That’s a great analogy, I’m stealing this. Just so y’know.
Very well said, and that is one issue which irks me about this. It escalates global cyberwar. It gives carte blanche to any nation or group standing in the sidelines.
It is also very true that these attacks can not be performed without being caught. Which for one means that even if they get any useful, good intelligence from it – how can they trust it is true? It is across the world, and likely that nation’s counterintelligence caught it years before it was publicly released. Like in WWII, they inject truly damaging false information, and the other side does the very same thing. The information is useless, so… what is the point?
Which can get to another factor: passive intelligence gathering is used for governmental actions. Nations go to war on such intelligence, and when they get it they do not usually tell anyone where it came from but the heads in charge of the decision. Which means no one can really know what decisions are being based on. On what they say it is based on?
So passive intelligence has limited value… what happens next? Well, they have sent systems designed to destroy or definitely muck up nuclear sites. Why stop there? Grab foreign commercial intelligence and give it to your own corporations for an advantage. Control politicians like Hoover and the KGB did by extortion data. Subtly change important commercial and governmental documents to sabotage major projects. Your country’s auto industry is faring poorly? Cut the competition’s corporations down.
Stock market manipulation. Have a field day. Besides Unlimited Insider Information which is completely illegal but extremely powerful… there are all sorts of options to play with live financial trading data.
Where would any of this stop? Easy money, easy power… no reason it would stop.
Right now? Governments are attacking other country’s corporations. And they go for the money, too, the jugular. Why not? Countries need money too. Why would this trend abate in the least? Way I see it, at this rate, it would only grow. It is an espionage boom unlike anything ever before.
Besides all of that? Historically, countries that can, do, surveil their own people. FBI surveilled Martin Luther King Jr and ran very nasty operations against him. They wired the politicians and literally extorted presidents. Why not do this, when it means unlimited funding and control of the nation? And this kind of crime is exceedingly difficult to detect and route out.
For instance, who polices the NSA? The NSA. After Snowden revelations, a politician asked the NSA for documentation on their own policing. If I recall they returned something ludicrously small, like twelve cases.
Who policed the FBI for those many decades while they were illegaly surveilling and running illegal operations? Really? The FBI. The Justice Department above them and politicians at times banned actions they became aware of, and the FBI just kept on doing it anyway.
Not real sure how that slide towards totalitarianism could be stopped.
IP. Fuck the IP.
This is where I am putting my hope. And the hacker subculture.
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