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Re: Clarifying the record from EFF


From: Jason Crawford <jason () purebsd net>
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2012 17:23:42 -0400

On 08/30/2012 04:50 PM, Justin Ferguson wrote:
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.

I don't normally post on these, but saying that exploits should be
regulated under the second amendment is kind of scary. Look at all the
regulations we have for possession and carrying of firearms. Do we want
to say that anyone who's in possession of illegal drugs would now do
serious hard time in a federal prison if they have exploits too? As
possessing a gun while using or possessing illegal drugs would land you
in prison. Maybe states like California that greatly restrict what kind
of firearms you can have and buy will basically chase all hackers out
now. Or in New York where owning a machine-gun is a felony, owning
CANVAS would be now too, as that's 'automatic' exploiting (greater than
one exploit fired off with a single mouse click). At one point
California was trying to pass legislation that would only let you
procure 50 bullets a month, shall we only allow people to procure 50
payloads a month? Oh, lets make sure people can only buy exploits from
federal exploit licensed dealers (except in some states that allow
private purchases maybe) and your name is now on their list that the
government can recall at any time. And of course, if you are a
registered dealer of exploits, that means the ATF can now enter your
home any time they want, and you can't stop them, since that's what they
can do with FFL's. Which also means any time you get exploits over the
internet, it must go to a federal exploit licensed dealer in your state
for them to run a background check on you. I'm sorry but regulating
exploits under the second amendment is the WRONG thing to do here.

 

    > 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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