It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

The latest and greatest from the most transparent administration evar:

This week, it came to light that a small error in the open-source OpenSSL implementation of the SSL encryption protocol opened a gaping hole in the security of hundreds of thousands websites and networking equipment across the Net—and that hole had been wide open and exploitable for years. Passwords could be easily grabbed. User names matching those passwords could be easily grabbed. Heck, userdata could be easily grabbed. The “Heartbleed” moniker attached to the devastating bug seemed all too apt.

And Friday afternoon, Bloomberg reported that the National Security Agency has been aware of and actively exploiting the Heartbleed bug for at least two full years, citing “two people familiar with the matter.”

....

Leaked NSA documents provided to reporters by Snowden have revealed an agency casting a wide—and often domestic—surveillance dragnet, spying on American emails and web searches, gobbling up metadata from smartphones en masse, and even tapping into the internal communication infrastructures of Internet giants like Yahoo and Google.

A September Snowden-supplied revelation revealed that the NSA can easily defeat many of today’s encryption technologies, and in an aside that now seems precognizant, the SSL protocol was then rumored to be a particular favored target for the Agency.

Keep that in mind next time you're "choosing" between Candidate Coke and Candidate Pepsi.

Oversight In Plain Sight

It's an unusual but perhaps critical issue on which I beg to differ with the estimable Charles Pierce, who feels that Obama has lost his grip on his administration. This is very similar to the media gabble heading into the weekend that Grandma Feinstein is suddenly mounting a principled stand against the vicissitudes of the intrusive meta-security state.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. People are welcome to insist upon and celebrate the substantive differences between the current boss and the previous, insofar as they do exist, though I suggest that perhaps Obama has not been and never will be the transformative figure he originally campaigned as. For the most part, in fact, he is simply a smoother and more articulate continuation of many of the Cheney regime's more objectionable policies.

Perhaps nowhere is this more true than the expansion of the capacity of the internal state security apparatus to spy upon and permanently archive the metadata comings and goings of its inhabitants, who through political and economic attrition have become less and less the traditional idea of "citizens," as in an informed and empowered body electorate, but rather a collection of demographics to be herded and cajoled, so as to make the picking of their pockets a simpler process for the rentiers who actually own the system.

In other words, Feinstein has been a US Senator for a very long time, and the head of the Intelligence Committee for a long time, and never before had any issue with the spying capacity or activities of the CIA or FBI or NSA -- in fact, it has been part and parcel of her office to enhance those capabilities. But now it's a problem, because the watchdog has stretched its leash, and is spying on elites and peons alike. You can see the problem for poor DiFi, suddenly the champion of principle, after previous tilts at such threats to the republic as flag burning and video game violence.

Similarly, Obama's problem is not that the CIA has exceeded its operational portfolio but rather, as with the self-serving data dumping of Edward Snowden, that the organization has now been observed doing so. These things are not errors or flaws in the system; they are features. The organizations in question are doing precisely what they've been asked to do, designed to do.

What's really unclear is why any of this should be worthy of note, especially under the hoary rubric of a "free society" -- the average 'murkin, like his proletarian counterpart in Russia, is much more authoritarian, or at least comfortable with the characteristics of such governments, than he lets on. Hell, this is a country where you can literally get away with murdering a kid for sneaking into your daughter's bedroom for illicit nookie, you think enough people give a shit that the Feebs are archiving their porn searches?