On 01/07/2014 02:13 PM, Melinda Shore wrote: > On 1/7/14 4:28 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote: >> Hi Stephan, > [ ... ] >>> I¹m personally convinced that, on balance, the >>> world would be a much worse place without ³attacks² than with. >> >> I see. So you're all for hacking into Belagcom then? I'm sure they'll >> be a little sad to hear that. Esp. if the next attacker is not a >> government agency. > > I think that it's pretty clear to most of us that, whether or > not we think that government eavesdropping should be trivially > easy, that thinking that the ability for them to do so is not > the same thing that thinking that attacks from other malefactors > would be a good thing. It'd be somewhat more compelling to argue > that enabling trivially easy eavesdropping by one party enables > it for another, which I also think is a more correct argument. > If I were Stephan I'd be reading what you wrote and thinking > "No, that's not what I think - Stephen's wrong" rather than > "Stephen has a point." > > At a minimum it might be good to argue what's been actually > written rather than to impute all sorts of views to someone > and then argue against those. > > At any rate I do think that we can probably discuss this without > people who disagree with you being characterized as naive, > enthusiasts of various sorts of attacks, etc. Well you're probably right that the way I phrased the Belgacom point above was a bit aggressive, (and sorry for that folks), but it is valid - in that case an active hacking attack seems to have been used to setup a later passive attack. And I do think Stephan's mail was naive in at least that it seems to consider that network elements can distinguish between good and bad guys. > At any rate I don't agree with much of what Stephan has written > but I do agree that there appears to be some risk that consensus > is likely to be asserted despite what seem to me to be some > significant disagreements over publication status. Figuring that out is Jari's job, I'm just an interested author here. (Albeit a quite energised author:-) S. > > Melinda > > >