Richard Craig – EngD Systems Thinking in Cyberdefence

A great introduction about the behaviour of the East German state that required a sample page from each typewriter to ensure that they could trace which was used to produce any critical articles of the state (The lives of others). The same thing is happening with laser printers today allowing government to use technology against citizens.

Mikko Hypponen divides attackers into the following groups

• Criminals – Motivations are easy to understand; they want to make money and have made their fortunes online. In the future the majority of crime will occur online.
• Protesters – Activists, motivated by beliefs .
• Nation states – