Tag Archives: ethics

Cyberthreat Information Sharing

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The public and private sectors need to increasingly declassify and divulge critical information if the U.S. is to set up effective cyberthreat organizations, according to a report released Wednesday by PwC that sets out a blueprint for how those groups could be set up.

That would certainly lead to faster responses to hack attempts—committed by anyone, whether governments foreign or domestic or criminals—and to more efficient hardening against present and future hack attempts.

Unfortunately, FBI Director James Comey has already written off the concept of public sector—at the Federal government level, anyway—cyberthreat sharing.

That’s a very clear indication of what this administration and its potential Progressive-Democrat successor administration thinks about Government controls.

Narcissism and Scientism

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These are two different concepts, but I’m not convinced they’re unrelated.

First is a Wall Street Journal Notable & Quotable:

[The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5] . . . criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these features:

Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance
Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
Exaggerating your achievements and talents
Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate…
Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

And

You may have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation.  To feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make yourself appear superior.

Second is another Notable & Quotable:

Now…science and especially science bureaucracy is a career, and one amenable to social climbing.  Careers attract careerists, in [Paul] Feyerabend’s words: “devoid of ideas, full of fear, intent on producing some paltry result so that they can add to the flood of inane papers that now constitutes ‘scientific progress’ in many areas.”

And

If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science.  The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism;” both have a tendency to treat the body of scientific knowledge as a holy book or an a-religious revelation that offers simple and decisive resolutions to deep questions.  But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance.

Hmm….

Another PRC Challenge of the US

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The PRC now is exploring Scarborough Shoal with the intent to expand its control over the South China Sea and to pose a more proximate threat to an American ally, this one the Republic of the Philippines.  Scarborough Shoal, as most of you know, is just 120 nautical miles from the Philippines 200 nautical miles from the capital, Manila.  Scarborough also is 470 nautical miles from the PRC.

In posing this challenge to the Philippines, the PRC also is making an in-your-face move against the US, with the intent of separating the RP from the US and of showing to the rest of the nations in the region just how little is the value of aligning with us.  The Obama administration is answering that challenge in just the way the PRC is anticipating—with timidity [emphasis added].

The six US aircraft that flew near Scarborough Shoal on April 19 are based at Clark [AB, 50 miles NW of Manila].  The four A-10 Thunderbolt fighters and two HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters “conducted a flying mission through international airspace…providing air and maritime situational awareness,” the US Air Force statement said.

None of the US flights flew to within 12 nautical miles of Scarborough, according to a US official, which would have amounted to a legal challenge to China’s claims on the shoal, but the proximity of the flights was clearly intended to send a message to Beijing.

A message was sent, all right.  By deliberately not challenging the legality of the PRC’s claims, the Obama administration said most clearly, “We accept your legal rights; we’re just making a feeble face-saving gesture.  Please.”

Elections have consequences.  And not only for us Americans.

Chimera

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The Justice Department said Friday it has withdrawn a request that sought a court order forcing Apple to assist in opening a locked iPhone 5s linked to a drug case in New York.

According to a court filing, the Justice Department no longer needs Apple’s assistance in unlocking the device because an individual provided investigators with the correct passcode Thursday.

This is yet another demonstration that DoJ didn’t need to dragoon a private enterprise into blowing up its own product—here hacking its encryption algorithm, to the detriment of its product and of its private citizen customers—for government convenience.  Government had the capability to get into the iPhone with its own resources.

This cracking, in fact, demonstrates two things: the first is that DoJ was cynically using the suits here and in the San Bernardino terrorism case solely for getting a court ruling that Government can force private enterprise to participate in Government searches, to destroy its own product, whenever Government takes a notion to demand it.

The other is that Government’s need for Apple’s help, which was Government’s claimed motive for its lawsuits against Apple, was a mirage.  On the contrary, these suits were nothing more than an execution of Government’s demand for control over private citizens’ personal data.

In each of the above cases, Government hacked the Apple phones’ encryption systems, encryption applied by the phone owners, not by Apple (Apple just made the capability available).  These hacks exposed weaknesses in Apple’s encryption algorithm.  In each of the above cases, Government has refused to tell Apple the nature of the weaknesses: the weaknesses are the backdoors into privately developed encryption algorithms that DoJ’s FBI Director James Comey has been demanding.

OPM

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The FBI paid a non-governmental third party over $1 million for technology that allowed the agency to unlock an iPhone 5C that belonged to San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook, according to a remark made by FBI director James Comey at a moderated discussion in London on Thursday.

And

The bureau’s top official added that the purchase of third party tools for the purpose of unlocking encrypted devices is not the preferred road the FBI would like to travel in investigating crimes and terrorism cases.

Of course not.  The FBI would prefer to use OPM to pay for such invasions, in this case Apple’s money to pay for forcing Apple to destroy its own customer-desired and -centered encryption.  Then Comey added in wide-eyed innocence,

I’m hoping that we can somehow get to a place where we have a sensible solution, or set of solutions, that doesn’t involve hacking and doesn’t involve spending tons of money in a way that’s unscalable[.]

That sensible solution includes no back-door, government-mandated accesses to encryption, which Comey has demanded earlier as part of his “sensible” solution.  He’s declined to explain how such backdoors don’t expose American citizens to government snooping and abuse, other than to say, “Trust us.”  He’s declined to explain, in any fashion, how such backdoors don’t expose American citizens to hacking by criminals and other nefarious types.

No, this push to use OPM for gaining entry is just another bit of government disingenuosity.