As stated on Reddit:
Please note our caveat that this version is for testing and development purposes only! Please do not move any money into it that you cannot afford to lose. With that being said, thanks in advance for your feedback. :-)
All such agencies will lose if we start creating software more responsibly. I understand that Stallman is a somewhat controversial figure here, but his mantra of "freedom over convenience" might bear repeating.
The NSA continues to be viewed as a shadowy government agency, limited in its capabilities by federal law. But what do we really know about that? Besides trivial inconvenience, is there any real disadvantage to taking the most paranoid and defensive stance against it?
I continue bringing this up whenever a submission like this appears, because I am very much afraid that the technical community will accept a congressional victory as "okay, let's continue business as usual", when we need to be reinventing everything that has made mass-wiretapping possible in the first place.
when we need to be reinventing everything that has made mass-wiretapping possible in the first place.
Are you suggesting we somehow roll back the last sixty-odd years of telecommunications and information technology? What do you suggest we replace it with?
It probably isn't necessary to replace the hardware infrastructure if privacy and security again become fashionable in software development. A great deal of important peer-to-peer, encryption and general data-obfuscation research has been done already. The trouble is, as Schneier so eloquently put it, that spying is the business model of the Internet.
But we can take another approach.
If this REALLY matters, we should be directing our attention not to some nebulous and almost certainly unenforceable government action, but rather to the eye of the storm: the very things we are building.
Be careful with your optimism. If the amendment passes, it will be a sign to many that the days of draconian domestic surveillance are over. The trouble is that this may or may not be the case; we likely won't be told the truth. And yet our defenses will be lowered just the same.
I want so suggest however, that you follow my lead in taking a sternly honest but less antagonistic approach to the topic. This reality implies a complete breakdown of democracy, which is terrifying. And while it may be true, we won't get far calling each other "fools", even if the effort is impotent.
Still, let me reiterate that I'm very glad you said it.
Nearly everything that the NSA does is Top Secret, so can we claim to know anything about its activities? Why do we believe that we have the power to defund it, when we don't actually know where it gets its money, or how much it receives? Are posters here aware that the CIA has long been accused of being involved in the global drug trade, as a means of self-financing and leveraging power?
Despite the recent revelations having vindicated the world's tin-foil-hats, we still seem to collectively lack the stomach for darker conspiratorial notions. To be in step with reality, it may be important to build up a bit of tolerance. I'm not making any claims (because I just don't know), but I see absolutely no reason to assume that democratic process applies to these agencies. They may have gone rogue; they may have always been rogue. Their global network may be the actual, de-facto world government. Would it really surprise anyone at this point if a convincing leak exposed such notions? What would we do then?
Let's stop imagining that Law will take care of this problem so we can at least assume a proper direction for our efforts. Which is to say, let's dispense with some of our convenience and fashions and start writing software the right way -- the paranoid way.
To quote the eternal R. Buckminster Fuller:
"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete."
