Information Security practitioners aren’t used to getting political; so there was apparently a small but vocal stream of nationalists complaining to the conference organizers by the time I was done.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Information Security practitioners aren’t used to getting political; so there was apparently a small but vocal stream of nationalists complaining to the conference organizers by the time I was done.
I believe in “the deep state” but it’s not quite what people think it is: the deep state is the combined momentum of several out-of-control government agencies; their political inertia and self-interest make their actions appear to be a behind the scenes government, but it’s mostly a desire to protect their importance and budget.
File it under “Elon Musk wants to screw all the telco monopolies.”
People who watch the surveillance state have known about this stuff since the early 1980s. My personal theory is that spooks talk to each other (as spooks do) and eventually word starts to leak; it’s too clever a scam to miss. Then, when a program becomes huge enough, there are tens of thousands of people using the data from it; it’s pretty easy to figure out where the data is coming from. I first encountered the international reach-around when I was at a conference and wound up talking to an interesting fellow who turned out to be a journalist that had been investigating the surveillance state for a very long time.
The intelligence state has not been collecting data for its own entertainment; they have to find a use for it. Remember back to when the Bush administration’s secret interception program was disclosed? Probably the most painful bit of news in it was that the NSA wasn’t (yet) capable of doing anything particularly interesting or useful with the data.
Warning: I get a bit ranty.
A surrealist is walking down the street, and sees a banana peel in his path; he says, “Mon Dieu! I am going to fall down again!” and keeps walking.
There is a bunch of strange stuff surfacing surrounding the alleged incident in which the NSA allegedly tried to buy back stolen data from an alleged Russian hacker. I’m tracking it, but there are still many shoes that need to drop before the story begins to even make a shred of sense.
Strava’s heat map has made a lot of people step back and realize, “wow, there are side-channels to data.” Most of us in the computer security world have known that for a long time; some of us have spent our lives trying to stop such channels from happening; it’s a frustrating way to spend your life but, as Townes says, “it beats sitting around waiting to die.”
I don’t really know where to go with some of this; I’m geniunely afraid I’m going to start sounding like a conspiracy theorist. The conspiracies have already staked out their territory, though, which makes this whole topic a bit of a mine-field.
Just lean over there and hit the “rewind” button for a second; take us back to… July 2016.