Security Basics mailing list archives

Re: Honeypots & reccord industry


From: Atom Smasher <atom () smasher org>
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:34:04 -0500 (EST)

On Mon, 19 Dec 2005, Tobias Hahn wrote:

I don't know how they do that, but it's seems to work really well, seeing that it lead to thousands of people beeing charged: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/63635
====================

that reminds me of the face-recognition companies that pick people out of a crowd using video cameras and a list of "wanted" criminal photos... their PR will mention how many thousands of people have been arrested with the help of their products, but they don't tell you that those thousands of arrests have resulted in almost zero convictions.

virtually everyone arrested using that technology is let go, because their only crime is looking like a bad guy. of the small number that are convicted, i'm not aware of any that where actually the person that they were looking for... just some poor sod who happened to have screwed up and made the mistake of looking like someone else.

in the same sense, i can claim to have "proof" that a hundred people (who i may have selected at random) have made illegal downloads. if 99 of them are arrested, and we inspect their hard-drives for illegal downloads, how many convictions do you think we'd get? how many settlements (aka RIAA blood money)?


--
        ...atom

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