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I think many systems commercial and otherwise will be open to exploitation. I don't necessarily object to the NSA or another government's intel service hunting

I think many systems commercial and otherwise will be open to exploitation. I don't necessarily object to the NSA or another government's intel service hunting those bugs either to protect against or to exploit. I do object overall to the creation of exploits or the weakening of systems. In the absence of a perfect system of governance I feel we should default to not giving unspeakable power to a concentrated few. The slides on the tools were leaked out of a for-profit firm that contracts for the NSA, next the tools themselves like music industry cohort MediaDefender[0] had happen to them? Or even worse a leak of a database the tools sift through like the Assad regime's BlueCoat[1] logs on political/sexual/religious targets? Another US firm Palantir was itself tangled in a scheme Glenn Greenwald reported pre-Snowden regarding the targeting of political activists via a solicitation of work through Hunton & Williams made by the US Chamber of Commerce[2]. I can't trust the US intel community as far as I can toss it when conflicts of interest are apparent at every level of clearance given to contractors. So I will probably frown upon most alphabet boys exploitation of capabilities. [0] http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3819529/Mediadefender_-_ANTI_P2P-mails_and_source_code http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3819529/Mediadefender_-_ANTI_... [1] http://bluesmote.com/ http://bluesmote.com/ [2] http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/ http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/

1457389 13y ago
Considering the scale of funding the NSA and other government agencies enjoy, I think that any focus on "cyber warfare" is going to lead to a "weakening of systems". But this is inevitable when you give state actors a monopoly on extralegal means. Like you said, the onus should be on a robust system of legal and regulatory restraints on this power, which is what the Snowden leaks and others have shown we definitely lack.

1457389 13y ago

Considering the scale of funding the NSA and other government agencies enjoy, I think that any focus on "cyber warfare" is going to lead to a "weakening of systems". But this is inevitable when you give state actors a monopoly on extralegal means. Like you said, the onus should be on a robust system of legal and regulatory restraints on this power, which is what the Snowden leaks and others have shown we definitely lack.