Obsidian Wings

where in the world is LJ open thread

by liberal japonicus

a picture hint

some other stuff below the fold

I'm Sure Only Angels Work for the National Security Agency

by Ugh

The New York Times:

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products. 

...

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. 

...

Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL; virtual private networks,  or VPNs; and the protection used on fourth-generation, or 4G, smartphones. 

...

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

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At Microsoft, as The Guardian has reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.

...

How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored. To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means.

...

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers.

...

Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections. The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity. But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

(emphasis added)

Remember, if the NSA isn't allowed to hack into a travel reservation system and foreign airline VPNs (yes they did this), the terrorists have won.

I especially like the part that this was so super duper uber classified that even people who had a "need to know" the information were not allowed to know, and yet Snowden managed to get all this information anyways despite supposedly not having access.  Heckuva job NSA, you don't suppose he also collected all the backdoors and de-encryption stuff too, do ya'?  And he's in Russia now, you say?

Update:  Here is The Guardian story.  Here is the ProPublica story.  Is it too late to learn Navajo?

Work, marriage, and the industrial revolution

by Doctor Science

I was surprised by the romantic historical ignorance about work in Yves Smith's post on The Rise of Bullshit Jobs. It's annoying, because I agree with Smith (and David Graeber, whom he starts out quoting) that

most people work longer hours than they should and consume too much, and many would benefit from increased free time to spend with family or relaxing.

But then he goes and quotes Yasha Levine, talking about
The Invention of Capitalism by economic historian Michael Perelmen:

Yep, despite what you might have learned, the transition to a capitalistic society did not happen naturally or smoothly. See, English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in shitty, dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of landowning capitalists. And for good reason, too. Using Adam Smith’s own estimates of factory wages being paid at the time in Scotland, a factory-peasant would have to toil for more than three days to buy a pair of commercially produced shoes. Or they could make their own traditional brogues using their own leather in a matter of hours, and spend the rest of the time getting wasted on ale. It’s really not much of a choice, is it?…

A romantic vision of the pre-industrial "rural communal lifestyle" is also my biggest criticism of Graeber's Debt, though he romanticizes the forager (hunter-gatherer) communal lifestyle instead.

The Harvesters, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Are these followers of a "rural communal lifestyle"? Or are they hired hands?