Cracking Over Coding

[John Young]

The discussion of Carnivore type systems reminds that 
the trend continues among governments to favor cracking
over coding, say, with ever increasing development of means
and methods to attack communications security whether
by many forms of burglary, by implantation of weaknesses
in systems, by enforced imposition of access to comms 
systems and, most often, by combinations of all of these.

Disinformation is not as well discussed in public as the
better known tools, but it is a heavily used means and
methods if practitioners of the surveillance trade are to
be believed -- and that is a big if.

In the US there is a substantial disinformation (and
pseudo-information) industry, not limited to the popular 
media by any means, but more often practiced in 
sophisticated academic, scientific and professional/trade 
publishing.

The hammer that regulates this disinformation is the promise
of privileged access to genuine information which most often
assures economic rewards.

ISPs are no more immune to these invitations than the telcos,
indeed one can assume the ISPs eagerly welcome mutually
beneficial arrangements with the authorities, so long as they
are kept quiet from customers -- rather better is that the
accounts of the arrangements are disinformative, including
a healthy protest on the customers' behalf component, as
practiced by banks, telcos and underwritten privacy orgs.

The UK would not stoop to such boorish sleaze, but in the
US it's vaunted as aggressive good business -- realism
of those who know the pleasures of privilege, the terrors
of being unknowing.

It does no good to attribute the art of disinformation as higher
education. That die is forever cast.