Of course! The US should destroy its electronic espionage capabilities, right as the world enters the information golden age! Makes perfect sense. Why think long term when you can just react to the last news-fueled scandal!

Every industrialized country is racing to adopt strong electronic espionage (and defense capabilities), it's been growing fast for the last decade, as the importance and impact of telecommunication technology has been growing. It is THE hot field right now. Clearly, the most rational move for the US right now is to simply abandon it altogether.

The trust (or legitimate lack of trust) that people have toward their country has little to do with how countries act among each others.

If you don't trust your country foreign policy (and you are right in saying that it isn't always very legitimate), then act on changing that. Hoping your country to sabotage itself won't work.

The US (and every single other countries) won't abandon the tools at its disposition to enforce its foreign policy just because you feel they should. Countries - especially powerful ones - don't sabotage themselves for no reason.

Just because spying has caused death doesn't mean it has the same general impact as war (for Christ sake!)

I like how you claim that spying goes against countries "national interest" when every single country does it. I guess it means that every single country is wrong in your view? Or maybe you're just wrong and has no idea what you are talking about.

> Just because its their job doesn't mean its okay.

Just because it's the job of the military to kill people doesn't mean it's okay.

It's not, but every single country in the world still has a military, and won't disband it just because "killing is wrong".

Countries have interests. They have a foreign policy aimed at defending these interest.

War is diplomacy by any other means, and countries will use wars as a tool of their foreign policy.

Spying is also diplomacy by other means, and countries will use spies as a tool of their foreign policy, which has the nice benefit of not killing people and not destroying everything, like wars do.

That it is "wrong" in some isolated, ideologically pure version of reality has little impact in practice. Countries continue to spy (since before they were such things as "countries"), and will continue for a long time.

Some will call me a troll, but as a gamer I'm no longer interested in 4K video since I know Occulus Rift (and competing VR set) are coming.

Why spend a shitload of money of a new 4K screen and the video card necessary for an acceptable game experience when I'll be able to do VR with a fraction of the cost and with my existing hardware setup?

Obviously that's a gamer perspective - I'm sure plenty of people will find 4K for what they are doing.

> Or, like the folks he's talking to, you could go to a prestigious college, get a fancy degree, and potentially land a job that can pay for 3 or 4 people to perform the duties of the charitable worker above, while still maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle. You could even end up higher in a profitable company, where you direct millions of dollars to aid programs just for tax breaks, if not altruism.

You could also tax the shit out of these high-paying peoples with fancy degrees and use the windfall to help fix social ills. Sounds a much more realistic plan than to just hope these guys will do charitable work by themselves - something they may not even have experience or aptitude too.

I really admire and respect what Bill Gates has chosen to do with his wealth, but he's still only an exception, not the rule. Instead asking billionaires like him to redistribute their wealth, we should instead ask ourselves how it is possible for them to amass such massive wealth to begin with.

"Only because software development sucks".

The solution isn't better coding. It's been CLEAR now, for many years, that we can't just wait for the world coders to magically become amazing and consistently produce flawless code. Yes, training is part of the solution, and so are advanced debugging tools and many other things, but just blaming that it is the coder's fault won't change anything. It's not a solution, it's a blame.

It's like saying that car deaths would go down if only drivers were better.

The lesson wasn't learned, but the problem was somewhat mitigated. Big software companies adopted regular patch cycles and deployed patch management tools on their customers. It kinda worked because PC are powerful computers well designed to be upgraded and modified.

This is not the case for many embedded systems. They are designed to be installed and then you forget about them. So the "classic" mitigation technique doesn't work. This is a big problem.

Well... sure... but how is this related to what I wrote?

The unauthorized disclosure of sensible US information has happened regularly in the 20th century. Act of spying are motivated differently depending of the individual. Interestingly enough, it's rarely a question of ideology.

Sure, illegal acts, or perceived as illegals, can motivate some people in doing what Snowden did. And yes, I guess stopping to do these acts will remove the incentive. But it doesn't mean that it's a solution for the actual security problem. And it certainly how the NSA will see it too.

Well, maybe that's true for Snowden, but it's just him. In practice, disclosure of sensitive information happens whether "constitutional rights" are respected or not, and the security controls that can be used to secure this information don't change.

Btw, I did not write that. AC isn't me.

It's Russia, you twit! How can there be a Russian conversation about domestic surveillance when they have trouble having political opposition, let alone a free press! The Russian Federation is 148th in the 2014 Reporters Without Borders World free press index, and here you are, talking about how you asked a tough question to a leader who doesn't give a shit about looking hypocritical or lying, and has been using you for the last 10 months to discredit the West while he goes forward with his project of grand russian unification.

See the provided link for the "definitions".

I really like how the very last one (8. "A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around") is said to be deprecated, when it is by FAR the most commonly used, among infosec professionals, in the litterature, the media and well, pretty much everybody, for the last decade or so... The only exception being that tiny minority who still cling to the old-school definition...

But yeah... "Deprecated."

This is very true, but from the POV of the US, it is also a great argument for continuing to invest in offensive cyber capabilities.

In the end, it costs way less to attack a network than to secure it properly. And unfortunately, this asymmetrical situation could remain true for a long time.

This also can lead to a cult of the offensive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_offensive