How The NSA Kills Exports

We have a vast spy-system, far more reaching than anything the East German Stasi ever accomplished, generally for the purposes of NSA clerks being able to check out your girlfriend.  They did nothing to see 9-11, the Boston Bombings or the Kenya Mall slaughter coming.  Or the LAX shooting or the Mall shooting recently. And have enough to keep every politician and judge live in fear of criticizing the "security apparatus" much as the Roman Senate lived in fear of Caligula's security apparatus.

But then there is the other problem.  IBM is dying for accepting their products have built in spy features, required by the NSA.

I’d warned about its impact at the time [read.... US Tech Companies Raked Over The Coals In China]. Snowden’s revelations started hitting in May. Not much later, the Chinese security apparatus must have alerted IT buyers in government agencies, state-owned enterprises, and major independent corporations to turn off the order pipeline for sensitive products until this is sorted out. As Mr. Loughridge’s efforts have shown, it’s hard to explain any other way that hardware sales suddenly collapsed by “40%, 50%” in China, where they’d boomed until then.

Nice!  The one thing in which we lead the world, we are now failing.

And the one hope is open source software, Linux, in a country the drives our best to death for "violating" "intellectual property rights."  Will the ironies never cease?

And now we learn the NSA intercepts deliveries of computers to turn them into spy-pods.

LONDON (AP) -- A German magazine lifted the lid on the operations of the National Security Agency's hacking unit Sunday, reporting that American spies intercept computer deliveries, exploit hardware vulnerabilities, and even hijack Microsoft's internal reporting system to spy on their targets.

Well, that means the delivery service is complying with the NSA, since all shipments are tracked all of the time.  They necessarily know shipments are diverted to be messed with, and why.  How soon will we here that Fedex or UPS becomes persona non grata in multiple countries.

Does anyone at the Federal level think through policies?

We have a tale of two judges, one that says there is NSA overreach, and another that says, no, it is the "counterpunch to terrorism."  We can get an idea of which judges the NSA has the goods on by their rulings.

China booted Google when it became clear that Google was a USA Intel Operation.

Here is the problem:  this ability of the State to compel compliance is degenerate.  The only viable means of society and polity is voluntary association.  Let the state ask private companies for info, but the private company can decide yes or no.  Today, you cannot say no.  You cannot even quit if you do not want to help the state do wrong.

The Silicon Valley is full of people who are free to create anything they want as long as it advances state surveillance.  Ironic.

The oldest and largest political entity on planet earth and in history also has the best intelligence network in the world.  It is called the Catholic Church.  It's diplomats are considered the best in the game.  And it is entirely voluntary association.

It is a good model for government.

We need a strict separation of business and state.

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends.

Bookmark this post --- Email this post