Congressional Reps Ask Bruce Schneier To Explain To Them What The NSA Is Doing, Because The NSA Won't Tell Them
from the look-at-that dept
This is both depressing and good news at the same time. A group of Congressional Representatives (who are among the most critical of the NSA) apparently asked Bruce Schneier to come brief them on what the NSA is doing because the NSA won't tell them:This morning I spent an hour in a closed room with six Members of Congress: Rep. Logfren, Rep. Sensenbrenner, Rep. Scott, Rep. Goodlate, Rep Thompson, and Rep. Amash. No staffers, no public: just them. Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn't forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me -- as someone with access to the Snowden documents -- to explain to them what the NSA was doing. Of course I'm not going to give details on the meeting, except to say that it was candid and interesting. And that it's extremely freaky that Congress has such a difficult time getting information out of the NSA that they have to ask me. I really want oversight to work better in this country.There's really not much more to be said about that, other than it shows what a complete joke it is for anyone to claim that Congress has real oversight over the NSA. It's great that these Reps would reach out to someone with qualifications like Schneier to have this kind of conversation. It's depressing that such a thing was necessary.
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Filed Under: bob goodlatte, bruce schneier, congress, jim sensenbrenner, justin amash, nsa, oversight, security, surveillance, zoe lofgren
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I see what you did there!
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:)
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All you have to do is listen to Jeremiah Wright and you will immediately grasp what the US economic problems are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_Wright
The problems are planned.
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After all the info on the NSA started coming out though... if he doesn't know what they're doing now, it's because he doesn't want to know.
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Let's not fall for partisan tricks, as both parties are equally responsible. That there's no real oversight is down to Lofgren, et al, not acting sooner. If we're to have real oversight, we need to stop voting the same people back in and we need to hold the people who are in office now to account for their actions.
As for the president, I recall reading an article in TD that says he gets his info from the papers first. That'd explain why he knows very little about what's going on. He needs to stop being cautious and remember he's a Constitutional scholar. Or has he forgotten that?
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And desperately hope that no one points out that a number of these programs were first put in place by Bush, a republican, I'm guessing?
Yeah, they're both to blame, any attempt to play 'No, it's all their fault!' to score points with the voters and dodge responsibility needs to be shut down immediately and pointed to as the cheap dodge tactic that it is.
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And yes, I know that applies to the current President as well, but I'm not entirely convinced the NSA are actually taking orders from the Oval Office at this point.
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If Snowden gained this much access, other probably have it as well. Companies, Private Investigators, Foreign Government pay a lot of money for information obtained from blackmarket sources.
How many Snowdens are out there whose purpose is purely profit driven?
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The public is pissed off about it and it is not going to blow over. So far, a $4 billion contract to sell military jets has been cancelled, AT&T has been denied bidding rights to a setup in Europe, France has found it has a white elephant on it's hands in the terms of a satellite found to have spy stuff hardwired in and the UAE won't proceed with the purchase, and various companies such as Crisco are finding out they are no longer welcome in the China market. This stuff is just getting started on the market side. We'll be hearing more of that for years.
And in all this, we have an Intelligence Committee that acts anything but intelligent. The house can take care of this really fast. Clear it right up. All they have to do is end financing the NSA until it can come up with answers that can be believed and so far, the answers coming out of the NSA can't.
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Thats it damn it!!!
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Re: Thats it damn it!!!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/surveillance-fallout-hits-startups-hard-bu siness-executives-say/2014/01/15/5e0b615e-7df6-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_story.html
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However, all this talk of software vulnerabilities seldom touches on the huge elephant in the room of hardware manufacturers. Intel, Nvidia...
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Get the popcorn: it's corp v corp and it's going to get ugly.
BTW haven't we forgotten the warplane deal with Brazil that went belly up over this?
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Just like they did against Hollywood screenwriters during the Commie Scare last time around.
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Might have been a good thing to state in the article.
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Wikipedia is your friend
'Bruce Schneier is an American cryptographer, computer security and privacy specialist, and writer. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography.
Long answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Schneier
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Speling
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Deitybounce (NSA exploit)
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