Dr. Joesph Bonner's quote:<p>I’d rather have it abolished than persist in its current form. I think there’s a question about whether it’s possible to reform the NSA into something that’s more reasonable…But my feeling based on what I’ve read is that I don’t want to live in a country with an organization like the NSA is right now.
Is World War II so far away that everyone forgets how fucked up the entire world can become - and it doesn't take long for it all to go to hell either. The NSA has to get their shit together, but we still need real strategical/tactical intelligence inside and outside of the US. So when it does happen (and it will eventually happen) we're prepared not to lose our country, or even the world to the super nuclear powered genetically modified nazi cyborgs.
How do you abolish something that the entirety of the federal and state governments rely upon? Intelligence resources are being pooled to the NSA, and cyber-intelligence reports are being sourced wholly from the NSA. They're the single most powerful intelligence agency in the US, and there's absolutely no sign of it slowing down.<p>If there's anything that Obama shall be remembered for, it's that under his administration there was an <i>astronomical</i> consolidation of power. The DHS has progressively been getting more and more involved in pulling the strings of all levels of law enforcement.
The winning engineer is currently doing an AMA on Reddit:<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bonneau_2013_nsa_award_winner_for/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1j6qo4/i_am_joseph_bon...</a>
This guy has the balls. Kudos, Mr Bonneau.<p>I'm curious if he will get a private reprimand from Google execs for unpleasant commentary on their partner :)
tikkun.org seems to be down. Here's the Google cache: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2013/07/25/google-engineer-wins-nsa-award-says-id-rather-have-it-abolished-than-persist-in-its-current-form/&strip=1" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...</a><p>Here's the blog post from the Google Engineer (Joseph Bonneau) about accepting the award: <a href="http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2013/07/19/nsa-award-for-best-scientific-cybersecurity-paper/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2013/07/19/nsa-award-for-...</a>
>> Like many in the community of cryptographers and security engineers, I’m sad that we haven’t better informed the public about the inherent dangers and questionable utility of mass surveillance.<p>Thought provoking.
Is this guy a google engineer because he thanks the people at Yahoo in his blog. Not that it matters, just happy he told them to go fuck themselves while accepting the award
> Google Engineer Wins NSA Award, Then Says NSA Should Be “Abolished”<p>That's one thing. Now make these 2 events happen in the opposite order.<p>;-)
The NSA announcement is here: <a href="http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2013/2013_sos_competition.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/press_room/2013/2013_sos_comp...</a>
This is silly coming from a company whose trusted computing base was nearly eaten by China. If any company needs the tightest possible OODA loop w.r.t. cyber-threats, it is Google.<p>There has been a lot of utter horseshit about how the NSA's activities will make Europeans distrust American cloud computing. Well the NSA is <i>nothing</i> compared to the Communist Party espionage organizations.