Computer security is a new(ish) field, so we get to make up names for things. That’s an advantage and a disadvantage – it means that marketing people can come up with new-sounding names for old stuff, and sometimes customers get all excited and buy it because it sounds so new!
This needs a cool name. There’s “The Singularity” – how about “The Feedback Loop” or perhaps “The Oroboros Loop”?
At this point, you should assume your smart phone is a tracking device – albeit one you pay for, which you can buy a nice case for.
This is a true story. Some minor details are changed deliberately.
Since 2004 or so, I’ve done a column over at SearchSecurity [ss] which started out as me doing a point/counterpoint with Bruce Schneier and ended with me interviewing interesting people from all over the field. I’m stopping doing the column, finally, this fall, due to “internet security fatigue” triggered by decades of saying the same thing.
You can be sure as water’s wet – if someone doesn’t tell cops “don’t intrude on people” (You know, like the constitution tried to…) they’re going to explore the grey zones around the people’s rights. And by “grey zones” that means “areas where they can pretend not to understand” or “it looks grey to me.”
If you use the same trick over and over, it becomes routine and eventually the people you’re trying to trick begin to play against your game, instead of falling for it.
By now, the establishment ought to be painfully aware that the FBI/NSA retro-scope is aimed at them, as well. Sometime in the next couple of years I expect a legislative backlash, especially if it keeps being used to take down friends of the high and mighty.
In the late 1990s, the US Government was setting up a case to argue that hacking equated to terrorism. Because, while it was mostly being used for illicit state-craft, it could potentially be used by terrorists. In 1997, at a keynote for Black Hat Briefings, I warned the hacker community what was coming but – at that time – there was a great deal of “community outreach” being done by NSA – they were hiring hackers (whose work we now see leaking on a regular basis) and it was all very hip and friendly.
Meanwhile, there are occasionally signs that the effort is paying off. Security hasn’t been too bad but it’s had its #MeToo moments and the conferences used to have “booth babes” and a lot of “locker room talk.”