The officials and news outlets have been steadily lying to us about the danger from the nuclear reactors in Japan. The idea was to protect GE’s stock, since they designed and built these failing reactors. The US government has been lying to us about their plans for Libya. They’ve lied about the so-called recovery. Okay, for the ultra-wealthy, things have been looking up, but for the rest of us it’s still a depression.
Recently one of those oligarchs admitted there was class a war. That is, he admitted there was a war of the wealthy against the rest, and the upper classes are winning.
Most folks don’t know about this thing called Certificates of Authority (“certs”) used on the Internet. It has to do with using your web browser to seek and accept an encrypted connection to the server on the other end. It’s a way of double checking whether that server belongs to whomever it claims it belongs to, and we can trust them to do for us whatever the owner advertises.
The authority for these certs is delegated and pretty carefully controlled. Except, someone managed to sneak into one of the certs issuing outfits and grab the numerical code keys for some very popular websites used for communications of various kinds.
I first read a rather technical report of it, and just barely understood it. Then I read a more popularized geeky report and understood it a lot better. Now the story is being reported in a very dumbed-down version. Basically, the reports now say they believe some government-sponsored Net spooks from Iran got those keys so they could intercept their own people’s attempts to use things like Skype and Facebook to communicate about plans to resist the government.
But the dumbed-down report doesn’t reveal just how serious this breech was in terms of how it threatens the very nature of the Net itself. Granted, this has all been fixed, and apparently before the keys could be used. Those keys were revoked and most web browsers have been updated to reflect that. Still, that the keys leaked at all is a really big deal. You see, if a so-called rogue nation like Iran can do it, what prevents someone in the US government doing it? What prevents them from having already done it and not telling anyone?
Don’t trust anyone with more power or money than you. Then, just to be safe, don’t even trust yourself.
