Infiltration/Exfiltration

Troy Benjegerdes hozer at hozed.org
Mon Jan 20 21:29:46 PST 2014


On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 08:57:17PM +0100, Anonymous Remailer (austria) wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 01/20/2014 09:17 AM, John Young wrote:
> > This how Cryptome got its first contributions from this cave. And
> > still does along with a long list of others. WikiLeaks and Snowden
> > the best yelled about, but far from disclosing the most information
> > which is done quietly and without "batshit" hyperbole and vulgar
> > braggardy.
> 
> I'm talking about something slightly different here. With most of the
> information on Cryptome, it looks like someone came across some
> information and decided to exfiltrate it. They probably weren't
> deliberately looking for it or had joined the agency for the specific
> purpose of having access to and leaking such information.  
> 
> In this case, I'm talking about actual infiltration: going in with the
> explicit purpose of betraying the secrecy of the organization and
> getting valuable data out of it.
> 
> > Claims of needing journalism and slow drips to hold public attention
> > are merely monetizing justifications. Biblical fundamentalism.
> 
> I too wish the leaks would come at a faster pace. But I don't think
> Snowden posting the leaks to, say, an FTP server somewhere would have
> got any response. There are too many leaks with too much technical
> jargon. Joe Average would have given up after the first four pages. What
> the Guardian and other media outlets are doing is making the information
> more accessible to people. I wish they'd do it more quickly, yes, but I
> do think there is some value in what they're doing.
> 
> > And may be much worse, as in the Snowden case, a rationale
> > for not releasing information except to a few selected abusers,
> > journalistic, technical and political "freedom of informaton." In
> > the bogosity of "doing no harm to national security" just like
> > secretkeepers who use that exact lingo.
> 
> I'll admit here that I am not someone who believes that there should be
> no secrets. I do believe keeping certain things secret, at least for a
> little while, has value. But those things should respect civil and human
> rights and adhere to the principles of the Constitution.  In too many
> cases, Snowden and Ellsberg being prime examples, official secrecy was
> used for no other reason than to cover up wrongdoing.  The "national
> security" bullshit was just that - bullshit because they could.
> 
> That's why I think we need more deliberate infiltrators. People who are
> well versed in the Constitution with a strong bend for civil and human
> rights. People who don't buy into the bullshit but also see value in
> some of the work being done. Someone who can filter through that and
> find what needs to be exposed while still protecting what shouldn't be.

Let me posit that we need humans that act more like ethical beings, that 
have insights that go beyond the logic, rules, and reason that seem to,
well, govern the keeping of secrets. I see a disturbing trend towards 
people who appear to be more human rule-and-emotional-reactivity execution
units than empowered beings with free and unpredictable thought and 
discernment.

The great thing that Snowden did was get more of the general public engaged
and involved, and for the various types of infiltrators to have any lasting
effect, there must be cypherpoliticians, architecting secure legal codes and
blocking legislative trojans.

Assassination Politics is an interesting armchair quarterback game, but I
think what we really need is some of that theory applied to Election politics,
with some down-in-the dirt wrestling with campaign finance. We need cypherpunks
pointing out the futility of more reactive campaign finance regulations that
plug the holes we saw last year. We need speech, and code as speech, and 
a debate about does the First Amendment cover the right to speak in code, and
does the Second Amendment give us the right to keep and bear a well-regulated
open-source drone Militia?

Get the public engaged and involved again, and run for office, or go work
for a campaign an do some analytics, and tell us the state-of-the art in
modern election engineering.





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