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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I think tptacek has hummed a few bars in this direction before, but it has become received wisdom on some parts of the Internet that geeks vs. government is an asymmetric fight and that since governments are stupid geeks will win. You often see this in, let me cherry pick out of charitability, threads suggesting that the OSS community develop surveillance countermeasures for use by dissidents subject to certifiably evil regimes.

It doesn't really matter whether the nation state in question is Iran or the United States. Do not pick fights with people who can respond to a hacking incident by writing a check for $5 million dollars to a defense contractor and consider that low-intensity conflict resolution. It will not end well.

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I agree with this, and I was similarly amazed when some folks calling themselves Anonymous started dumping personal information about law enforcement officers onto the web, you don't pick fights with people who are going to hunt you down and eliminate you. It may be they will just lock you up, it may be worse than that.

That said, there is a history of people who have done that, paid the ultimate price, and later been honored for their sacrifice. Seems like history can go either way sometimes in judging the act, hero or idiot.

I'm all in favor of people keeping their eyes open though as they walk into it.

For me things like Flame just tell me that what I knew as an engineer could be done, actually have been done. And that is always a bit of a wake up call.

The idea that governments are stupid in the sphere of technology ignores the recent-ish discovery on behalf of governments that if you just pay a bunch of geeks to be geeks on behalf of the (evil or otherwise) government and make them exempt from bureaucracy they get results that are at least as good as geeks acting independently.

> You often see this in, let me cherry pick out of charitability, threads suggesting that the OSS community develop surveillance countermeasures for use by dissidents subject to certifiably evil regimes.

> It doesn't really matter whether the nation state in question is Iran or the United States. Do not pick fights with people who can respond to a hacking incident by writing a check for $5 million dollars to a defense contractor and consider that low-intensity conflict resolution. It will not end well.

Are you really saying that people should avoid writing software that could help people who are subject to evil regimes because said evil regime might be upset at them? There's an uncertain level of personal risk associated with doing such things, but there's definite moral hazard in total self-interest.

Either way, if Flame was written by the US or Israel a lot of us on here are already complicit in such a project. We live in a democracy. Those are our tax dollars, hard at work.

I totally agree with you otherwise; governments are not stupid.

He's not saying that, I am.

There's no personal risk to writing regime circumvention tools. Iran isn't going to have you assassinated for your work on Tor.

There is serious risk to using Tor in Iran. Death squads and disappearances aren't a conspiracy theory in Iran; they are the regime's well-understood M.O. When circumvention tools like Tor work, they hide your traffic from the regime. When they stop working, or are turned, they do exactly the opposite: they attach a statistical marker to your traffic that says "whether or not you can read these packets, the person sending them is interesting".

The people working on circumvention tools are mostly well-intentioned (many of them are friends of mine), but they are delusional about the SWOT analysis at play here. None of them have any unique skills that aren't available to an organization willing to shell out 6-7 figures to a team in a month. Money buys competence. A lot of money buys a lot of competence. Iran has a lot of money. Circumvention projects do not.

Kickstarter hasn't seen the amount of money that a world government could spend without director-level approval on a project to turn a circumvention tool against its users.

And that's before you get to the fact that many, if not most, of the computers in authoritarian regimes are probably already rootkitted.

While I agree with most of your post, I do have to take issue with this statement: "There is serious risk to using Tor in Iran."

While there certainly is a chance of getting in trouble for using Tor, I wouldn't classify it as "serious risk." The government in Iran faces a situation w.r.t. filter circumvention similar to what the US faces when cracking down on illegal file-sharers. From my (admittedly limited) experience in Tehran last year, anyone with even a little computer know-how will have either some proxy service or Tor installed on their computers. The more knowledgeable ones have their own VPNs. Most use it to get through to Facebook and chat with their friends. It would be impossible to persecute everyone who's used circumvention tools without emptying half of Tehran.

The government certainly doesn't shy away from the measures you mentioned, but they generally go after for more grievous "offenses" than browsing the internet through Tor. Being gay, for example.

>It would be impossible to persecute everyone who's used circumvention tools without emptying half of Tehran.

Judging from the recent actions in the middle east, the leadership there have no problem with going precisely that far, and further if they see fit.

All the competence in the world won't let you break basic crypto algorithms without at least breaking a sweat.

The playing field between Alice and Bob on the one hand and Eve on the other hand is inherently asymmetrical. Given equal competence and time to work on it, Alice and Bob are going to come up with an encryption scheme that Eve won't be able to break. You seem to be convinced that given almost unlimited resources, Eve can break any scheme Alice and Bob can come up with. I'm not sure I see any evidence for that.

In some cases, Eve is willing to arrest/maim/kill anyone caught using Bob's encryption scheme. Eve has the ability to control at least some of the intermediary systems. Eve doesn't need to specifically break the scheme, just be able to figure out who's using it so she can go apply some lead pipe cryptanalysis [0].

