new-york-times-wants-info-on-fusion-centers.htm
New York Times Wants Info on Fusion Centers
By NICK RUMMELL
MANHATTAN (CN) — The New York Times wants a federal judge to have the Department of Homeland Security release documents related to counterterrorism “fusion centers” that have been roundly criticized in recent years.
“Intelligence” of any kind must still operate within the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, there is no terrorism exemption to the U.S. Constitution.
American citizens can still sue for the personnel assets of government bureaucrats that violate their Bill of Rights. Sovereign Immunity doesn’t protect bureaucrats for crimes against the Constitution.
The problem is if judges allow “non-confrontational” blacklisting it makes it near impossible for citizens to prove “legal standing” in court. It’s the same type of blacklisting used by the communists during the Cold War, then adopted by the FBI against people like Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today the U.S. doesn’t have a Justice system at all, not sure why we need courts and judges at all if they allow this type of blacklisting. Thanks for the link.
I’ll see you that and raise you one letter….
ATTN: DOJ Office of Privacy & Civil Liberties
c/o Erika Brown Lee and Associates
[[email protected]]
Dear Ms. Brown Lee ,
This is a letter of initial intent to express non-consent, to opt-out or to retroactively withdraw or remove any tacit or subjectively presumed consent for use and dissemination of my non-criminal information, public or non-public, for mass surveillance by any US federal agency with observance of the Privacy Act of 1974 as a matter of cease & desist.
Specifically, the agencies I am most concerned with may conduct national security, homeland security, law enforcement and global enforcement of US foreign policy. These agencies do not have my consent to use, share, disseminate or continue to use my personally identified information for non-criminal surveillance purposes.
I am invoking my right to expunge, delete, or destroy all data swept up for mass surveillance purposes at the technical convenience of any agencies involved. This includes but is not limited to 3rd party contractors, online APIs, or Fusion Center aggregates who conduct or produce consumer investigative reports or who provide market intelligence services for online products and services to government agencies for mass surveillance purposes and other related services. They do not have my consent to use my information. I expect a full stop of the process of my data as a US citizen.
Furthermore, I am interested in due process to provide complaint or to pursue criminal charges against agency actors who produced this content by using a secret database or hidden means of collection without my notice or consent.
Please indicate the method for me to follow through with this process so I can remove my information for use.
If due process implicates me as a target for criminal investigation so that my information is in use, I request to know what qualifies the criminal matter and if I am under reasonable suspicion of a crime. These matters are currently unknown to me. If they are reason to continue to amass surveillance information I expect to be able to resolve this with personal legal assistance from an attorney.
I request to be able to face my accuser in accordance with the Confrontation Clause of the 6th Amendment of the US Bill of Rights. If they are available to conduct personal mass surveillance on a transactional basis, then they must be available for confrontation with concern to any accusation of my crime.
Thank you for your assistance with this matter.
Sincerely,
[YOUR NAME]
[ADDRESS]
[PHONE]
For whatever it’s worth: I’m an average person. Weird perhaps, but average. I now use encrypted text messaging because I value privacy and expressive, intimate space. My challenge has been to have family members embrace encrypted communication. They are still busy putting all of their personal information on Facebook. Yes, I would say that in reading the information Snowden put out about data collection and surveillance, it has caused a change in my behavior. I’m not sure I had an opinion of our intelligence agencies before Snowden, but now I tend to view them in a negative light, understanding more of what they have been doing and continue to do. I don’t feel protected by them, but more like a victim. We are the leaders of the free world, right?
the “free-for-all” world.
Dear Mr. Clapper.
It could always be worse. For you.
Consider how the Chinese punish serious crimes against the citizenry.
and how it is worse for all of u.s.
The population of America has been lied to since 1913. WW2 precipitated by a lie. Korean war run on lies. death of JFK lies. Vietnam lies. Nixon lies. Reagan lies. Bush lies. Clinton lies. WMD lies. Wallstreet lies. Obama lies.
America wasn’t built on lies, it floats on lies. And what was that big flushing sound?
The presupposition of the NSA is without basis because they assume their overall strategy is sound. It is not.
