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With the right kind of eyes, there are no shadows. And likewise,
with the right kind of ears, Obama's NSA speech was the beginning of
the second wave. You can view the <a
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/full-text-of-president-obamas-jan-17-speech-on-nsa-reforms/2014/01/17/fa33590a-7f8c-11e3-9556-4a4bf7bcbd84_story.html">transcript
</a>and the speech itself, and of course there are parts of it that
fall completely flat, such as the continued insistence by the Obama
team that they can convince the American public there is a
difference between Metadata and Data. Likewise, nobody believes
Obama would be considering significant reforms, or even talking
about the NSA, if Snowden had not happened. No amount of "I was
going to go there" is going to convince people of that.<br>
<br>
But the majority of the speech was historical precisely because it
echos the unseen successes of today's Intelligence Community (IC).
In particular, nuclear threats from Iran and others have been
thwarted. Cyber threats that attack the very heart of our economy
and infrastructure are held back, and the evolution of fully
networked warfare is what defeated Al Qaeda. His speech also called
out our allies for their weirdly pandering holier than thou drama
queen public reactions to the Snowden documents.<br>
<br>
None of the more crazy suggestions of the <a
href="https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2013-December/000546.html">NSA
Task Force</a> got any time at all - restricting 0days, changing
the meaning of need to know, etc. <br>
<br>
And today the second shoe dropped - the French and Americans
announced that "<a
href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-26140744">Trust is
restored</a>".<br>
<br>
The next step will be commercial - a message from the IC to the US
corporations currently whining the most (Google and Microsoft, in
particular) that if they want to protect themselves from China, they
have one partner, and one partner only. Look for something like the
Mandiant APT1 paper to come out soon, but bigger, and better. :><br>
<br>
-dave<br>
<br>
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