[0] http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-10-19

I don't think he's saying that at all. I interpreted it as, given unlimited resources, Eve can determine that Alice and Bob are communicating over encrypted channels which, for Alice and Bob, is almost as bad as having their encryption broken.

I took that to be a specific example -- Tor may be detected using traffic analysis -- of a more general principle -- circumvention tools can not hope to withstand nearly unlimited resources. I thought tptacek was pretty explicit in making this more general statement.

One thing that a lot of circumvention tool promoters get wrong is the threat model. The threat model isn't "attacker can read your traffic" --- although some of the best known circumvention tools have made cryptographic mistakes that did allow that. The threat model is "tractable attacks that isolate traffic using your tool from bulk Internet traffic".

A torture cell will do just peachy at decrypting the actual packets.

Are you really saying that people should avoid writing software that could help people who are subject to evil regimes because said evil regime might be upset at them?

No, I'm saying that "my software helps people who are subject to evil regimes" is approximately as irresponsible as "my homeopathic remedy solves cancer" except in this case cancer has essentially infinite computational resources, arbitrarily high numbers of very savvy domain experts, and an army. Any hacker who believes their software, or their community's software, will hold up to dedicated adversarial interest from a nation-state is dangerously delusional.

I don't think it's as simple as you make it sound.

If somebody writes a tool that helps 100 million Chinese people access the unfiltered internet, a percentage of them will be caught and punished in devastating and inhumane ways. Some fraction of the illicit traffic will be blocked and the holes sealed up.

The remaining people will have access to material that, as far as the Chinese government is concerned, poses a tremendous risk to the state's continued authority. If this - as the state obviously believes - would help speed along the atrophy of an authoritarian state, net human suffering would be reduced overall.

I see what you mean and mostly agree but not with the example you chose: Chinese government never intended to completely block sensitive content. If they wanted so they would use other technologies. Any Chinese netizen with a VPN can go outside and many of them do. What the Chinese government do, successfully, is to make the sensitive content slightly harder to access, compared to local "safe" content. Then, like the water choosing the downward slope, most information consumed by Chinese netizens is inside the GFW.

That's a really good explanation, and something which I hadn't considered.

I think a bigger asymmetry than "hackers vs. governments" is "defense vs. offense" -- the state of computer security is laughable enough that the attacker will probably win, whoever he is.

If non-government hackers were building offensive tools, vs. defensive, and only had to win periodically vs. essentially all the time, they'd be able to put up a better fight. Government doesn't have a particular monopoly on competence, and internal politics and budget issues probably would allow a relatively capital-poor non-governmental enterprise to do pretty well vs. a contractor/government team.

In addition, keep in mind that the geeks in government (a) cannot talk about what they are working on (see http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/12/26/decades-later-cold-war-...) and (b) are happy to be considered stupid because it makes their job easier.

Similarly, I'll grant that the fight may appear asymmetrical at the higher level of organizations if one side is run by geeks and the other side is run by non-geeks. Nonetheless one should recognize that those hired by either side to be on the "front lines" so to speak will be geeks. Whether they're computer geeks or gun|bomb|espionage|etc geeks, assuming an asymmetry in the ability to employ strategy and accomplish goals on that level would be unwise.

Right. It always comes back to the people performing the task. Because people are generally "good" (IMHO), "evil" isn't particularly easy to get away with. This goes for geeks, police and even the military. Commands can be issued, but real people with real emotions have to deliver. This is why whistle-blower protection is so key to our economy and society.

And while politics may attract a disproportionate level of narcissists and sociopaths, I'm guessing CS doesn't.

I'd rather assume that sociopaths are drawn to politics because it's kind of a wildcard field (you can pretend to be expert and meddle in pretty much every topic).

That doesn't mean there aren't highly specialized and capable sociopaths out there.

"geeks vs government" assumes geeks don't work for the government.

Neither Stuxnet nor Flame target hackers or even the general population. They were targeting specific institutions. Attacking is easy once you know who or what to attack.

Each individual hacker and each individual citizen is a much smaller target. Sure, as soon as you're identified, you're toast: they break in and install malware on your computer -- if you're lucky. But there's a lot of hackers and even more normal people, all of which can be made individually harder to identify through smart software.

Lots of people. Relatively few pieces of software. Pit against an avalanche of money and access to the best talent in the world. The incentive structure doesn't work, at all.

Don't build circumvention tools. If you're lucky, they'll just turn out to be useless.

You forgot to mention black choppers.

FTFY: "Do not pick fights with people who can fly black choppers"

So when you mention black choppers, people will assume you are either being ironic or crazy. There's a particular policy goal affiliated with these attacks, and a spectrum of options for achieving that policy goal. Those options included "There exist certain individually identifiable employees of a foreign government who are personally indispensable to implementing something which goes against our policy goals. We could assassinate them."

