Diffie: Don't secure the internet, it needs crime | Hacker News Reader

Diffie: Don't secure the internet, it needs crime

zdnet.com

39 pointsmatan_a20 comments

These ideas sound a lot like one of the more amusing texts by Marx that I rediscovered just the other day. In Swedish it's called "brottets produktivitet" which roughly translates to "the productivity of the criminal".

With every crime a chain of business emerge where only first link is in itself criminal. For the internet security companies, graffiti removal services, security consultants, lawyers, anti-theft system resellers, locksmiths, insurance company and so on – it's business as usual.

I've found a part of text here: http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/deleon/pdf/1905/apr...

“A philosopher ‘produces’ ideas, a poet poems, a preacher sermons, a professor text-books, and so forth. A criminal ‘produces’ crimes. If we look more closely at the relation in which this branch of industry stands to society, not a few prejudices will drop. “It is not crimes alone that the criminal ‘produces’; he also ‘produces’ criminal legislation, and, as a consequence, he is also the first mover in the ‘production’ of the professors who ‘produce’ lectures thereon, along with the inevitable text-books in which these professors cast their lectures as ‘goods’ on the markets of the world. . . . “Furthermore, the criminal ‘produces’ all the criminal and correctionary branches of society—police, judges, hangmen, juries, etc., besides all the several branches of industry demanded by these, and all of which constitute just so many categories in the scale of social labor, develop different faculties of the human mind, create new wants and new means whereby to satisfy them. . . . “The criminal ‘produces’ an impression—good or bad, as the case may be. He thereby ‘renders a service’ to the moral and aesthetic sentiments of the public. It is not only text-books on criminal legislation that the criminal ‘produces’; he ‘produces’ not merely the penal law itself, and consequently the legislators of that law. He also ‘produces’ art, literature, novels, even tragedies as shown by the appearance of Mullner’s Tanjte, Schiller’s Robbers, the Oedipus, and Richard III. The criminal breaks the monotony and humdrum security of bourgeois life, he thereby insures it against stagnation, and he arouses that excitement and restlessness without which even the spur of competition would be blunted. Thus the criminal furnishes the stimulants to the productive forces.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

The fact that several people commenting here spotted that error, and still managed to frame the useful part of the argument properly, has given me renewed appreciation for the HN community.

He was, of course, satirising some arguments in favor of capitalism.

Thanks. Without that piece of context, the entire quotation is completely bizarre.

You know, in a way he is not that wrong. Bad things often are necessary for good things to happen. Crime may not the best example, though. But a good example would be striving for excellence. People who come from the rock bottom are often insanely driven to reach the ultimate heights. People who are happy and mellow by default most often don't feel the need to do so. Kind of like how a grain of sand irritates an oyster into making a pearl.

It's unfortunate that he invoked the ridiculous broken window fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy) in the course of making his real point, which was that making the internet secure or reliable from the bottom up is prohibitively expensive and that security and reliability should be layered on top only where required.

His "broken window fallacy" like point is an important one, but he poorly justified it. Stopping one rogue window breaker is admirable, stopping them universally has its disadvantages.

The proposals for a secure network usually include avoiding the security confrontation through vetting users, extreme legal protection, etc. These solutions prevents us from maintaining 'glaziers' at all, which in turn leads to catastrophe when our global security solution fails.

For example, if the FBI virtually eliminated viruses by chasing individual virus writers internationally with extreme laws and international agreement we would be even more vulnerable to the threat of state backed cyber attacks.

It is really a "War of the Worlds" analogy.

So, the argument is that you can't stop all the criminal, rather than that it's undesirable to do so. As you wind down the population of criminals (at increasing marginal cost), you wind down the incentive to protect against crime, making the lives of the remaining criminals easier (further increasing the cost of apprehending them).

Yes. It is why the aliens in Independence Day lost the war.

Yes. There's a big difference between "crime is desirable" vs "there are unacceptable tradeoffs involved in eliminating it".

Ignoring the nonsense logic quoted here, the Internet does need crime because any medium that does not have crime does not have true freedom of expression.

A street where it's impossible to be mugged is also a street that you cannot freely walk down with no restrictions. Something fundamental about the act of walking down the street would have to be removed for it to be completely free from crime.

Similarly, a computer that can't get malware isn't a truly general-purpose computer -- it cannot run an arbitrary program.

Yes, I was surprised that this was not his argument.

Note also that "crime" is defined by the government. Tomorrow it could be a felony to suggest that The People's Fully Democratic Honestly Not Evil We Do It For The Children party's policies aren't quite in the service of the people.

"What if I told you that Batman is not the true hero in the Dark Knight saga? What if I told you instead that if The Joker did not exist, Gotham would be overrun by organized crime families and the corrupt politicians that live in their pockets? And what if I told you that there is mathematical proof of this argument's validity?"

These Jokers, would they be the equivalent of "Hacker Manifesto" type hackers / groups like Anonymous?

Silly notion, this is the same logic we use when we bomb a country then send people in to fix it up again.

Very good :)

..... And as we know, that could never happen...

I think you will always have cyber-crime or any type of crime for that matter. One thing that keeps a limit on the number of things that are considered criminal is that there is only so much that can be enforced. If people stopped doing things like murders it would free up enforcement resources to go after smaller perceived wrongs.

This article is quite vague, I don't see how it would be possible to make a truly secure internet without figuring out how to develop 100% non exploitable software.

The article also doesn't seem to draw a strong distinction between security and cryptography, this is something I have to explain to people all the time.

The comments on this article, including Marx and an indirect link to a journal article about game theory in a biology journal are a great example of the "je ne sais quoi" that keeps me coming back to hn.

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