So for the sake of possibly needing to break into a non-US citizen's iPhone, they do research to create exploits that put EVERY US citizen who uses an iPhone at risk? And they really don't have a great track record of keeping these exploits safe [1]
If there was a way to have exploits that only affected non-citizens, I would expect them to explore that enthusiastically. I suspect there is no such thing, but I would absolutely love to be enlightened as to how completely wrong I am!
With that in mind, do you think it would be wise for an intelligence agency to refuse to consider searching for exploitable holes in a platform that is known for a fact to occasionally used by adversaries? Bear in mind that, of course, there are plenty of other groups and agencies doing the same thing.
Do you think this choice would better serve to advance American interests? If so, why? Would the weaknesses the CIA could find cease to be if the CIA was not looking for them? Perhaps you imagine a scenario in which the CIA finds every exploit first, and in doing so causes them to get fixed rapidly. Would you be comfortable with an intelligence agency working hand-in-glove with a major American company selling supposedly-secure consumer goods? Would you trust such an arrangement to protect you?
You're right, there's no existing solution to exempt US citizens from these exploits. However, with the massive resources available to them, if they focused on enhancing our security rather than fouling it, I very much believe we would be better off. Think about how much crime occurs in the modern era through electronic hacks and exploits. Would it be better to have these intel back channels, or to stop these crimes? Their priorities are in the wrong place, through tradition more than anything else.
There are many, many platforms that are "occasionally used by adversaries". The Intelligence Community has put exceptional resources towards one that has a very significant market share among it's citizens. And given the wholesale surveillance we are already under, I can't accept that this was an innocuous decision.
Trust is built through positive actions over time. I have zero trust for our Intelligence Community as is; and I've actually worked with US intelligence. If they devoted a majority of their efforts to finding and patching security risks through public and open source means, I would slowly start to trust them again.
You're so completely right that the NSA, CIA, and more already agree with you!
The IC invests massive resources into enhancing security. I've seen it firsthand - software projects like SELinux and a whole slew of research projects come to mind in addition to stuff I worked on. Though if you've only ever been exposed to the other side of the house, it's easy to be ignorant that the defensive missions exist at all. Certainly it tends to not make any news, ever.
It's true, I've only been on the military side of the IC, so everything I've been exposed to has been offensive in nature. That being said, the attitude of everyone I've met in the IC has been "we need to be able to access everything, at any cost". This attitude comes from the top (how else would it be so pervasive), and it is completely at odds with any sense of security for the average citizen. I think that this overall attitude is what really skews me. I'm familiar with SELinux, and why it was made open source; but I'm also familiar with Dual_EC_DRBG. Seems SELinux release may have been more a red herring or PR stunt than an actual attempt to protect security of the average person, given how much effort they put into defeating the security of the average person.
We only found out about COINTELPRO because some US citizens got together and burglarized the FBI [1]. What programs are running today that we don't know about yet, because we haven't burglarized them lately?
Regarding the DMCA, I think you need to insert the word "intended" in there, in order to make it a try statement. The DMCA was intended to provide those protections... It has become a channel for baseless abuse.
Most of the "baseless abuse" actually isn't DMCA, it's abuse of systems that services like YouTube set up to make it easy for copyright holders to submit takedowns without going through DMCA.
Student here - I was struck by the "summer learning loss" quoted in the article. Everyone I talk to has this, myself included. The greatest reason for this, personally, is subject diffusion. This is especially true from freshman to junior year; we are required to take a dizzying number of classes that not only have nothing to do with our job field, but also have nothing to do with each other. I understand that it's important to "gain broad interests", but I retained very very little until my junior year, when all of the irrelevant courses had been completed. This issue may be coupled with the signaling problem, in that not only is the senior year the only year of college that employers care about (because you get handed a credential), but also because you take so little away from school until that point.
I'd say that paying for college should be scaled with the earning benefit it imparts, freshman year costing very little, and senior year costing a majority of the total degree. Thoughts?
If there's "summer loss"? What about when you leave high school and college?
What happened to the notes you took for your classes at the end of the semester? I suspect that they are thrown away and never seen again.
I suspect part of the problem with education is that we don't learn how to learn, and that we done very little work on how to retain those skills and connect them to our world.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you are getting at. With the internet in it's current state, notes from college years 1&2 are useless... I could go on Wikipedia and YouTube and get the same, if not higher quality, information about those subjects. FWIW, I still have all of those notes. The understanding and intuitive development is what suffers, not having the information available.
You do not develop understanding by merely looking up resources and reading about it.
Reading something alone will create not create fluency and understanding.
That is why we take notes. They serve both as records of what we learned, a learning tools, and a place to synthesize knowledge and understanding.
I also use wikipedia and lookup youtube videos, but I don't merely read or watch about it. I engage in an active process of learning and synthesizing information.
> I understand that it's important to "gain broad interests"
Its important, but I definitely agree with the OP its not ~40k a year and 3 prime years of your life important.
Its also something high school should be presenting. Its the literal last step that the state has in producing productive members of society from its curriculum, and they waste it on Shakespeare driving generations to "hate" reading than trying to diversify their students interests to get them excited about career prospects and opportunities they can rise into.
Its evident in how totally directionless and lost most college freshman are. They did what they were told in gradeschool, don't remember a fraction of it, and are now being drilled with the same kinds of banal "diversification" classes of lecture and monotony they have toned out for a majority of their life at that point.
Experiencing diversity is something that requires a desire to experience it in the first place. Forcing people to do it when all they want is a job that pays them a living wage is at least disrespectful to their self determination.
Here's the way I look at it: learning loss is almost inevitable, but I think it's less of a problem than it appears.
What I think we should instead pay attention to is the rate of re-learning. Something may take significant time and effort to learn the first time, and after say a year or two, one may forget it. But when re-introduced to the concept (when you may actually need it), I think one can re-learn it quite rapidly.
Information loss is inevitable when that information isn't used enough to become inately retained. When we focus on a particular area of study, what we learn is self-reinforcing. If I study calculus and discrete math, my understanding and retention increases in each subject, because the overlap between them connects mental pathways. If I study calculus and eastern Asian religions, retention suffers because my brain cannot make meaningful connections between the two. This lack of coherence in what I'm learning means that I'm wasting my time with one of those subjects ;)
