Living with the surveillance state

Posted Oct 30, 2013 20:50 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Living with the surveillance state by nix
Parent article: Living with the surveillance state

Even there, a social solution (that a reasonable man does not burgle others' houses, and reports burglars seen burgling others' houses, and that when called to a burglary in progress the police bother to turn up) does 99.9% of the work.

Bingo. IT world lived under different rules for so long it forgot how people interact with a real world. Think one recent hoopla. What happens if real world “security professional” (someone who tests keylocks for living) will pick a code of some Mom&Pop store (or, even worse, General Motor's HQ), visit it and make a copy of a couple of confidential documents? Just where exactly he'll be if he's not affiliate of said company? Sure, people do pick locks on safes and crack other systems regularly for different reasons—read Feynman's book, or Wozniak's one, but they absolutely do expect to see repercussions if caught. The fact that computer “security professionals” expect to see easy acceptance for such an acts is baffling to me: sure, if you want to study security precautions of some firm or a website then you need need to negotiate it in some form. It should not be advertised widely among the compnay employees or site visitors, but some people “at the top” must know about your efforts. If you go and crack different sites willy-nilly to collect information for your Phd.D. and you are caught… well, your Ph.D. will be postponed for couple of years, I guess.

The whole “technical problem” vs “social problem” is false dichotomy: few problems are purely social and few problems are purely technical. All the security measures in the world can not protect you if some government feels you house must be cracked… either NSA or MSS will crack it. And it'll not matter much how many locks and how complex you've attached to your door. But if something is perceived as totally socially unacceptable then some rare individuals will still try to do that and to repeal them you need things like keylocks.

Why computers should be any different? It's the same story.