agreenjay

Thanks for this comment. This is probably closer in spirit to Schneier's view. And his big point is that we can do more to prevent mass collection of data through strong cyrpto-- a good door look and bolt. It appears to me -- I was at the conference and wrote the article--that many in the community are surprised/impressed by how effective APTs and other techniques--packet injection-- are at getting around the lock.

A few of my thoughts. Bruce did make an important point during his presentation, which I didn't write about in the piece. Whenever possible the NSA goes around crypto and other security. The agency has immense power--through, for example, QUANTUM Insert and redirecting to Foxacid servers--to target individuals. The real-issue is BULK collection, and that's where strong crypto will help when placed on endpoint devices and of course at the backend. In this sense: if we make it more expensive and more difficult to get at the data, the NSA will go after easier targets--this is kind of implied in some of the Snowden documents according to Bruce. So crypto is "less important" because if they really, really want to governments and next-gen cyber thieves will get at some of the data. But there are a lot of conventional techniques--better authorization controls, and constant monitoring of activity-- along with encryption that can limit the amount of data that's exposed.

design work by Gregory Koberger!

The public should have much control of their online privacy--especially the right to be left alone.

With the UK's plans to create a giant DNA research database for the National Health Service, DNA will really become a workable PII.

Bad year for privacy ... FISA and now Congress drops the ball on EPCA reforms

The serf-lord relationship is convenient for many and does have economic benefits. Thankfully, when the arrangement becomes too one-sided, you can always leave the castle.

I'll file in my "department of huh?" folder--I give up. Thanks for pointing out fair-use rules and commercial speech. Back to the point ... any thoughts on power laws and file system size distributions? Are they lognormal, power law in tails, double Pareto, etc. Is the generative model based on some kind of herding behavior --preferential attachment (Yule-Simon,etc)-- or something else? Feel free to take a histogram of your own file system and tell us what comes up.

It stands to reason! You want go up against Microsoft's lawyers?