Comment by Terretta
12 years ago
The site has been equally embarrassingly bad about taking certain claims at face value, like, "no direct access to the servers", when it is painfully clear to anyone running a colo how NSA PowerPoints could talk about data direct from BigCom servers at the same time as BigCom denies giving direct access to its servers, with both 100% "technically true."
What HN could use is a bit less knee jerking towards belief based discussion, and a bit more analysis: we have these two claims, assuming both parties are self interested, could both be true, and if so, how.
I see "of course Google is/isn't giving server logins" but I don't see as much "here are ways a third party could get data directly from servers, for these various definitions and implementations of 'directly'."
That stuff does get said here more than other places I'm reading, but still clearly not enough as I haven't yet seen that kind of analysis get noticed and picked up by the reporters increasingly sourcing their tech digests from here.
This comment neatly characterizes the kinds of discussions we have on this issue; it starts with innuendo about how the NSA could have what any reasonable person would refer to as direct access to servers, then retreats to a broad, abstract position crafted to make the innuendo harder to rebut.
Thank you.
You seem to frame it in a very odd light. I don't see anything in that comment could be refereed as an "innuendo", nor do I see any source for comment to be crafted as to make something harder to rebut.
From that, I can only ask if you are arguing against a honest intellectual discussion, based on facts as well as rational arguments in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive?
In this specific case of "direct access", the facts are the few press-release made, the leaked slides, and any contributing leaked report. The rational arguments is mostly around the definition of "direct access". The truth is thus depended on the quality of the facts, and the derived result of discussing the rational arguments.
Is this bad for HN, and if so, what should be done about it?
Thanks. This thread is a meta discussion about HN, not a technical discussion on concrete data collection methods.
I agree NSA's slides are not innuendo. Neither were BigCom denials. To me it seems reconciling those is neither a rebuttal nor a retreat, it's advancing the conversation from two disputing sides (NSA lying vs corporate collusion) to a third "this is likely what's meant, as seen in multiple concrete cases from 2006 to today, and makes sense of currently available info."
The 19 July story by Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, disclosing one in flight data capture practice well known to the data center community, was not abstract. The latest xkeyscore reveal fits this model as well.
"Are they or aren't they" isn't the most productive debate to have anyway. If they aren't, they could, and if the end result is the same, what should we do about it?
As you suggest, the discussions in this area I do appreciate at HN are on what honest rational policy should be, and on how technologists can assist in ensuring trust in confidentiality and non-repudiation in the cloud of services HNers are building.