When a big company lays you off, they often give you a year’s salary to ‘go pursue a dream.’ If you’re stupid, you panic and get another job. If you’re smart, you take the money and use the time to figure out what you want to do next.
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.
If the FBI parks a van bristling with cameras outside your house, you are justified in closing your blinds.
Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.
It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics.
Cryptography products may be declared illegal, but the information will never be.
Why is it that we all – myself included – believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power? It’s because everything seems so arbitrary, because there’s no accountability or transparency in the DHS.
Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.
Secret courts making secret rulings on secret laws, and companies flagrantly lying to consumers about the insecurity of their products and services, undermine the very foundations of our society.
The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.
Metadata equals surveillance; it’s that simple.
Surveillance of power is one of the most important ways to ensure that power does not abuse its status. But, of course, power does not like to be watched.
Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.
We no longer know whom to trust. This is the greatest damage the NSA has done to the Internet, and will be the hardest to fix.
If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.
The question to ask when you look at security is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it’s worth the trade-off.
It is sort of interesting that in our society this days we are very quick to apply the term ‘war’ to places where thare are no actual wars, and loath to apply the term ‘war’ when we are actually fighting wars.
Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.
This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community.
When my mother gets a prompt ‘Do you want to download this?’ she’s going to say yes. It’s disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it’s your fault.