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.
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.