The NSA strategy and, by consequence, that of the CIA, is grounded in the mad attempt to collect as much data as possible, wasting billions of tax payer dollars on “data” centers where raw data and “meta data” is collected, stored and dissected. The volume of data is simply too excessive even for artificial intelligence software with sophisticated algorithms to sift through.
This cannot work, will not work and HAS NOT been working.
In the meantime, the proliferation and acceleration of encryption will make it harder for hackers to target specific individuals and sectors of business in the inevitable mass attacks that are to come as prelude to an actual enemy strike.
We must assume and prepare for a triple threat in ANY reasonable defensive posture: Cyber Attacks, EMP, Military Invasion designed to knock out defense and counter attacking capabilities. But our defensive strategy is based on World War 2 era conceptions – giant aircraft carriers, ICBM’s, stealth bombers and submarines. These strategical deployments may be rendered either obsolete or ineffective after a modern strike designed to do mass damage to command, control and communications infrastructure.
And if I, a complete amateur can see this….WHY CAN’T THE CIA AND NSA MANAGEMENT ???
No ICBMs or stealth bombers in WWII, and carriers and subs were smaller (no nuclear power).
American colonists in 1775 were the terrorists who beat the big armies, big guns, big ships, big money. I’m starting to feel a little British now.
Even straight to your face liars and manipulators are not deprived of conscious intent or sense of their survival and their own selfish reality. Of those, even the ones with no morally guided principles whatsoever are not totally deranged. They just make use of our collective shortsightedness and stupidity.
The reasons why they must: “Collect it All”, “Process it All”, “Exploit it All”, “Partner it All”, “Sniff it All” ™, with the believed ultimate purpose of “Knowing it All” in order to be able to entertain “playing God” illusions are because:
1) otherwise they would have to “Make Sense of it All” and, ouch!, that would be too hurtful to them (which they know), having to actually think, make sense of things, is way beyond what those so-called “intelligence” agencies can actually do;
2) since they are very essentially imperialistic, they must “Screw Us All”. USG simply can’t exist without messing with the world at large. At this point it is getting down to our own individual lives. They use all that tired talk about “freedom loving” and “democracy” to entertain themselves and come off as more senselessly diabolical which creates some exploitable conscious dissonance in your opposing targets;
3) current technologies make functional illusions of all-encompassing pervasive “awareness” so cheap and functionally easy that even “philosophizing about sophisticated nonsense such as ethical concerns” is a measurable waste of time to them.
Not long ago they would make some prisoners on parole ware bracelets 24×7. Now people not only pay for their TV sets, but most carry more than one cell phone (just in case one the bracelets missfunctions and for better triangulation) leaving a centimetrically detailed trace of your whereabouts (they also have 3-D data structures of whole cities) which they correlate with everyone’s else and keep for good. All people are talking about is being recorded, people are busy posting their “private” matters about their lives online and even abysmally entertaining selecting whom they would consider to be within their “private circles” while they are at it … they have started to market “self-driving cars” so that they have even greater control of our lives
// __ In Response to Theories on Michael Hastings’ Fatal Crash
youtube.com/watch?v=yUC3GFDoO4s
Now, try to convince those kinds of folks that they can’t do away with personal privacy and run an all invasive police state when, in fact, U.S. IT companies had been successfully running their proof of concept for years prior to the NSA realization of its potential.
Technically speaking, the NSA probably is the less wasting and probably most efficient (I would even say, -technically- (not morally by any stretch) speaking less corrupt) of U.S. agencies and companies. Primarily, due to Moore’s (hardware) Law, they have been consistently doing more with less and less and that will not change any time soon (or -ever- I would say). In a few years from now hardware will be so cheap that even on a personal level people will individually have more storage space that they will ever need so that even the cloud would not make any sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat-assisted_magnetic_recording
The meaning of that “ever” stanza is becoming scarily true. It is not just a quantitative difference but a qualitative shift of paradigm.
There are no such thing as “artificial intelligence” or probably “intelligence” departments would be the only ones believing such a thing possible (which I doubt). The Greeks were the first ones to use mechanical devices to “prove” theorems, but they would not kid themselves to the point of believing those devices to be “intelligent” “an sich”. They knew they were just syntactic devices through and through. Beep blue beat Kasparov simply because chess as a Rubik’s cube is a fully syntactic game and the Turing test is no prove of anything semantic:
http://brainmeta.com/forum/lofiversion/index.php?t21887.html
There is no “Abracadabra” incantation in so-called “Bid Data”
http://mailman.uib.no/public/corpora/2011-August/013543.html
“Artificial Intelligence” is the “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” of our times.
