Security quote of the week

[Posted March 11, 2015 by jake]

What's both amazing -- and perhaps a bit frightening -- about that dispute over who hacked Sony is that it happened in the first place.

But what it highlights is the fact that we're living in a world where we can't easily tell the difference between a couple of guys in a basement apartment and the North Korean government with an estimated $10 billion military budget. And that ambiguity has profound implications for how countries will conduct foreign policy in the Internet age.

— Bruce Schneier

to post comments

Security quote of the week

Posted Mar 12, 2015 16:25 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

Bruce's point brings up the embarrassment of International Law in the face of technology.

All those treaties and customs pertain to a pre-Napoleonic day when royalty maintained smallish standing armies and navies, bloodied each others noses a bit, then signed a treaty and exchanged some parcel of land.

These days, non-state outfits this size of the Grateful Dead can render large numbers of people ungratefully dead in various ways.

"Profound implications for how countries will conduct foreign policy" is a vast understatement. The range of options, from hacking to terrorism, is a full-on earthquake for the existing governance/policy structure.

Conclusion: as geeks age out of hard core hacking, it's increasingly needful for them to dive into the horrifying, Cthulhuian maw of public policy, where a stout few can survive to inject some rationality into the coming sea-change in how society operates.

(my $0.02)