Snowdon is a dummy

I think when it helps your argument...you suppose a government is telling the truth

What do you do with debaters who would never dream of supposing the government is telling the truth?

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I think when it helps your argument...you suppose a government is telling the truth

Given that we know for a fact that the government officers had lied to congress on national TV so yes any government statements that benefit them is indeed called into question.

An the very few statements that do not benefit them have must more credible by the very nature of logic.

You ought not to comment on logic, Bill...you have shown absolutely no evidence that you understand it in the least.

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You ought not to comment on logic, Bill...you have shown absolutely no evidence that you understand it in the least.

This is from a man who is eager to turn his back on the bill of rights in order to deal with a very minor threat that is nothing at all compare to the other threats that this country had live through and deal with from the civil war, to two world wars to a cold war period that could had turn into nuclear war at any moment.

Some people are happy when the government can find an excuse to take rights away it would seems.

Two of the five members of the panel appeared on Sunday TV talk shows, giving notably different read-outs of their collective work. Richard Clarke, a former US cybersecurity official, told ABC’s This Week that “we think the so-called metadata telephony programme has not been essential, has not contributed significantly to prevention of terrorist attacks at home and abroad.”

He added that the panel was critical of current arrangements whereby the NSA could spy on foreign leaders, even of allied countries such as Germany, and not have to seek senior-level approval in advance. “Most of the time there’s absolutely no reason to engage in wiretapping of our friends,” he said.

Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, put a much more NSA-friendly spin on the review panel’s findings on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I think one of the misperceptions out there at the moment is that the review group did not see value in this programme,” Morell said, referring to the mass collection of phone records.

However, he went on, the data remained important in the fight against terrorism. “It's important for the government to continue to be able to query this data."

Morell said that there “is a view that the NSA was out there on its own doing all these things. Not the case. The agency was doing exactly what the government asked it to do. There was no abuse here.”

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2082720/report-on-nsa-secret-payments-to-rsa-fuels-encryption-controversy.html

Report on NSA 'secret' payments to RSA fuels encryption controversy
Marc Ferranti
Dec 22, 2013 12:20 PMprint
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) paid US$10 million to vendor RSA in a “secret” deal to incorporate a deliberately flawed encryption algorithm into widely used security software, according to a Reuters report that is reigniting controversy about the government’s involvement in setting security standards.

The contract was part of an NSA campaign to weaken encryption standards in order to aid the agency’s surveillance programs, Reuters reported on Friday.

The report, based on two sources that Reuters said were familiar with the contract, has sparked a series of headlines that are stoking the ongoing debate about NSA surveillance tactics. The NSA and RSA, now a part of storage and enterprise software giant EMC, declined to immediately comment on the Reuters story.

In September, articles in ProPublica, The Guardian and The New York Times disclosed that the NSA had been working for years to weaken security standards to help the U.S. government’s massive surveillance programs. The articles were based on documents leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

The articles indicated that a crypto random-bit generator known called “Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator,” was deliberately subverted by NSA cryptographers working to develop and promulgate standards that would allow the creation of “back doors” in security products.

The RSA took money “secretly” from the NSA to embed the Dual EC DRBG technology into its widely used BSafe toolkit, according to the Reuters report Friday.

At least some commercial dealings between the NSA and RSA are a matter of public record, however. In March 2006, RSA announced that the NSA had selected BSafe encryption software for use in “a classified communications project.” The value of the deal was not revealed.

”RSA BSAFE Crypto-C ME software meets the Suite B cryptography requirements issued by the National Security Agency (NSA),” RSA said in its 2006 announcement. “Introduced at RSA Conference 2005, Suite B provides a common set of cryptographic algorithms that the technology industry may leverage to build solutions that meet the security needs of U.S. federal government organizations.”

The central question raised by the Reuters report and earlier articles, however, remains: Did RSA use what it knew was deliberately weakened crypto software in BSafe, or at best did it look the other way in the face of expert criticism of Dual EC, in order to make money from U.S. government deals?

The Reuters article Friday suggests that RSA had significant monetary incentive to set Dual EC as the default random number generator in BSafe, reporting that $10 million “represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.”

The inclusion of Dual EC in RSA technology software also helped the NSA convince the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to approve the software as a method for generating random numbers used by encryption software, the Reuters story noted.

But questions about the efficacy of Dual EC were being raised even as RSA publicly announced its Bsafe deal with the NSA in 2006, and continued for years.

One paper, “Cryptanalysis of the Dual Elliptic Curve Pseudorandom Generator,” by Berry Schoenmakers and Andrey Sidorenko, published by the Eindhoven University of Technology in May 2006, reported that “our experimental results and also empirical argument show that the DEC PRG is insecure.”

