Forty-nine years ago today, Senator Frank Church appeared on the Sunday news program Meet the Press and explained then, in 1975, how the United States government had the capacity to spy on every citizen and that it was vitally important to oversee the United States’ intelligence apparatus to make sure that their operations were compatible with the law and democracy:
And no American would have any privacy left such is the capability to monitor everything…
There would be no place to hide if this government ever became a tyranny–if a dictator ever took charge in this country. The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny.
… And, we must see to it that [the NSA] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss: That’s the abyss from which there is no return.
i don’t want to downplay Snowden, a brave hero in my book, but i keep telling people that he didn’t really bring anything new to the table regarding spying by the intel community
there was also a whole lot more that was disclosed through the so-called ‘Church Committee’
sold a PC to a guy once - said he had once worked for the gov and had a crypto clearance, though for what program, i have no idea
we started talking about some very interesting stuff but he had to leave, so i suggested we continue using encrypted email - his 3 word response was “encryption is useless”
obviously encryption is not useless and i don’t think that’s what he meant, but i suspect that he meant that it’s useless at a certain level, such as NRO, NSA, etc.
I am not an expert. But, in principle, all encryption is vulnerable in the sense that there is a hidden message and that there is a correct key to unlock that message. It is important to keep that in mind because I think many people assume that encrypted information is inaccessible. Instead, encrypted information is hidden in a large mathematical space where there are an unimaginable number of combinations yet one of those combinations will unlock the information. So there are two questions. One, how many guesses can you make per second? And, two, are there flaws in the encryption algorithm or are there mathematical search algorithms which shrink the mathematical space which you have to search?
Well-funded organizations, like national spy agencies, have the resources to conduct those searches. And, in general, the government has an interest in limiting the encryption casually used, which makes spying easier.
While not directly comparable to encrypted communication, the discussion around deprecated hash functions like MD5 give an idea of what cryptography failures look like.
With regard to Senator Church, I happened to be reading about the committee and I noticed the anniversary. So, wanted to take advantage of the coincidence and link to the Church Committee which is one of only a few instances where the policies and actions of the CIA were publicly examined.
The 1,000 page Church Committee report is saved on Wikipedia. I have not read the report. But I generally enjoy reading large, technical volumes. And I have not been disappointed by reading these types of reports in the past if I found the subject interesting.
If you want something more interesting, I know there is the popular book called The Last Honest Man by James Risen which focuses on Senator Church. That was published in 2023 and benefits from Risen’s research including recently declassified documents.
watched a 2023 interview with James Risen and his son about the book and was more than a little shocked that he thinks the CIA is no longer involved in such activities (assassinations) and that the deep state is unfounded conspiracy theory … this, in light of all the revelations of the last 24 years and prior? that’s quite a ludicrous assumption
when asked about what he thinks Church might have felt about the post 9/11 U.S., Risen says he think Church would have rebelled against the national security state set up by Cheney and Bush, but doesn’t mention Obama who made a massive contribution to the same (Trump is intent on continuing the stupidity it seems)
all in all, these guys seem to have a very narrow view on how deep the deep state is