5 ms·

It's not necessarily true. Maybe the best ones were the best UNTIL they got caught. Hard to say, given we don't know anything about the best if they were never

It's not necessarily true. Maybe the best ones were the best UNTIL they got caught. Hard to say, given we don't know anything about the best if they were never caught.

brutusborn 5y ago
Not necessarily, but probably true. Same with all the best criminals, the best live out their lives and none are the wiser as to their actions besides those in the know. This all assumes that getting caught is a bad thing. For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals. Errrr, should we tell you about Blackwater, Thalès, BAE Systems, Bolloré, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Alexandre Benalla, Serge Dassault, NSA? They are just some examples of very famous people/corporations engaging in high-level criminal activities ranging from basic corruption to actual slavery to wide-scale murder. We live under capitalism, a system which glorifies criminal activity as the path to success and social recognition. Sometimes, this criminal activity is legal and you can't believe how that's even possible, but many times it's illegal but when people/organizations become too influential they are far above the law. Don't even get me started on law enforcement engaging in criminal activity such as organizing drugs trade like in USA's crack epidemics or with France's chief anti-drug cop leading the biggest smuggling ring for cocaine/hashish for years. One could even say in some circles, being ready to defy the law is a sign you're part of this circle. For example, in France at least, murderous cops are more likely to get promotions than to get kicked out of police, because once they took part in murder and held their mouth shut through the shitstorm without compromising colleagues/higher-ups, they have successfully demonstrated their loyalty to the establishment. Of course, you're free to not research scandals involving the people/organizations i mentioned, take the blue pill and go back to dreaming about elections and free market and how fair our society is.
  - emteycz 5y ago
    Legal criminal activity is an oxymoron. The legal system defines what is criminal, and that has nothing to do with morality. And even though I'd tend to agree, I absolutely don't understand why you're making a connection to capitalism. Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues with police etc you're talking about.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > The legal system defines what is criminal, and that has nothing to do with morality. That's not entirely wrong, but "criminal" is often used figuratively to refer to morally-abhorrent behavior. I took the liberty to employ the word this way to address the blind spots of our respective legal systems. I personally wouldn't call a weed smoker a criminal but would call a murderous cop a criminal: that France's legal system does not agree with me is unfortunate but irrelevant. > Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues That's a debatable point of view, but my opinion is that what you refer to as "socialism" or "social democracy" is in fact just another brand of capitalism. For example, in anarchist circles, the USSR was widely criticized as "State capitalism" [0]. In this mental framework, laissez-faire capitalism (Randt/Hayek ideals) is yet another brand of capitalism, although it has yet to be proven that capitalism can exist without nation states to enforce it, while stateless communism has a varied history throughout the ages. [0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-is-no-communism-in-russia https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-i...
      - emteycz 5y ago
        The problem with criminality is that what we feel like is absolutely irrelevant, which is why this is a big mistake. The fact is that weed is criminal in France/elsewhere in Europe and that is a problem that must be recognized because it's immoral. Same re: murderous cops and other excesses of criminal systems. Ad brands of capitalism - well OK, but any place that tried any brand of anarchism failed even harder than any brand of capitalism ever did, and the end result was much worse for the individual people who lived there. The US was always a heaven on Earth in comparison, even during its worst era of unregulated capitalism. USSR is the largest example but it was a poor country. There were rich countries that voted for true communism democratically and even there it devolved into a catastrophe in less than a year (after WW2, or after a few years for the more recent examples). IMHO human nature makes it absolutely impossible to make communism work, because it will be immediately taken over by power hungry people for their own benefit. Any anarchism that might be desired will never be allowed to develop, these power hungry people will make sure they control it.
davidwritesbugs 5y ago
Having been caught and done jail time I think that the view that "only the dumb ones get caught" is wrong (OK, I would say that): intelligence and getting caught are mostly orthogonal and I met a, very, small number of extremely bright people in jail. The difficulty in executing many types of crimes and evading detection is that it is a probabilistic process: a criminal activity may be composed of many actors with differing motivations and competencies, in a hostile environment with unknown features and requiring multiple contingent steps. Any mistep in this chain can cause the failure of the project and, however clever the player, the mistep can be difficult to forecast and non-deterministic.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Have you written about your experience at all? If you’ve got a blog (or even a book!) I’d love to read it.
  - davidwritesbugs 5y ago
    Others have written about it, it did make case law which was 'fun', and I've moved on.
    - geocrasher 5y ago
      Links?
- ska 5y ago
  More generally, humans are generally bad at anything requiring the discipline and attention to detail that good opsec requires. Ability to do this well probably doesn't have much correlation with intelligence (although seeing the need for it might).

