Cracking Over Coding

[Julian Assange]

John Young is referring to corporate and academic complicity,
ourchased through dollars, access and a shared interest in keeping
such arrangements quiet.

Corporations are controlled by shareholders of varying moralities and
degrees of seperation from and identification with the behavior of any
given corporate entity. These differences grate against one another
leaving the one commonality, short term profit motive, as the dominant
predictor of corporate decision making.  Consequently corporations are
ethical paper tigers, fluttering endlessly to the whip and nipple of
governmental immorality. An extreme example of this is the supreme
ease in with which the Nazis co-opted corporate power with simple
inducements during their rize to power in Germany during the late 1920s
and early 1930s, ultimately to their collective doom.

"Owen Lewis" <oml@eloka.demon.co.uk> writes:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John Young" <jya@pipeline.com>
> To: <ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
> Sent: 03 February 2001 16:47
> Subject: Cracking Over Coding
> 
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Quite so, though only because it is a relatively recent phenomenon that
> there has been a general access to means of communications security. Some of
> us grew up in the days of manual switchboard operating and a single exchange
> line being shared between two homes (for the minority who had a phone at
> all)
> 
> > 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.
> 
> That's very perceptive of you. But you are unkind to belabour just the US
> and the groves of academe. It permeats many walks of life and many nations.
> Here, we often call it 'spin'. Our government departments have their
> 'declared' spin doctors infiltrated into positions of influence. Doubtless,
> the departments have their 'illegals' too.
> 
> Occasionally, a spin doctor - even at senior Cabinet rank- leaves too
> obvious a gap between spin and reality and is 'let go'. But then one simply
> can't make an omlette without breaking the occasional egg -  now can one?
> 
> In this respect the US continues to surpass us though. We have not yet had a
> head of the Executive proven a liar time and again and yet able to keep his
> job with a smile on his lips and a soggy end to his cigar. Now that was a
> stellar performance.
> >
> > The hammer that regulates this disinformation is the promise
> > of privileged access to genuine information which most often
> > assures economic rewards.
> 
> You may be understating the situation, I think.
> 
> Owen
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
 >"People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
 >please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves,
 >but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted
 >from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a
 >nightmare on the brain of the living."