Re: [tlug] Unix's 40th Birthday

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2009-08-22 19:32 +0900 (Sat), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Curt Sampson writes:
> 
>  > But then I remembered that that recently a major mandate of the NSA
>  > appears to be to domestic interception of communications of American
>  > citizens. Why would they make their job harder?
> 
> Fixing kernel bugs doesn't hinder intercepts, for one.

It does if you're backdooring the machine to do the intercept. The FBI
has been known to install keyloggers and the like.

> A second reason might be that they want to be able to trust trusted
> computing to do what they tell it to do, and not what the owner of the
> equipment tells it to do.

Not relevant, since your typical Linux box is not a trusted platform.

> A third reason ... why do you think they fixed bugs in DES and
> released the fixes to the public?

That was a long time ago, in a different age. Do you think that twenty
years later the NSA wasn't aware what kind of security holes the were
introducing with Clipper? That was a complete about-face right there,
and that was before they decided that they needed to break the law as
well.

> A fourth reason ...  most U.S. officials are rather hypocritical, and
> actually do seem to believe that what they do is what's good for the
> country.

Sure. But they consistently (whether truly understanding what they
are doing or not) make choices to reduce the security of the general
populace's communications in order to facilitate monitoring. Why would
they chose differently in this case?

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com