Government Is Not Your Friend: CIA Hacking Tools Released
...including what appears to be a discussion about how to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices. WikiLeaks said the data also include details on the agency’s efforts to subvert American software products and smartphones, including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft Windows.
- via Washington Post
By now you've probably heard the news that Wikileaks has released 8,700 documents and files alleged to be zero-day hacking tools used and developed by the CIA.
This is yet another example of why I don't like government.
In a market system, white-hat hackers can be rewarded for ethically revealing vulnerabilities. My company relies on them for the security of our business and have gone over a decade without a hack on our core platform because of their help. Governments, on the other hand, have seemingly infinite resources to build militarized hacking tools and then keep them secret. They then use them against each other at the expense of all of us.
How much longer will we have to put up with this? At what point will we come together and criticize and shame those who choose to work for governments and continue their monopoly on the use of force within a geographic region? At what point will we stop pretending we can delegate rights to others we ourselves do not have? When will we demand all interactions be voluntary as much as possible while improving our non-violent communication and conflict resolution techniques?
When will we grow up to no longer need mommy and daddy government?
EDIT: Here's Snowden's Tweets on the matter: https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/839171129331830784
The CIA reports show the USG developing vulnerabilities in US products, then intentionally keeping the holes open. Reckless beyond words.
You have to wonder whose interests the government serves. I'm sure they are trying to track terrorists, but it seems anyone could be considered one these days. We bring all this technology into our houses and it can be exploited against us. Crooks will be trying to hack it too for their own ends.
I really don't know where things are going. This is not the technical utopia I was promised.
I used to wonder, but now I think it's pretty clearly human farming:
Market systems enforce improved security to keep up with the crooks. Government agents are worse than crooks.
The statistics on "terrorism" are so insignificant as to be laughable and yet that's the dominating narrative. It's like something straight out of 1984.
great video choice and so true
Here is a post describing the situation of what T.H.E.Y. are doing. Published today on steemit
https://steemit.com/pets/@badquakerdotcom/the-dog-in-the-yard-or-how-the-tsa-makes-travel-more-dangerous
It seems you have put the cart before the horse.
They were exploited before they ever left the designers drawing board.
Microsloth has been known to have backdoors for the govern-cement in their software for over two decades now.
Orange has the largest, indexed by location and time, collection of finger prints ever amassed.
You may ask, with our "advanced" technology, why do we still have viruses?
It is because the safety is compromised from the beginning. The security is a big fancy lock on a screen door.
And the reason why is unknown to you because you believe other people think like you.
Narcissists and their more evil counterpart psychopaths do not think like you at all.
In their mind, they are threatened at every turn. They plot to control and manipulate everyone in their lives, they assume that everyone else is thinking the same. So, they go for more and more surveillance. And more and more control. And more and more manipulation. More and more brainwashing.
After the microsloth back doors were shown to large groups of programmers, microsloth should have just died. But, it appears we humans would rather have the latest gizmo, and don't really care about its security.
Name-calling doesn't help any cause ;)
I work with technology and know how complex it is. I tend to suspect incompetence before malice. We know from Snowden how the NSA exploits bugs and so do crooks.
Any bureaucracy has issues. I don't live in a total bubble, but I don't believe everyone is out to get me either.
Name-calling? I try not to make any of my writing about a person, unless its about A person, so I do not know what you interpreted as an attack. I am sorry for any implications.
I am not speaking about bugs, I am speaking about DESIGNED features.
That whole charade about the iPhone from the "terrorist". It was not about unlocking the phone, it was about: Oh look we accidentally, stumbled upon, an ability to unlock the unlockable iPhone, oopsy.
The NSA has black boxes that filter the backbone of the internet. And yes, the boxes are painted black.
That thing about microsloth? That wasn't a bug. That was designed in, system call, back doors. You don't carry a dozen eggs, trip and fall and create a soufflé.
I don't doubt there are backdoors and secret deals. I think some people in government agencies around the world are overreaching their brief, but they have to compete with every other country. It's hard to regulate and harder to monitor. I just don't buy all of the paranoia that gets spread on-line.
Watch your back ;)
Have you considered what Quantum Entanglement entails in hacking and exactly how one sided and secure it can be?
It literally cannot be subverted without full transparency in the manufacturing process, any little piece of hardware can be compromised to transmit instant (read faster than the speed of light) and clear communication in the form of 1 and 0's, and I want to reiterate that:
Any little piece of hardware.
