FBI Investigating Whether Companies Are Engaged in Revenge Hacking

bloomberg.com

37 points·subdane··6 comments

I am pretty confident I have at least one example of this occurring, but it's all (probably) hearsay. :P

Which, in hindsight, is pretty terrifying because engaging in an offensive hacking campaign against, i.e. a foreign government, can allegedly qualify you as an unlawful belligerent (read: terrorist) in the eyes of the Geneva Convention.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EObxvIfdKgo

Soon we will need a cyberwarfare equivalent of the Geneva convention and I'm being serious.

I will probably get to live long enough to see cyberpunk dystopias happen. They will probably suck.

Yeah because they /totally/ aren't.

Maybe it's time to end the charade of pretending that the meatspace tradition of ambient authority works for electronic communications, and come around to accepting that the best form of law on a hostile anonymous network is executable code.

The NSA accepts the reality you've presented. Is that what we want?

The NSA accepts reality, period. Most of what they do are mere symptoms of existing insecurity, and the really egregious stuff (eg global passive adversary) have more to do with imposing legacy ambient authority than not.

The topics of politically neutering well-funded governmental adversaries (that use gained data to drive "justice") and directly persecuting hacking are orthogonal. We currently have the worst of both worlds - unaccountable governments along with unlimited liability for running nmap or incrementing the number in a url.

In general, anonymity is directly opposed to accountability. Proper information security does not rely on after-the-fact accountability, so why should we think it prudent to give up anonymity?

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