Re: Hardware Trojans - was:] Urgent: skype vulnerability?

Posted by Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Urgent-skype-vulnerability-tp7583763p7583849.html

On 9/16/13 10:47 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
On 9/16/13 9:41 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
My (relevant) point is that with that kind of distributed, self-motivated, activity... how could we possibly know that there aren't man Anonymous-Sympathetic individuals working on hardware doping, etc.  as part of their day jobs (or parallell/tangential to their day jobs) who might be on the edge of this.
It seems to me an organization like Anonymous has little to offer such a person, besides risk of identification.  Does such a person really want to risk their own Adrian Lamo when picking a fight with the Zetas cartel? 
Anonymous has *nothing* to offer *anyone*  as an organization IMO.   What it offers, as a concept, is an inspiration and an awareness that a large, almost completely decoupled group of people can have a big effect.  

I'm sure that you are correct that the limited effect against the Cartels by Anon's call to action *is* based on the wide reaching and unforgiving threat they represent in their very nature.

   Without using the brush too broadly, I can imagine that *many* would be as reticent about taking on say... the US (or any country's) intelligence apparatus or any of the transnational corporations (look at what has come out about such interests in SoAm and Africa and the lengths they have probably gone to to maintain favorable conditions for extractive profits).

Using Snowden as an example, if we grant him the motivations he has claimed (whether they might be naive or not), he disturbed the water of the US National Security policy regarding spying on US Citizens in a way that surely thousands of others in similar positions to his might have.  His position was elite, but not unique.  

I don't fully appreciate your Adrian Lamo reference... are you saying that the Mannings (and Snowdens?) of the world need to think about the Lamos of the world when they act?   If we were playing Jeapordy, I guess the answer to "Adrian Lamo" is somewhere in a recursive chain of "Who is watching the Watchers?".

I don't like the idea of generating/cultivating a culture of fear and paranoia, but I suppose I *do* like noticing that the culture of fear and paranoia that already exists might be self-limiting through it's own nature?

- Steve



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