The "usual suspect" discussions about NSA are something like 10:1 against NSA. If there's an NSA sockpuppet army trying to influence HN, it's a good one, because there's no evidence of it.
Good influence won't simply be support for/against, but deflecting each viewpoint into a framework that upholds the status quo (making it impotent) and causing infighting between people who would otherwise find common ground.
The NSA doesn't influence standards by sockpuppeting "no crypto". They concern troll to add endless complexity, making implementations buggier and rarer.
In the HN NSA threads, the easiest example is encouraging argument between people who are in violent agreement that the NSA must be curtailed, but differ in approach. But instead of coding or grassroots activism, they're goaded into engaging each other on a message board!
Listen critically to "conservative" talk radio for a good general example - every segment starts off talking about problems that have grassroots concern (and that the "other side" would even sympathize with, just with lower priority). After the warm up to get listeners on board, the narrative switches to pigeonholing that anger away from systematic issues, and towards individual politicians and the "other side" that supports them.
So, you should be able to provide an example of an NSA thread on HN where a sockpuppet diverted the conversation to infighting between people otherwise sharing common ground.
I don't think standards groups need a lot of help concern-trolling complexity into standards. The exact same force is exerted on more benign standards; watch HTML for example.
Here's a rebuttal framework: select a NIST crypto standard and show an example of needless complexity and the discussion that led to it. I'll reply with an HTML working group thread that demonstrates the same thing. I'm pretty sure I'll win that contest, but we could try a few rounds just to see. How about we just do one?
I'm certainly not saying these behaviors are only due to conspiracy, as your response seems to be addressing. What I am saying is that the most effective and stealthy way of steering and disrupting conversation is to encourage these natural behaviors, and simultaneously calling out the organic infighting. Your previous assertion that discourse control would manifest as simple for/against is itself a straw man.
I'll own that my comment is a handywavy journey of rough assumptions, not an open and shut logical course. This is the case with any heuristic, and it's necessary navigate the unknowable (without waiting decades to get lucky for a leak to reveal specifics, at which point the method is ancient history anyway).
The way I see it, in 2014 the onus of proof is on someone who wishes to assert that discussions aren't being manipulated - if not by USG "itself", then by private companies looking out for their own interests. The only mechanism that would prevent corporate self-interest from evolving to this is individuals' morals, and given what we know about moral plasticity I don't see how that's any more than wishful thinking.
The irony is, I'm going further out on a limb, and at the same time making a falsifiable claim. Unlike you, I do not believe that the NSA subverts standards groups by injecting spurious complexity. I think there's a lot of spurious complexity in crypto standards (in fact, I think that for the most part, crypto standards are evil), but that it doesn't come from NSA.
There are archived mailing lists of many of these standards groups. We should be able to find an example of a potentially NSA-sourced complexity.
Remember when John Gilmore claimed that someone from the government had persuaded the IPSEC working group to misuse CBC IVs in order to weaken the standard? We found out who was behind that, and it clearly wasn't the NSA --- not only that, but they were part of a years-running clique of people degrading crypto standards out of what appears to be vanity and ignorance.
If you're a crypto standards body, I think vanity and ignorance is a much bigger threat than NSA.
(I think NSA did subvert at least one crypto standard, for what it's worth).
I doubt he will respond to you. It's a pretty classic tactic to request citation from someone you know isn't prepared to offer it in order to defuse an argument. He doesn't have to offer citation, he only has to stop his opponent from appearing knowledgeable.
he doesn't need to be right, he only needs to make the other guy look wrong.
I've no doubt that people ask for citation in the manner suggested, but the gp had a resonable point. In the absense of evidence, it's better to assume what's going on is organic to online discussions.
If you've been on the internet for the last 10 years, this is easy to believe. If not, just visit the phoronix fourms. You'll be astounded by the batshit insane folks.
I mainly just wanted to see an analysis of needless complexity which is organically injected into committee-based standards processes because it could inform my own work which depends so heavily on them. Additionally, when so much of software engineering involves dealing with multiple stakeholders, understanding how people can "concern-troll" a useless or damaging requirement into the process might allow me to diffuse such a situation in the future.
At no point has the interests of any company I've worked with dovetailed with the NSA's. That was a profoundly ignorant and obnoxious accusation to casually lob at anyone.
Yeah, but that's fine. Tptacek is not a sock-puppet, exactly because he's one guy with strong views. Yes, he has a lot of power here, and uses it to shape the discussion, but that's what we want! If we decide we don't like what he's doing, we can down-vote him to oblivion, or just ignore him.
The problem is when one person has 1500 accounts, and just uses them to direct the discussion, without actually contributing to it.
IIRC, tptacek just has a more nuanced position wrt NSA spying. It just often comes across as towing the Party line.
But that's certainly no reason to call him a sockpuppet. Frankly, if you think HN is pwned so hard that the highest-karma account is a sock puppet, why would you even bother? Maybe this whole board is just one giant programmatic timesink meant to waste your time and discourage you from doing something.
> * Maybe this whole board is just one giant programmatic timesink meant to waste your time and discourage you from doing something.*
As a kid I read a science-fiction short story to that effect --- a successful scientist discovers that he's being drawn into more and more university-committee work, etc., and thus has less and less time for his real work. He detects signs that "someone" (aliens?) is doing this intentionally, to all kinds of knowledge workers. Wish I could remember the title and author.
I'd like to register my objection to the currently fashionable, yet toxic idea that when a point of view is only 95% stomped out that that is still a sign of "sock puppetry" and that the remaining dissent, rather than being celebrated, must be stomped out even harder... and then that this is treated as some sort of improvement of public discourse instead of an inevitable degradation of it.
This is, admittedly, not 100% a reply to any of the ancestors of this post, but, well, it's definitely an opportune time. Labeling all disagreement as "sock puppetry" is already a popular rhetorical dodge and this news is only going to make that worse. If you want real free discourse, you need real diversity of viewpoints and you need to foster that diversity, not insist on conformity.
If the only place that diversity is coming from truly is sock puppets, well, I would consider that a condemnation of the community in question. (And make sure you read that sentence very carefully before replying; it doesn't say "we should trust the sock puppets" (hardly!). It means that there should be diversity in the community, before we add in any viewpoints, right or wrong, expressed by sock puppets.)
it's basically tptacek and mpyne against the world. for the most part i welcome contributors who aren't entirely biased.
unfortunately as even my own worst paranoia was not predictive enough, paranoia that has had me laughed at to my face and behind my back, given what's come out: it's very hard for me to react reasonably.
so people with a different bias to myself or others can greatly contribute to such discussions.
We're probably not worth it, we're a small community, and the part of that community that are actually and truly influential is smaller still, and wouldn't be doing their influencing by preaching to the HN choir. I'm sure we're monitored, at least automatically, but I doubt we're worth directing.
