The NSA Is Making Us All Less Safe

An open letter today from a large group of professors – top US computer security and cryptography researchers – slams the damage to ecurity caused by NSA spying:

Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data-center links provide bad actors, foreign and domestic, opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.

The value of society-wide surveillance in preventing terrorism is unclear, but the threat that such surveillance poses to privacy, democracy, and the US technology sector is readily apparent. Because transparency and public consent are at the core of our democracy, we call upon the US government to subject all mass-surveillance activities to public scrutiny and to resist the deployment of mass-surveillance programs in advance of sound technical and social controls. In finding a way forward, the five principles promulgated at http://reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/ [a site launched by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, AOL, Yahoo and LinkedIn] provide a good starting point.

The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its […]

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There are ‘facts” in the ACE PACEs that are absolutely untrue. Now, you might be kind and say, ‘Perhaps they are mistakes.” But these errors have remained in the PACEs through successive reprints, and they are things which were known to be untrue long before the PACEs went into print in the first place. Therefore, we can say that the writers didn’t care about factual accuracy. If you’re running an education system, that’s gross negligence and I feel no compunction about calling these things lies.

I called ACE on May 3rd, 2012, and was told that all of these PACEs are still in print and the content has not changed. These lies are still being taught in over fifty British schools today.

5. The Loch Ness Monster Disproves Evolution

This would be at number 1, but since it’s already been substantially covered in the Times Educational Supplement and the Guardian (at my instigation, please note), I don’t want you to feel you’re getting second-hand information. If you haven’t read the stories and can’t be bothered, Science PACE 1099 contains this priceless wisdom:

Some scientists speculate that Noah took small or baby dinosaurs on the Ark…. are dinosaurs still alive today? […]

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LONDON — It was a vast boat that saved two of each animal and a handful of humans from a catastrophic flood.

But forget all those images of a long vessel with a pointy bow – the original Noah’s Ark, new research suggests, was round.

A recently deciphered 4,000-year-old clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq – reveals striking new details about the roots of the Old Testament tale of Noah. It tells a similar story, complete with detailed instructions for building a giant round vessel known as a coracle – as well as the key instruction that animals should enter “two by two.”

The tablet went on display at the British Museum on Friday, and soon engineers will follow the ancient instructions to see whether the vessel could actually have sailed.

It’s also the subject of a new book, “The Ark Before Noah,” by Irving Finkel, the museum’s assistant keeper of the Middle East and the man who translated the tablet.

Finkel got hold of it a few years ago, when a man brought in a damaged tablet his father had acquired in the Middle East after World War II. It was light brown, about the size of a mobile phone and covered […]

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Last year was supposed to be a year of action to curb gun violence in our schools. But three weeks into the new year, statistics suggest that the problem could actually be worsening.

Though the sample size is far too small to draw any definitive conclusions, 2014 is off to a deadly start: in the first 14 school days of the year, there have been at least 7 school shootings. For sake of comparison, there were 28 school shootings in all of 2013, according to gun violence prevention group Moms Demand Action.

Purdue University is the most recent, when a 23 year old teaching assistant fired four shots inside a campus building on Tuesday, killing a 21 year old senior. One day earlier, a student was hospitalized after being shot near the athletic center on the campus of Widener University in Pennsylvania. And last week, there were at least three other school shootings, resulting in the hospitalization of five students between the ages of 12 and 18.

That number could have been even higher were it not for several near-misses. An eighth grader was arrested in Georgia last week after he brought a gun to school on consecutive days and robbed a classmate. […]

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The Christian right has long understood that in order to get the power they desire, they need to portray themselves as a group that is working for a majority. Sometimes they claim to speak for a majority of Americans and sometimes just for the majority of Christians, but either way, they understand that positioning themselves as spokespeople for a majority is an excellent way to push forward their agenda, even when that agenda is absolutely against what the majority actually wants. More than any other group in America, the Christian right knows that you can shove through a massively unpopular policy by appealing to people’s sense of identity and solidarity. Indeed, you can often get people to support you who would be utterly repulsed by your actual agenda.

How do they do it? They understand better than anyone how, in politics, identity trumps grittier concerns like actual policies. Labels like ‘conservative” or ‘Christian” create intra-group loyalty that allows the radicals within a group to push their agenda knowing that while the majority in their group may disagree with them, they won’t fight too hard because they don’t want to be accused of not being Christian or conservative enough.

Understanding how identity often […]

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