Monday, June 27, 2011

My commitment to LulzSec et al

I made the following commitment on Friday:
But not to worry, all you agoraphobic/OCD/bipolar loners. In my Monday post I think I'll stir the pot and give you a roadmap for continuing mischief. No, I'm not encouraging your breaking the law. But my hope in stating the obvious is to build a case for responsible political entities to realize that bonded and licensed cyber privateers are still our only hope. To that end I'm going to point out the holes in both DNSSEC and even the malware-proof and massively parallel Active Element Machine discussed in #13 above.
You've gotta' hand it to LulzSec. They're doing a masterful job of garnering headlines. Not that anyone (besides the Wall Street Journal) believes for a minute that they're disbanding. But my purpose today isn't to read between the lines or to predict the next hacker A-Team incarnation. My goal is to let "The Man" (ie, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and DHS) know that the tide is unstoppable without some serious government rethinking.

The "roadmap for continuing mischief" isn't really complicated. In spite of DNSSEC or supposedly malware-proof hardware architectures, the tools exist today to create The Perfect Virus. The combination of mathematics and physics make anything possible. Whether its a combination of nano-ionic resonance that lets an outsider directly read non-Internet-connected secure files from a non-trivial distance, or the ability to turn a giant botnet into a SETI-like massively parallel system to crack encryption, the tax dollars necessary to counter global hacktivists would make the Afghanistan/Iraq budgets seem like a mere roundoff error. Why?

Even though LulzSec's "crew of six" (or six million), the A-Team, and the alphabet soup of future hacktivists are all likely teenagers—even disfuctional ones who don't like to leave their game dungeons—you are not constrained by your lack of formal college training. You actually have a leg up on the formal pedagogues who so smugly think they are above you. On January 14th this year I shared my thoughts on Stephen Wolfram and his seminal work. After digesting A New Kind Of Science—all 846 main pages along with an additional 351 pages of footnotes—I had to agree with Wolfram that:

  1. Mathematics hadn't seen much innovation since the Babylonians; and
  2. My own college major in mathematics was not so much math as it was taking a very narrow set of problems and then regurgitating non-computational techniques designed reduce those problems to a simple form. In other words, I was a technician, not a mathematician.
So to the somewhat agoraphobic and OCD kids looking A JUST CAUSE on which to focus, all you have to do is pick up a copy of Wolfram's book, read it cover to cover—take notes, and learn the real mathematics behind all modern thinking through his meticulous proof-of-theorem footnotes—and you'll be head and shoulders above academia. Which means you'll be head and shoulders above The Man, since He recruits from academia as a matter of career preservation. It's axiomatic: The more degrees you have, the smarter you must be. 

A SINCERE WORD OF ADVICE:  I beg you to reconsider your extra-legal tendencies. Young meat in a federal prison doesn't live a happy life. Your cell "mates" will show you the true meaning of "hard time." This is the plea-bargain logic The Man will use to get you to double cross your hacking buddies. Of course, when I wrote that the FBI only recruits the dumbest hackers, I should have added that even the smart ones become dumb working for the FBI. That's because when you are NOT true to your own consciences, to your own "guiding lights" of morality, when you double cross people with whom you've made a common cause, then you have to shut down part of your brain. Smart guys become dumb, because the part of your consciousness that realizes of your hypocrisy must separate itself from the rest of your intellect. In the end, your only two options will be to (1) ejoy your life as a prison sex toy, or (2) eventually use one last digit of intellect to get your big toe into the trigger guard of a shotgun and place the barrel in your mouth. Your alternative?

How about focusing your tremendous intellect on persuading your government (wherever it is) to license and bond cyber privateers? Obtain your get-out-of-jail-free card and then make a fortune going after cyber bad guys and their complicit rogue governments. 

Give this alternative an evening of thought. For a whole lot of reasons, it's really the smarter path.

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Implementation suggestions for THE MORGAN DOCTRINE are most welcome. What are the "Got'chas!"? What questions would some future Cyber Privateering Czar have to answer about this in a Senate confirmation hearing?