[cryptography] The Compromised Internet

[John Young]

At 09:16 PM 9/25/2013, you wrote:

>Fundamentally, what you're asking for doesn't make sense.
>Threat models are about economics, scale, and mistakes,
>and even if we don't have security bugs, we still have economics.

An NSA technical report says a unit was set up in Bell Laboratories
over 50 years ago to research fledgling ideas which the over-militarized
NSA staff didn't have time or skill to look into. So it was done at Bell,
IBM, MIT, Philco, NCR, RCA, and ilk, back then and as now with
today's iconized coms, orgs and edus. Inside of which, then and
now, are the cypherpunks playing chess with suits and slicks,
manipulating the infrastructure to generate exploits the suits
can't, or don't want, to care about so long as quarterlies are
fat.

Calling upon the sagacity of this forum the question might
be answered as you say by developing ways to piggy-back,
rig, boot-leg, twist and turn switches and valves, to swipe
a little bit of the infrastructure pipelines to use for less
controlled purposes. Whatever the infrastructure is,
internet, EM spectrum, radio, laser, cable, optics, farts,
prayer. Whatever happened to hunches and gut feelings
as cover for IP theft and lucky accidents.

Pilfering by insiders sold or shared off the market has
an ancient history, Snowdens galore forever, the mothers
of invention and payback to suits sucking blood of labor.

Now then, cough, cough, suppose the internet will continue
to be the comms medium of choice for citizens and consumers
and their besuited gang of exploiters. Workarounds to exploit
the exploiters will flower by avid hackers multiplying like rabbits
inside and outside the hegemons. What else besides that
healthy pilfering industry which happily generates profits
for hackers and cypherpunks to set up their own exploiting
ventures?

As might have been asked before the internet, before telecoms,
before radio, before drums and smoke and yodel and grunts
and skull banging. What are lab rats doing when not angling
for scale-up capital? Nothing commercial, hopefully, nothing
worth feeding to John Markoff, to Glenn Greenwald, to WikiLeaks,
to vultures. Probably not worth this all too open call for hot
shit swapping.