Finally, after articles about the NSA’s alleged efforts weaken security standards were published this September, NIST issued an advisory recommending that Dual EC not be used, and RSA followed suit.

”Following NIST’s decision to strongly recommend against the use of the community developed encryption algorithm standard (known as Dual EC DRBG), RSA determined it appropriate to issue an advisory to all our RSA BSAFE and RSA Data Protection Manager customers recommending they choose one of the different cryptographic Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNG) built into the RSA BSAFE toolkit,” the RSA advisory said.

RSA CTO Sam Curry publicly defended and explained why RSA originally chose Dual EC in an email published by Ars Technica.

But Curry’s statement was dissected and ridiculed by cryptography experts.

Among other statements, Curry said that “Dual_EC_DRBG was an accepted and publicly scrutinized standard.”

However, “every bit of public scrutiny said the same thing: this thing is broken! Grab your children and run away!” noted Matt Green, a cryptographer and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, in a careful analysis of Curry’s defense.

The Reuters report came at the end of a week of mounting criticism of the government’s surveillance programs.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, in a preliminary ruling in a court case challenging the government’s phone records collection program, harshly criticized the agency and suggested the program violates the U.S. Constitution. A report from the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, appointed by administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, said that the government’s spy programs create problems for international commerce and affect the U.S.’s relationship with other countries,

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, vigorously defended the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts, saying on NBC that if the program had existed early enough, the Sept. 11 attacks could have been thwarted. He questioned why the agency’s activities were even up for discussion.

“This is all, to me, a debate generated by the hysteria caused by Edward Snowden, and why we’re listening to him is beyond me,” Mr. King said.

Tell me Frank with US companies being pay by NSA to screw their customers by placing back doors/weaknesses in vital software security systems such as are used in banking just for example who in their right minds would buy from an American company any such software or hardware?????????????????

Not only foreign firms but American firms would likely not buy American due to the fear that they are opening up their business to hacking attacks.

You can not place a weakness into a system and be sure no one other then NSA will find those weaknesses.

NSA is going to ruin some of the most important US firms by playing those kinds of games.

The Deafness Before the Storm
By KURT EICHENWALD

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

Another opinion from New York (but not by Frank himself )

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Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, vigorously defended the National Security Agency’s surveillance efforts, saying on NBC that if the program had existed early enough, the Sept. 11 attacks could have been thwarted. He questioned why the agency’s activities were even up for discussion.

“This is all, to me, a debate generated by the hysteria caused by Edward Snowden, and why we’re listening to him is beyond me,” Mr. King said.

Source: NYT-report Debating the N.S.A.’s Data Collection, and a Panel’s Findings

Apparently lots of people...because lots are being bought

Definitely not me, Walter...but this guy is on my wave length.

But Bill--shame on you- you are trading lives for money. And you won't be able to answer the obvious question that begs.

tarnishing America's image while quickly scurrying away

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Apparently lots of people...because lots are being bought

You do know that American companies are shitting themselves and companies selling network gears for example are already losing big contracts due to this?

If you do not know, I will give you a number of links but then all you wish to do is keep your head bury in the sand as a whole and important industry is ruin over this silliness.

Hell companies right now are dropping everything to get another random number generator into their software at great cost.

So let me know if you would care to face the real world and I will cheerfully give you links of the $$$$$$ we are already losing.

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Definitely not me, Walter...but this guy is on my wave length.

I have not often listened to Representative Peter King because I've always found him too stridulant. But when he came out forcefully against Ted Cruz, I melted, for King and I shared the same thorn in the side. King was the first Republican to publicly call Cruz a fraud, and gradually more *ordinary* Republicans spoke forcefully against the firebrand.

Secondly King came out reeking of disgust for Edward Snowden, the same feeling I developed, for giving away classified documents and tarnishing America's image while quickly scurrying away like a sneaky rat so he would not have to face the music. King along with others believe strongly Snowden bargained with Putin to stay in that country, that some info was given to Moscow. He thinks the same thing might have been done with China, but especially Russia since Snowden was being squeezed.

Rep. Peter King and I are soul mates when it comes to Snowden. There were ways this thief could have dealt with this info if he believe Americans' rights were being infringed upon. Edward Snowden seems to have an undue fascination with himself. Can one say narcissistic.

Whatever, he will not have the same kind of freedom in Moscow he once enjoyed here in America as Russia has a lot of catching up to do with the rest of the West, for instance, there are definite laws against Homosexuality and Gays are not free. For those speaking out against the government even though it's now suppose to be a democracy since the fall of the Soviet Union, there might be consequances.