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Magniir wrote:In the time between my post and now I've had an immense inner turmoil and have come to the sudden realisation that I have no understanding of the NSA's motives, or their puppetmasters.
Answers such as "control", "power", or "money" are all well and good but I'm struggling to find a reason to spend $200 million a year on the idea that you'll make it back in a few years time. It's an investment, andit it one they haven't seen turnaround since its inception a decade ago.
For decades, governments and individual parties have been fighting a cold war. Amongst the shadows they fight for global dominance. They want the power to control the world and they want to get rich doing it. I don't see the point, myself, since having so much money seems utterly fruitless but, alas, that is the only true motives I can see that they might want.
Now some of you might think that I'm merely trying to justify their actions to myself in a bid to better come to grips with the situation. Perhaps you are right, but I in no way, shape, or form, justify the actions that the NSA have done now or ever against the "free people" of America and the world. Nor will I. I simply refuse to believe that spending $200 million a year is the right way to go about control and argue that any one of us could do better.
The concept of having our information, of knowing our deepest, darkest secrets, does not seem so scary to me anymore. Is it bad? In a way, yes, they will now have unlimited access to your porn collection and all the other nasty secrets you keep locked away online but, in general, this "control" is largely over the hundreds of millions of people who are already under their control anyway.
Knowing what the millions of mindless sheep thing doesn't seem worth $200 million. Beneficial, yes, as it makes it a lot easier to sway public opinion and enact certain policies, but they can and have done that without the internet for years, so why spend nearly $1 billion over the past 10 years trying for seemingly little gain?
The biggest concern would be that having the power to get into any internet service would mean ultimate control against those who wish to usurp them. The power to stop revolutions, as it were, or any ones that might pop up. But as great as that sounds it didn't work well in Deus Ex and the internet hasn't been needed to make revolutions work well in real life. $20 million for Prism I can understand. $200 million for encryption-cracking I cannot.
The idea of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in the hopes you'll make billions back in your lifetime seems such a worthless investment. The PRISM concept, being what it apparently costs, sounds far more reasonable, despite perhaps being much harder to implement. Even concepts like SOPA can't be that expensive in comparison and opt to do the same thing.
So congratulations, NSA. You have started gaining access to billions of gigabytes of information that you probably already knew about. At best you will be able to use it to find dissenters and get rid of them, but you didn't need the internet for that before and you certainly don't need it now, so paying upwards of over a hundred million for the utility seems a bit excessive.
When I wake up to military coups and open warfare then I will be afraid but, right now, I refuse to be. Syria seems far more important in light of this.
Perhaps I'm just not cut out to be a puppet my entire life. Which is effectively all the NSA is, and they'll be dropped like one the moment their usefulness comes to end. I would be interesting in seeing peoples arguments to help me see the "error of my ways", so to speak.
synthetic wrote:do we really know what information era means?
Magniir wrote:Oh yes. Where there is young there is revolution.
"This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."
Magniir wrote:http://lavabit.com"This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/1 ... _unsealed/
Magniir wrote:Frankly, I don't think it matters in the end.
Levison, Snowden and others like them have given up their entire lives for the sake of integrity. Integiry I can respect, but integrity that will not get them very far if the people don't wake up.