This is no different from selling an exploit on the black market for $1m . It's sad that a university is going black hat. A university should be a safe place with great respect to ethics in the field the university does research.
Selling exploits exclusively to assist the government is very much like a large swath of white hats.
What do you think Infragard is? It's Feds rubbing elbows with crooked pro-government technologists. But they're the white hats, remember.
At the end of the day, you only have green hats (the color of money), and people who don't wear hats at all. The black/white distinction has become meaningless.
Recommended reading: http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/
Do you know what your entire government is up to? Even if you sell it to the NSA, how do you know it won't end up in the hands of the DEA to spy on a large number of people just to find a couple of drug traffickers?
We don't know. We can't know.
There's nothing grey about that choice. They're the ones that call themselves white.
> If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I’ll choose power vs. people.
I would not have expected him to say that.
I think Moxie is saying that the choice is whether you work in support of centralized authority ("power"), or decentralized "people".
* engage in human torture * practice extraordinary rendition to third world countries to circumvent due process * photograph prisoners naked * practice extra-judicial, aerial execution
then it's reasonable to call the hat black. that we used to think their hat was white is a testament to their power of deceipt, not an indication that the "hat system" has lost meaning.
I would argue that the hat color is from the perspective of "the public", and clearly the public is on the losing end of lost anonymity.