If you read the papers you know that that option is neither a joke nor the fevered imaginings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

It is likely that such assassinations are against both International Law (Geneva Conventions) and US law. Carter, Ford and Reagan all prohibited them through executive orders. Even if you think that knocking off some Hamas leaders is a good idea, you will experience scope creep - last year a (sort of) influential policy advisor suggested using drones against Julian Assange.

Honestly, "we" (the West) are best armed, best funded, most free peoples ever to walk the earth. If we cannot put aside assassination and torture, then the human race has no hope.

Here for an interesting review of legality of such assassinations:

http://www.kentlaw.edu/perritt/courses/seminar/jerry-bekkerm...

Assange / assassination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Flanagan_%28political_scien...

edit: for clarity, before I become flamed as a woolly left winger, I think that there are many people in the world, that if they were hit by lightning today, the world would be much better off. but

a) I think the world is nett worse off if democracies 'arrange' that lightning, because it demeans the important point of a democracy - being a beacon of hope for the future generations.

b) the choice of targets, is not discussed in a democratic manner, and almost certainly would not be my choice. (Now thats a referendum I would love to see:-)

c) my guess is that, like crime, taking out the people committing the crime right now, magically someone else steps into their place. Sometimes someone who yesterday was not committing those crimes.

Hmm, still pretty left wing there...

  If we cannot put aside assassination and torture,
  then the human race has no hope.

We can and should put aside torture. Assassination, however, is still a preferred tool, when often an alternative is a larger scale military conflict. A focused attack has a better chance of avoiding hitting innocent bystanders.

  important point of a democracy - being a beacon of hope 
  for the future generations

I do not think this is a point of "a democracy" at all.

  the choice of targets, is not discussed in a democratic manner,
  and almost certainly would not be my choice.

This is a serious point. And it arises in any military conflict. How the democratic public controls its military is a matter of serious study; I am not competent in this, but perhaps someone could suggest a few links?

It seems pretty clear that the US public has democratically decided to delegate the commission of war crimes to its military and not be told about the details.

This has been going on for far longer than we realize. (http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/bookauth/battle... -- excellent article on WWII linked on HN a couple of weeks back.)

A weird phenomenon that I have observed is the general public does not seem to consider killings that incorporate the use of aircraft to be assassinations.

Drone attacks, Apache missile strikes, and even dropping Navy SEALS on people with helicopters all seem to fall into some sort of "standard act of war" category when talked about in public. If you even merely refer to these things as assassinations you are written off as trying to use exaggerated or at least loaded language.

It's almost like people think "assassinations" are limited to snipers and James Bond figures breaking into your hotel room and making it look like a suicide.

That's because only the Good Guys(tm) have Hellfires, Apaches and Tomahawks to fire at will. The Good Guys also have restraint - the US won't send a cruise missile into an apartment complex in Islamabad, for instance - and only attack people who are both in a war zone and lack public support. The scary thing about covert assassinations is that they could happen anywhere and be committed by anyone (IMO the "anyone" part is the key bit for differentiating "war" and "murder"), whereas large-scale strikes are carried out by political figures who are (presumably) accountable for their actions.

Nice theory. Please try to convince people like Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan and Massoud Ali-Mohammadi that this theory is true.

Oh, you can't. They were assassinated by a western-backed democracy. (There have been many more, those were just the first two names that turned up of Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated by Israel.)

As much as you'd like to believe that assassination does not happen, it does. In the very same conflict that gave us Flame and Stuxnet. In fact I would not be surprised if information from Flame was used to target assassinations.

If it were done using a hellfire missile from a drone would that be called an illegal "assassination"? The idea that assassinations are more illegal or immoral than -- say -- firing hellfire missiles at suspicious looking people in countries we don't care for is pretty silly.

That said, I'm sure that if the US was involved there was some kind of backwards hoop jumping so as not to technically break the law. "I just had a chat with him on a park bench when we bumped into each other. He said he'd look into it."

Having the US sign up to the international criminal court would remove a fair few skeptics, and would keep the wooly left at bay.

The point in the first paragraph regarding 'scope creep' is a non sequitur because Julian Assange was in fact not assassinated and public figures calling for his assassination were not taken seriously.

The second paragraph and points a and c are non sequiturs.

In b it seems you are in favor of a lynch mob.

Just explaining why I down-modded your comment

down modding stuff is fine, giving reasoned comments is fantastic.

lynch mob - no, but I was struck with concern and amusement by the idea of a quarterly referendum on which world figures we should target for assassination, plus maybe a limit of civilian children whose collateral death would be acceptable in the voting list. In fact its the opposite of a lynch mob. A lynch democracy perhaps.

don't quite understand the non-sequiteur part... could you expand?

Indeed: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in...

Just for the record, I was implying you're crazy.

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