It's not necessarily true. Maybe the best ones were the best UNTIL they got caught. Hard to say, given we don't know anything about the best if they were never caught.

brutusborn 5y ago

Not necessarily, but probably true. Same with all the best criminals, the best live out their lives and none are the wiser as to their actions besides those in the know. This all assumes that getting caught is a bad thing. For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals.

southerntofu 5y ago
> For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals. Errrr, should we tell you about Blackwater, Thalès, BAE Systems, Bolloré, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Alexandre Benalla, Serge Dassault, NSA? They are just some examples of very famous people/corporations engaging in high-level criminal activities ranging from basic corruption to actual slavery to wide-scale murder. We live under capitalism, a system which glorifies criminal activity as the path to success and social recognition. Sometimes, this criminal activity is legal and you can't believe how that's even possible, but many times it's illegal but when people/organizations become too influential they are far above the law. Don't even get me started on law enforcement engaging in criminal activity such as organizing drugs trade like in USA's crack epidemics or with France's chief anti-drug cop leading the biggest smuggling ring for cocaine/hashish for years. One could even say in some circles, being ready to defy the law is a sign you're part of this circle. For example, in France at least, murderous cops are more likely to get promotions than to get kicked out of police, because once they took part in murder and held their mouth shut through the shitstorm without compromising colleagues/higher-ups, they have successfully demonstrated their loyalty to the establishment. Of course, you're free to not research scandals involving the people/organizations i mentioned, take the blue pill and go back to dreaming about elections and free market and how fair our society is.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Legal criminal activity is an oxymoron. The legal system defines what is criminal, and that has nothing to do with morality. And even though I'd tend to agree, I absolutely don't understand why you're making a connection to capitalism. Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues with police etc you're talking about.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > The legal system defines what is criminal, and that has nothing to do with morality. That's not entirely wrong, but "criminal" is often used figuratively to refer to morally-abhorrent behavior. I took the liberty to employ the word this way to address the blind spots of our respective legal systems. I personally wouldn't call a weed smoker a criminal but would call a murderous cop a criminal: that France's legal system does not agree with me is unfortunate but irrelevant. > Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues That's a debatable point of view, but my opinion is that what you refer to as "socialism" or "social democracy" is in fact just another brand of capitalism. For example, in anarchist circles, the USSR was widely criticized as "State capitalism" [0]. In this mental framework, laissez-faire capitalism (Randt/Hayek ideals) is yet another brand of capitalism, although it has yet to be proven that capitalism can exist without nation states to enforce it, while stateless communism has a varied history throughout the ages. [0] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-is-no-communism-in-russia https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-i...
    - emteycz 5y ago
      The problem with criminality is that what we feel like is absolutely irrelevant, which is why this is a big mistake. The fact is that weed is criminal in France/elsewhere in Europe and that is a problem that must be recognized because it's immoral. Same re: murderous cops and other excesses of criminal systems. Ad brands of capitalism - well OK, but any place that tried any brand of anarchism failed even harder than any brand of capitalism ever did, and the end result was much worse for the individual people who lived there. The US was always a heaven on Earth in comparison, even during its worst era of unregulated capitalism. USSR is the largest example but it was a poor country. There were rich countries that voted for true communism democratically and even there it devolved into a catastrophe in less than a year (after WW2, or after a few years for the more recent examples). IMHO human nature makes it absolutely impossible to make communism work, because it will be immediately taken over by power hungry people for their own benefit. Any anarchism that might be desired will never be allowed to develop, these power hungry people will make sure they control it.

davidwritesbugs 5y ago

Having been caught and done jail time I think that the view that "only the dumb ones get caught" is wrong (OK, I would say that): intelligence and getting caught are mostly orthogonal and I met a, very, small number of extremely bright people in jail. The difficulty in executing many types of crimes and evading detection is that it is a probabilistic process: a criminal activity may be composed of many actors with differing motivations and competencies, in a hostile environment with unknown features and requiring multiple contingent steps. Any mistep in this chain can cause the failure of the project and, however clever the player, the mistep can be difficult to forecast and non-deterministic.

elliekelly 5y ago
Have you written about your experience at all? If you’ve got a blog (or even a book!) I’d love to read it.
- davidwritesbugs 5y ago
  Others have written about it, it did make case law which was 'fun', and I've moved on.
  - geocrasher 5y ago
    Links?
ska 5y ago
More generally, humans are generally bad at anything requiring the discipline and attention to detail that good opsec requires. Ability to do this well probably doesn't have much correlation with intelligence (although seeing the need for it might).