This has become a theme of mine: who knows what, and when.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
This has become a theme of mine: who knows what, and when.
If you use the same trick over and over, it becomes routine and eventually the people you’re trying to trick begin to play against your game, instead of falling for it.
Information Security practitioners aren’t used to getting political; so there was apparently a small but vocal stream of nationalists complaining to the conference organizers by the time I was done.
I believe in “the deep state” but it’s not quite what people think it is: the deep state is the combined momentum of several out-of-control government agencies; their political inertia and self-interest make their actions appear to be a behind the scenes government, but it’s mostly a desire to protect their importance and budget.
The CIA is not supposed to do domestic propaganda, because we’re the good guys. That’s how we can tell ourselves from the Russians: they use propaganda.
Nobody should, for a fraction of a second, think that this is “new” news and has not been widely known in ‘certain circles’ for some time. Apparently the FBI got into the “torturing muslims” racket, too. I choose my words carefully, since some of the techniques of humiliation and intimidation included shaving their victims’ beards.
“What happened to Abu Zubaydah’s eye?”
People who watch the surveillance state have known about this stuff since the early 1980s. My personal theory is that spooks talk to each other (as spooks do) and eventually word starts to leak; it’s too clever a scam to miss. Then, when a program becomes huge enough, there are tens of thousands of people using the data from it; it’s pretty easy to figure out where the data is coming from. I first encountered the international reach-around when I was at a conference and wound up talking to an interesting fellow who turned out to be a journalist that had been investigating the surveillance state for a very long time.
Warning: I get a bit ranty.
A surrealist is walking down the street, and sees a banana peel in his path; he says, “Mon Dieu! I am going to fall down again!” and keeps walking.
Strava’s heat map has made a lot of people step back and realize, “wow, there are side-channels to data.” Most of us in the computer security world have known that for a long time; some of us have spent our lives trying to stop such channels from happening; it’s a frustrating way to spend your life but, as Townes says, “it beats sitting around waiting to die.”