What is a cyber weapon? Knowledge of a vulnerability? Exploit code? How do you propose regulating it? Much of this has been tried before and ended up hurting rather than helping.
155 karma · joined February 22, 2016
Sometimes, data really does need to be sanitized at the point of submission. If you disagree, that's more of a point about application design than appsec.
As long as the data is sanitized before it can affect the storage/transport mechanism for its content type, you're good.
Of course they do. You may disagree with the logic, but it's there. Vectors of intelligence gathering have to be both sufficiently covert and useful for an agency to consider. This vulnerability is neither.
This is hard to believe. I find it much more likely that Snowden had a broad agenda he wanted to cover, and simply decided to delegate the work of sifting through documents relevant to the public interest to journalists. How successful this strategy was is another issue entirely.
Also, the direct comparison between the material Ellsberg had to work with and what Snowden had is misleading. Ellsberg leaked a study from RAND literally designed to assess and document the history of the Vietnam War, including past failures. It's easy to look at that and go, "Wow, this is a careful, strategic disclosure." But Ellsberg couldn't have had an easier choice about what to leak!
In contrast, Snowden had access to a much more disparate set of documents that required lots of interpretation and technical parsing on journalists' part. There wasn't a single PowerPoint presentation that summed up NSA's abuses so conveniently.
That doesn't necessarily justify scraping as much as possible and passing it over to journos, but we have to keep the two men's access to material in context.
https://securelist.com/blog/research/69203/inside-the-equati...
> In this work we analyze the iMessage protocol and identify several weaknesses that an attacker may use to decrypt iMessages and attachments. While these flaws do not render iMessage completely insecure, some flaws reduce the level of security to that of the TLS encryption used to secure communications between end- user devices and Apple’s servers.
Your argument falls apart the moment you claim this.
Which is odd, because I personally have not found any of the Snowden publications off topic or unnecessary. When I press these people about what they think shouldn't have been published, they always give me vague answers about "military secrets" and the like without citing anything specific.
And what would that be?
> the practice of allowing brutal murderers and rapists to live out their lives and die in peace
Unless I'm misreading you, that's a huge misrepresentation of what death penalty abolitionists advocate. I don't want violent criminals to have zero repercussions for their actions, and no present-day society I've ever heard of allows them to.
But I agree with (what I perceive to be your greater) point about differences in personal moral code. I was merely speaking contextually about the general trend Western society has followed for the past few centuries -- like fewer, more lenient punishments and more respect for civil rights, among others.