RCL
Clapper said the same thing he has been saying for a long time. How is that news? Am I missing something?
Perhaps you’ve missed where Gen. Michael Hayden, Michael Chertoff, Mike McConnell, David H. Petraeus, James Woolsey and Richard A. Clarke are all now saying something different. It seems they all now agree with Edward Snowden on this point:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/business/on-encryption-battle-apple-has-advocates-in-ex-national-security-officials.html?_r=1
Pedinska, I miss your cat.
The Bill of Rights are totally meaningless if a defenseless law abiding citizen can’t restrain any and all government agencies from violating his or her privacy rights.
The Bill of Rights is also very good for intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies – it focuses their resources only down “rabbit holes” where there is “probable cause” of a past crime instead of fruitless fishing expeditions. That was the assessment from former FBI Field Agent, Michael German, that specialized in domestic terrorism for over a decade.
It’s curable, but today we don’t really have any intelligence agencies – we have a communist style secret police that is trying to create dossiers on every citizen like the East German Stasi did – not based on any wrongdoing or any probable cause of a past crime.
today we don’t really have any intelligence agencies – we have a communist style secret police that is trying to create dossiers on every citizen like the East German Stasi did – not based on any wrongdoing or any probable cause of a past crime.
just wanted to repeat that for emphasis. We are a corrupt third world country ruled by wealthy thieves who consider us as cattle and expendable for their wallstreet wars for profiteering.
And Jim, please don’t forget to mention how these people turned terrorist in the first place.
Ofcourse, as you well know, this has to do “something” with US & Western policy concerning the countries they come from. Terrorism, a welcome enemy after the cold war ended and a “good reason” to get more involved in the Middle East. Don’t mind the arms-industry making a buck on the side.
As you also know, mass-surveillance won’t put an end to it. Why don’t you just tell us so? The governement would do better by taking a good look in the mirror to stop this mayhem they themselves keep producing in the world.
BTW Jim: which war-monger will you be voting for next election ?
Thanks to Edward Snowden we all know a little more about your doings !
I’m sorry, but I think this is all a bait and switch. “Encryption” may be moving forward, but it is the kind of encryption that Apple or some other company can circumvent whenever they feel like they rewriting the operating system. And the only things it takes to get them to rewrite the operating system are money and secrecy. I would be astonished if they have not already given the NSA all the back doors they want. We can’t let the dribbling out of a few secrets confuse us into thinking we know everything.
Apple, Google, Facebook… I am no technologist but I worry more about the porn industry planting back doors!
What exactly are you suggesting with this most evocative image?
And you are no farmer either!
So you are saying this thing between Apple and the FBI was just another act in the current play running in Security Theatre?
Oh, that’s not even something I have to argue – you already know it. It had nothing to do with the FBI not getting access – only about them having to pay for access. Whether the “hackers” who knew the back door paid some programmer inside Apple for their access, or even Apple itself, is another question. But it’s all irrelevant, because Apple admits it can write a new operating system with a back door and put it on the phone in a couple of weeks. Provided it’s worth their while and they don’t get any negative publicity. According to corporate “ethics”, it would be wrong for them to pass up that kind of money making opportunity – if you were a shareholder and you knew they had done nothing to avail themselves of it, in theory you could file a shareholder lawsuit to make them.
I also expect that Snowden is a triple agent. I think he released what they wanted released, didn’t release what they didn’t want released, and I expect he’s running around Russia pretending to be a useful idiot when actually he’s still working for the NSA. Though I imagine the Russians have hopes of making him a quadruple agent, sextuple, who knows?
Of course we do not have to look at it from Clapper’s POV. My POV is that terrorism currently causes a small amount of damage in the US, so small that it is easily outweighed by the savings from reduced fraud resulting from better encryption.
Now I could speculate, and say that better encryption also potentially saves lives because it makes it harder for terrorists to steal information about their targets, etc.
