

FBI Investigating Whether Companies Are Engaged in Revenge Hacking - subdane
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-30/fbi-probes-if-banks-hacked-back-as-firms-mull-offensives.html

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sarciszewski
I am pretty confident I have at least one example of this occurring, but it's
all (probably) hearsay. :P

Which, in hindsight, is pretty terrifying because engaging in an offensive
hacking campaign against, i.e. a foreign government, can allegedly qualify you
as an unlawful belligerent (read: terrorist) in the eyes of the Geneva
Convention.

Source:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EObxvIfdKgo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EObxvIfdKgo)

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Paul_S
Soon we will need a cyberwarfare equivalent of the Geneva convention and I'm
being serious.

I will probably get to live long enough to see cyberpunk dystopias happen.
They will probably suck.

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drannex
Yeah because they /totally/ aren't.

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mindslight
Maybe it's time to end the charade of pretending that the meatspace tradition
of ambient authority works for electronic communications, and come around to
accepting that the best form of law on a hostile anonymous network is
executable code.

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eat
The NSA accepts the reality you've presented. Is that what we want?

~~~
mindslight
The NSA accepts reality, period. Most of what they do are mere symptoms of
existing insecurity, and the really egregious stuff (eg global passive
adversary) have more to do with imposing legacy ambient authority than not.

The topics of politically neutering well-funded governmental adversaries (that
use gained data to drive "justice") and directly persecuting hacking are
orthogonal. We currently have the worst of both worlds - unaccountable
governments along with unlimited liability for running nmap or incrementing
the number in a url.

In general, anonymity is directly opposed to accountability. Proper
information security does not rely on after-the-fact accountability, so why
should we think it prudent to give up anonymity?