Watch your back, I think it's >be prudent and consider who your enemy is and the extent of their capabilities.
let us set aside for the moment all possible grand conspiracies: Government serves the interests of those in government. Getting elected and holding office, getting appointed and holding office, getting hired and holding office, whatever the case may be - this is the primary concern of nay government employee. It is a massive distortion of the incentives in the market of getting and retaining a job, without the hassle of providing goods and services to a voluntary consumer.
Maybe I'm naive to believe that some people may actually want to do some good. A lot of those in government don't seem to enjoy it much. For some it's just a job.
A desire to do good is likely present, but the incentives and means available guarantee evil results regardless of intent. Public Choice economics theory explains this beautifully.
Where do the educators and the educators of educators fit in, they don't get elected, their salary is guaranteed regardless of numerous studies exemplifying the constant and seemingly unstoppable decline of literacy and math. Then consider the terms Planed Obscelence, Percived Obscelence and tie that into books to begin with. The education system DWARFS the military industrial complex. Read: Less Than Words Can Say.
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/edgraph.html
Make note, that doesn't include higher education, and other graphs combine both healthcare and military into one budget and compare that to the education budget which still excludes higher education and their numerous grants through various globalist agencies, which in turn have the say in education, and those figures, military plus healthcare are just a little over the education aspect. Then try not to let that awful fact float the conspiracy moniker.
Pierre DuPont wrote in 1812 from Education in the United States
Monopolies promote waste and abuse. Taxation is extortion. A tax-funded monopoly is inherently evil, regardless of the service it provides.
Corporations supported by government subsidies, bailouts, protectionist regulations, etc. distort the market by denying consumer choice and externalizing their costs. The added burdens on business through regulation, taxation, trade restrictions, etc. harm those at the margins - the small businesses and startups - that would otherwise be able to make headway in the market. This guarantees overpriced, shoddy goods and services too. Corporations are aspects of the State, not market phenomena.
http://www.notbeinggoverned.com/treason-make/
Reminded me of that passage ;D
I keep reading these news updates and thinking to myself "Will someone please STOP the world, I want to get off!"
I look at this stuff, and I look at the very valid questions you pose... and the potential solutions seem to live in an almost bottomless "rabbit hole" of contingencies and dependencies. I keep asking myself "Why are we really HERE, in this state of affairs?"
Why ARE we really here? What I mean by that, is how do we separate (and address) the core issue from a mountain of "symptoms," like the above... where is the root problem? There's always a root problem but it gets harder and harder to find, as it becomes separated from the symptoms by an increasing number of "generations" or layers.
I keep coming back to the issue of valuing "competing/controling" higher than "cooperating/collaborating," but there are probably deeper layers than that. So why do we perceive the need to compete/control? The "world of scarcity" paradigm (as opposed to the "world of plenty" paradigm) drives the need for "ownership;" ownership sets up the "us vs. them" dynamic, creating a lack of trust and the need to "hoard" resources out of fear leading to mistrust... it's just a bottomless pit, and I struggle to find the "head of the snake" because there always seems to be another layer.
Right now, the inequities (financial and influential) in the world seem to be at an all-time high, which means a lot of people are "hardscrabble struggling" to merely survive... which in turn has caused more people to reach for (or be open to) the "strong parent" archetype in government because they feel like they just have NO ENERGY left to think for themselves, so hand it off to the government.
I'm still not sure what the most effective antidote is... but thanks for a post that led to this little thinking exercise!
I think it has to do with authoritarian thinking. If we can evolve past our reliance on that, we can make great progress. No human being has the right to rule over another human being. We own ourselves. This comes down to the philosophy of liberty:
Inequality may be high, but those "at the bottom" are much higher now than they ever were throughout history. Whenever I get discouraged about this stuff, I remind myself of Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature and I watch this video:
Yup, shotgun for Mars.
You might want to use #vault7 as a tag for this post.
Thanks. Updated.
Would be great if the original quote wasn't from one if not the most prominently biased fake news outlet. Why not quote directly Wikileaks?
Sorry, I was heading out the door for a lunch meeting, and it was one of the top Google results at the time. As much as I'm not fan of fake news outlets, I also do my best to judge each piece on their own merits. If the information in that piece is factual, I'm okay with it.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
This was a good episode of The Tom Woods Show on how the Internet came to be:
http://tomwoods.com/ep-333-could-there-have-been-an-internet-without-the-state/
Nice! I'll check it out. I liked his book Real Dissent.
I've just re-enjoyed it, with my attention at 100% this time (I listened to it while walking, back when it was released). I believe it's à propos with all the Internet security now being discuss.
Never read any of his books even if I have downloaded some of his for free. I should finally get to it someday.