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Comment by 1457389 | Hacker News Reader

Do you object to the very capability to exploit such commercial technologies? Or do you object to the NSA's exploitation of such capabilities?

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I think many systems commercial and otherwise will be open to exploitation. I don't necessarily object to the NSA or another government's intel service hunting those bugs either to protect against or to exploit. I do object overall to the creation of exploits or the weakening of systems.

In the absence of a perfect system of governance I feel we should default to not giving unspeakable power to a concentrated few. The slides on the tools were leaked out of a for-profit firm that contracts for the NSA, next the tools themselves like music industry cohort MediaDefender[0] had happen to them? Or even worse a leak of a database the tools sift through like the Assad regime's BlueCoat[1] logs on political/sexual/religious targets?

Another US firm Palantir was itself tangled in a scheme Glenn Greenwald reported pre-Snowden regarding the targeting of political activists via a solicitation of work through Hunton & Williams made by the US Chamber of Commerce[2]. I can't trust the US intel community as far as I can toss it when conflicts of interest are apparent at every level of clearance given to contractors. So I will probably frown upon most alphabet boys exploitation of capabilities.

[0] http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/3819529/Mediadefender_-_ANTI_...

[1] http://bluesmote.com/

[2] http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/

Considering the scale of funding the NSA and other government agencies enjoy, I think that any focus on "cyber warfare" is going to lead to a "weakening of systems". But this is inevitable when you give state actors a monopoly on extralegal means. Like you said, the onus should be on a robust system of legal and regulatory restraints on this power, which is what the Snowden leaks and others have shown we definitely lack.

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