Re: Clarifying the record from EFF

[Justin Ferguson <jf () ownco net>]

Firstly and most importantly, to me, your right to own, possess and sell
exploits is pretty clearly protected under the 2nd amendment. I'd argue for
that legitimacy in the same way I would your right to do the same with a
firearm. I do however take contention with what the actual circumstances
are though, a market where you can only sell firearms to your respective
governments instead of an actual open and free market.


> > George W Bush walked into a room full of defense and intelligence
> officials, and he pointed out to them in a dry Southern way how if they

> didn't think of something better that the Isrealis were 100% going to
> attack the Iranian nuclear program, and they were going to pull the

> United States into it, and there was going to be a large serving of
>  _extremely unpleasant_ sandwich with a small side of possible nuclear

> winter for everyone involved...

> And looking around the room, the people who had never shot a gun, who
> that very night would go home to play an RPG so hideously
>
> complex it has its own government, who spent the time before the meetings
> with high powered government officials arguing about Firefly
>
> versus Buffy the Vampire Slayer's various scripts, people who if given
> have a chance would expound upon deeply held personal opinons
>
> regarding various subtleties in the licensing of Unix
> distributions,...these people simply shrugged and said "Yeah, we got this
> one."

This is a bit misguided at best and I've not quite decided for myself
whether you are delluding yourself or just trying to delude readers.
Ignoring that the most likely candidate for how the worm ended up there in
the first place-- a FTO, the MEK/PMOI, who exists on our lists because of
their old habits of killing Americans and thus that participating in the
cyber-side of things could be rightfully construed as material support for
a terrorist organization. And ignoring that you decoupled operations from
the targeted assassination of scientists aspect, as those aren't exactly
thank you notes being strapped to the side of their cars-- isn't the
correct answer when faced with this situation to question our ties to
Israel, a country that legitimately serves no interest for the United
States instead of doubling down by participating in an operation designed
to help satiate their desire for blood?

About a year ago I had a box compromised after I got a new twitter follower
that was of the Tibetan NGO type who had obviously had their website
compromised and was in turn compromising visitors to their website-- chrome
0day in the wild on an NGOs website. Sure, it could have been some random
spammers or similar, but we all know that's not what's going on.

What exactly do you think they do with the intel they collect from such
operations? I just don't buy the 'hate the game not the player' argument
here, if you sell someone an exploit that in turn ends up used to exfil
intel that in turn ends in an extraordinary rendition or a car-bomb
strapped to the side of a scientists car, you're hands are anything but
bloodless and you have most certainly deployed bombs and guns unlike you
speculate.

But whatever, thats life and we're all spooks now. What I have issue with
is the idea that it's a free market or anything to do with civil liberties
when in essence if you tried to sell the same exploits to something like
Wikileaks, you'd quickly find yourself embroiled in a series of legal
snafu's. And of course, if I say sell to the NSA/CIA, no one bats an eye,
but if I were to suggest selling to Wikileaks or telecommix or the PLF et
al, that would sound insane. At least have the decency to call a spade a
spade and instead of pretending to be free-agents people should at least
acknowledge that they're essentially agents of their respective states.

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