Snowdon is a dummy

Snowden expressed his willingness to testify before a German parliamentary committee investigating surveillance activities of the NSA - Germany' Federal Interior Minister de Mazière said this would be considered, especially regarding the complex juridical questions.

That most assuredly is where he ought to be testifying.

Frank Apisa wrote:

That most assuredly is where he ought to be testifying.

Says you. We want him as witness about possibly severe crimes done here.

Well, if I had the change to appear either as witness or as accused, especially, when I got asylum because I was accused, ...

Actually, how many people who got asylum somewhere go back to the country they fled from?

What the agency's denial isn't telling you: it didn't even need know about the bug to vacuum your privacy and store it indefinitely
[... ... ...]
If NSA moved quickly enough – as dedicated spies are supposed to – the agency could have exploited the bug to steal those keys before most sites got around to fixing the bug, gaining access to a vast treasure trove of stored traffic.

That creates a huge dilemma for private sector security experts. Normally, when they discover a vulnerability of this magnitude, they want to give their colleagues a discrete heads-up before going public, ensuring that the techies at major sites have a few days to patch the hole before the whole world learns about it.

The geeks at NSA's massive Information Assurance Directorate – the part of the agency tasked with protecting secrets and improving security – very much want to be in that loop. But they're part of an organization that's also dedicated to stealing secrets and breaking security. And security companies have been burned by cooperation with NSA before: the influential firm RSA trusted the agency to help them improve one of their popular security tools, only to discover via another set of Snowden documents that the spies had schemed to weaken the software instead.

Giving NSA advance warning of Heartbleed could help the agency protect all those government systems that were relying on OpenSSL to protect user data – but it also would aid them in exploiting the bug to compromise privacy and security on a massive scale in the window before the fix was widely deployed.

Little wonder, then, that the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies – informally known as the Surveillance Review Group – dedicated a large section of its recent report, Liberty and Security in a Changing World, to this basic tension. "NSA now has multiple missions and mandates, some of which are blurred, inherently conflicting, or both," the Review Group wrote. "Fundamentally NSA is and should be a foreign intelligence organization" rather than "an information assurance organization."

Because Internet security depends on trust and cooperation between researchers, the mission of a security-breaking agency is fundamentally incompatible with that of a security-protecting agency. It's time to spin off NSA's "defense" division from the "offense" team. It's time to create an organization that's fully devoted to safeguarding the security of Internet users – even if that might make life harder for government hackers.

Well, Frank, that's exactly what all government say when people fled and searched asylum somewhere else.

Most, if not all them, don't believe it. And some gob´vernments don't either - otherwise they hadn't granted asylum.

I can understand the dilemma our government is in, too: law is law, but friends/allies are allies and friends .... especially, when they use pressure.

I can understand the dilemma your government faces also, Walter...although I see the dilemma from a different perspective. I suspect the dilemma is that "your government" knows that it also spies on other countries...and doors might be opened that they prefer to remain shut.

Frank Apisa wrote:

I can understand the dilemma your government faces also, Walter...although I see the dilemma from a different perspective. I suspect the dilemma is that "your government" knows that it also spies on other countries...and doors might be opened that they prefer to remain shut.

That's seen differently here. Even the worst critics of our government from the extreme left don't have such ideas.

It's a legal thing. And closely connected to our dependency to the USA, and that we have to be thankful, and are friends, and that it is our best ally, and our bad history ...

Is there some reason you yell in your posts? Do you think your readers can not read?

I suspect you are being naive about what "the worst critic" of your government think on this subject.

Frank Apisa wrote:

I suspect you are being naive about what "the worst critic" of your government think on this subject.

You're wrong.

Well, not really: it is now planned that we start spying an our allies and maybe friends as well, at least on the USA.