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posted by LaminatorX on Saturday June 07 2014, @10:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the Blaming-the-Messenger dept.

Charles Cooper reports that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has called former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a traitor for leaking national secrets about US surveillance practices and says that foreign nations may use the disclosures as an excuse to promote their domestic technology suppliers over American rivals. "Obviously he's a traitor," says Andreessen. "Like if you look up in the encyclopedia 'traitor,' there's a picture of Ed Snowden. Like he's a textbook traitor. They don't get much more traitor than that. I will say that I'm in the distinct minority out here. Most people in Silicon Valley would pick the other designation."

Andreessen added that NSA leaks may well wind up getting used as a cudgel by foreign governments against American companies that depend on overseas sales. "There's a big open question right now how successful our companies will be when they go sell products overseas," says Andreessen. "I think there are a lot of foreign companies that are very envious of Silicon Valley and America's domination of tech and wish that they could implement protection policies. And they are going to use this whole affair as a reason to do that ... as an excuse."

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday June 07 2014, @03:14PM

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 07 2014, @03:14PM (#52635) Journal

    Domestic surveillance and unrelated information. Would what you call "unrelated information" be the global surveillance? The same tools?

    You ought to be aware that when the NSA subverted Chinese Huawei in China and created ways of using Huawei hardware to spy of people then that very Huawei equipment doesn't know whether it is spying on you (obviously an Usian, certainly not an American by the sound of it) or me (a foreigner). It makes no difference.

    Or if you prefer US hardware: Cisco. Still makes no difference (but hurts twice as much: have you no pride at all?).

    Was that a sufficient example of unrelated information? Do you wish to provide your own example?

    When the NSA collected and stored the content of every single telephone call in Bahamas and in Afghanistan the data was "exfilled" using CONVEYANCE for voice processing and using NUCLEON to store the voices because what else could the NSA mean by using those words when giving an introduction on related systems to themselves in the slides [firstlook.org] (scroll down until you see the "APEX VoIP Exploitation" slide, the VoIP part only relates to a specific collection tool and not the backend systems). This is done in exactly the same way by exactly the same tools no matter where the data comes from.

    If I called you then the contents of the call and both your and my voice would be sent exactly the same route into the surveillance system and exactly the same tools would be used. And the next time I call it could potentially not be me even though you recognize my voice. Or are you dissing the abilities of the NSA?

    Have a look at the slide named APEX VoIP Exploitation again and notice that named cloudy thing in the middle? The one named "NSA Net"? This is where the NSA says everything goes to before being sent to the tools for "Exfilled content".

    You go there just as easily as I do. Or are you saying the NSA is lying to itself?

    Wasn't that a good example either?

    As a foreigner according to you I shouldn't really care one bit about the NSA domestic surveillance of Americans and Usians. However the NSA doesn't really care about any differences (oh they'll claim to do so for sure but that's meaningless) nor do they reserve their methods only for foreigners or anything like that. They'll say anything but they'll also do anything.

    So if I think those tools are a bad idea in the first place why should I make a difference for you? Why should I say that domestic surveillance of Usians is a good and proper thing? Why should I be like you? Why would you want to be like you?

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