via this Google+ Post

Listening to National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered, I couldn’t quite believe my ears when a guest on the show said something along the lines of, “You can’t trust any commercial encryption tools; they’ve been compromised by the NSA. Instead, you have to use open source.“

Aside: Here is an exhaustive list of free open source encryption tools.

Wait, come again? Here it is:

Hard to believe, isn’t it? One of my favorite comments this past week was from someone who said, “You know, everyone thought I was a crank about privacy, but it turns out, I wasn’t cranky enough.” I laughed as the obviousness of this came through. Think about all those movies, books, television shows that display an overactive imagination about government surveillance. 

MILLAR: Well, what we’ve been able to establish from the documents is that over the last 13 years or so, there has been a massive effort in both the U.S. and the U.K. to circumvent, crack, and in other ways undermine all the major encryption codes, and the documents show that they’ve achieved considerable success in that and now can access vast amounts, to use their terms, of encrypted data that’s passing across the world’s communications.

Those fictions were OK because they were…fiction. The reality of living in a police state of constant surveillance, where protecting one’s privacy is an act of liberty that is against the law, well, that was a reality no one ever imagined in America.

Source Unknown – please leave in comments if you know.

No one imagined this except the cranks, those free software fanatics like Richard Stallman.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide. 

Source: Bruce Scheneier

Any cause that brings together the ACLU and the National Rifle Association (NRA) must be wrong. . .

“If programs like those currently justified by the government’s interpretation are allowed to continue and grow unchecked, they could also—contrary to clear congressional intent—undo decades of legal protection for the privacy of Americans in general, and of gun owners in particular,” the brief states.
President Obama and Army Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s director, have defended the program.

“President Obama, tear down this NSA.” I voted for liberty, hope and change, not this. Here…this is how you do it:

Check out Miguel’s Workshop Materials online at http://mglearns.wikispaces.com

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