What good is encryption when the Government can read your mind?http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/scalar_tech/esp_scalartech12.htm
Could Mona or some other clearly intelligent if somewhat abrasive skeptic kindl point us toward a few links debunking this material?
https://ipsoscustodes.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/theintercept-20160422-judge-grants-torture-victims-their-first-chance-to-pursue-justice-links-debunking-this-material/
RCL
The senior Imperial apparatchiks operate well above the law. The president openly shows contempt for the law why should his most important operatives be hindered by it?
I am trying to find an article from The Intercept’s archives which was published about four months ago.
The article was about an Arab potentate who told a news conference about an intelligence program or rather an agreement that the Arab Gulf States and/or Saudi “taking over” intelligence after Watergate as the US was “frozen” and couldn’t “send agents” or do aggressive spying so the Arabs had to take over. The program has a very common word as its name.
I may be the world’s worst internet searcher as I have exhausted every search term I can think of and can’t find it again – I did find it once and didn’t bookmark it a mistake.
Clapper is still in charge of the NSA? That explains a lot.
Thank you Mr. Snowden, for helping this encryption process along.
That would be Michael Rogers. Clapper is Director of intelligence…
Clapper is a proven perjuring POS who belongs in jail for a long, long time, something that will hopefully be coming to pass with the next administration. As for the literary merits of the Christian Science Monitor, no comment.
Hahaha, “something that will hopefully be coming to pass with the next administration” that’s a good one. Every single one of the clowns running for president is as big or bigger cheerleader of the NSA than President Obama. More like you can expect Clapper to be *promoted* in the next administration.
“Every single one of the clowns running for president is as big or bigger cheerleader of the NSA than President Obama.”
I assume you meant “every single one of the clowns running for president AS A DEMOCRAT OR A REPUBLICAN…”
Otherwise, not accurate.
http://www.jill2016.com
Absolutely. The fact that this liar still has a job is a disgrace.
FYI Mr. Clapper
We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.
Benjamin Franklin
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constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.”
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Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.
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Lost time is never found again.
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He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.
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Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.
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They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety.
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Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
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The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.
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We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
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A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.
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Distrust and caution are the parents of security.
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Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.
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Half a truth is often a great lie.
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He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for
money.
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The strictest law sometimes becomes the severest injustice.
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This is the guy who lied to Congress. I don’t think we really need to take anything he claims seriously anymore. The faster we protect our privacy and repeal this tyranny, the better.
My math isn’t very good, but isn’t 7-3=4? This would conflict with Mr. Clapper’s earlier claim that “commercial encryption has accelerated by seven years”. Of course, the NSA allegedly hires more mathematics Ph.Ds than all other organizations in the US combined, so I can’t imagine they would be wrong about this.
“My math isn’t very good,”
Remember your number line.
The total acceleration is 7 years ahead of the last time they evaluated things, it just took 3 years to get to 7 years worth. Your attempt to mitigate the appearance of the amount of damage caused by Snowden is admirable but misguided. Those seven years are gone; never to be found again.
So it took them three years to reach a level of encryption they thought would take seven years. To me, that means encryption is four years ahead of schedule.
However, that assumes they actually performed a projection of encrypted communications three years ago. We only have Mr. Clapper’s assertion, which constitutes rather flimsy evidence, given his past history. It also assumes that any discrepancy between their projection and current levels of encryption is due to Mr. Snowden. That’s a logical leap.
Suppose that Mr. Clapper’s ‘projection’ was a simple linear regression. That would be invalid. The main impediment to using encryption is the effort required – downloading special apps, exchanging keys etc. When some of the principle communications providers simplify this process, encryption of communications becomes the default standard. So you would expect a step function, not a slow linear increase. Suddenly a substantial number of people, or even the majority would be using encryption – it becomes the default method of communication.
While math may not be my strong point, I am good at detecting when people are pulling numbers out of their ass. Mr. Snowden no doubt had a significant effect on the public’s perception of the prevalence of NSA spying. However, I am not very impressed by Mr. Clapper’s clumsy attempts to quantify it.
i believe I have confused Mr. Clapper with Mr. Brennan.
Apologies.
If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll have to find someone who will.
As Usual,
EA
Great article. The intercept is one I of the few places still doing investigative journalism. It’s very appreciated.