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Archive for 2014
January 14, 2014
STEVEN LEVY: I Spent Two Hours Talking With the NSA’s Bigwigs. Here’s What Has Them Mad.
The dual mission of the NSA generates cognitive dissonance. Right on its home page, the NSA says its core missions are “to protect U.S. national security systems and to produce foreign signals intelligence information.” The officials repeatedly claimed they pursue both responsibilities with equal vigor. There’s a built-in conflict here: If U.S. industries distribute strong encryption throughout the world, it should make the NSA’s signals-gathering job much harder. Yet the NSA says it welcomes encryption. (The officials even implied that the tension between the two missions winds up making both efforts more robust.) Nonetheless, the Snowden leaks indicate that the NSA has engaged in numerous efforts that tamper with the security of American products. The officials resisted this characterization. Why, they asked, would they compromise security of products they use themselves, like Windows, Cisco routers, or the encryption standards they allegedly compromised?
They believe their intelligence gathering is palatable because it’s controlled by laws, regulations, and internal oversight. Looking at the world through their eyes, there is no privacy threat in collecting massive amounts of information — if access to that information is rigidly controlled and minimalized. This includes efforts to excise data (about Americans, mainly) that should have not been collected in the first place. The NSA feels that if people knew about these controls, they’d be OK with the collection. This argument reminded me of something I learned from my approved NSA source in the 1990s. The official who concocted the Clipper Chip scheme had a vision where private citizens could use encryption. But the NSA, though its built-in backdoor chip, would be able to access the information when it needed to. The official called his vision “Nirvana.” The NSA is still envisioning Nirvana, this time a system with huge haystacks accessed only when national security is at stake. But many people believe the very creation of those government-owned haystacks is a privacy violation, and possibly unconstitutional.
They really hate Snowden. The NSA is clearly, madly, deeply furious at the man whose actions triggered the biggest crisis in its history. Even while contending they welcome the debate that now engages the nation, they say that they hate the way it was triggered. The NSA has an admittedly insular culture — the officials described it as almost like a family. Morale suffers when friends and neighbors think that NSA employees are sitting around reading grandma’s email. Also, the agency believes that the Snowden leaks have seriously hurt national security (though others dispute this). NSA officials are infuriated that all this havoc was caused by some random contractor.
Well, that last isn’t really to their credit, since they granted some random contractor access. But to my mind, it’s actually the IRS that has done the most damage to the NSA, by illustrating how an agency that’s supposed to be disinterested and technical can act as a rogue, politicized agency.
UPDATE: From the comments: “If the NSA is seeking redemption, they could look into the IRS for us.”
IT’S NOT A BAD-LOOKING CAR AT ALL: 2015 Hyundai Genesis remakes its image.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Printed Eye Cells Could Help Treat Blindness. “Researchers at the University of Cambridge used a standard ink-jet printer to form layers of two types of cells taken from the retinas of rats, and showed that the process did not compromise the cells’ health or ability to survive and grow in culture. Ink-jet printing has been used to deposit cells before, but this is the first time cells from an adult animal’s central nervous system have been printed.” Faster, please.
FRENCH CAB DRIVERS REALLY DON’T LIKE UBER: “Uber, the service that allows you hail a car ride from your smartphone, has faced bureaucratic obstacles and legal challenges in nearly all of the cities where it has tried to expand, typically from local taxi and limousine commissions that aren’t happy about the competition. Today in Paris, those paperwork protests turned into smashed windows and flat tires.”
WHY STEPHEN GREEN IS SO SMART: Drinking Alcohol Doesn’t Actually Kill Brain Cells.
TONICS AND TEAS.
SKIING DOWN THE DEMAND CURVE: Meet “Smart Restaurant”: The Minimum-Wage-Crushing, Burger-Flipping Robot.
HISTORY: The Other Model 1873 Revolver. “Colt’s first double action revolver in a service caliber, the M1878 ‘Frontier’, is a far more gracile piece than the MAS. However when compared side-by-side, the more martial nature of the French wheelgun is obvious. For instance, it can easily be field-stripped: Using the cylinder pin as a screwdriver, a single screw is removed, allowing the sideplate to be lifted off. The sideplate retains the left-hand grip panel. Et voila! You have now probably stripped the gun as far as caporal-chef Jacques had any need for taking his gat apart in a foxhole. Taking it down further wouldn’t be hard, provided you have someplace to set the fiddly bits. There is even a handy pivoting lever under the grip panel, complete with a knurled tab for a thumbpiece, that can be used to remove the mainspring. By comparison, the Colt Frontier requires screwdrivers and some needle-nose pliers, and you’d probably best just forget about messing with the lockwork unless your dog tags say ‘Grant Cunningham’.”
NOAH POLLAK: Yoko Ono vs. Ayatollah Khomeini. Well, make her some mullah’s girlfriend and the whole regime will split up within a couple of years. . . .
NARRATIVE BREAKDOWN: The Hill: Feinstein rejects NYT on Benghazi. “Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) rejected the Times’s conclusion that al Qaeda wasn’t responsible for the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. She also took issue with the notion that the Libya strike was sparked by a U.S.-made anti-Islam video online.”
UPDATE: The Benghazi Transcripts: Top Defense officials briefed Obama on ‘attack,’ not video or protest. (Bumped).
ANOTHER small-business success story. I wrote about this kind of small/big symbiosis years ago.
IRAN’S nuclear enablers.
WAIT UNTIL HE FINDS OUT THAT OBAMACARE COVERS THIS: Iranian man goes 60 years without a bath. “The man eats dead animals, and his most prized possession is his pipe, which is 3 inches in diameter, in which he smokes animal dung. Amoo Hadji lives in a stone shack built for him by his neighbours and he rests in a hole in the ground resembling a grave.” So, pretty much a paleo lifestyle.
ACTUALLY, WATCHING A FEW EPISODES MAY TAKE AWAY YOUR DESIRE TO REPRODUCE AT ANY AGE: ’16 & Pregnant’ Stops Teen Births.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: How Democrats Kill Jobs.
VIDEO: Me on Lou Dobbs, talking about The New School.
I TALK ABOUT THE NEW SCHOOL, on NRO’s Between the Covers podcast.
ABBY SCHACHTER on the future of Bitcoin and the past of the Internet.
TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: This Is What Government-Run Health Care Looks Like: 67% Don’t Trust Government with Health Care, Only 31% Have Trust. “This distrust has only gotten worse as the ObamaCare debacle unfolded, climbing 4 points in one month. Even Democrats — at 44%, up from 34% the month before — are increasingly skeptical.”