Security quotes of the week

That's a hard problem to fix. We can't imagine Washington passing a law requiring iPhones to be made entirely in the United States. Labor costs are too high, and our country doesn't have the domestic capacity to make these things. Our supply chains are deeply, inexorably international, and changing that would require bringing global economies back to the 1980s.

So what happens now? As for Hezbollah, its leaders and operatives will no longer be able to trust equipment connected to a network—very likely one of the primary goals of the attacks. And the world will have to wait to see if there are any long-term effects of this attack and how the group will respond.

But now that the line has been crossed, other countries will almost certainly start to consider this sort of tactic as within bounds. It could be deployed against a military during a war or against civilians in the run-up to a war. And developed countries like the United States will be especially vulnerable, simply because of the sheer number of vulnerable devices we have.

Congress hasn't updated consumer privacy law since 1988, when it took the bold step of…banning video-store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. Since then, a coalition of commercial surveillance companies and the cops and spies who treat their data-lakes as massive, off-the-books anaerobic lagoons of warrantless surveillance data has prevented the passage of any new privacy protections for Americans.

The result? Stalkers, creeps, spies (both governmental and corporate), identity thieves, spearphishers and other villainous scum are running wild, endangering every American's financial, physical and political wellbeing. The correct amount of commercial data-brokerage for America is zero.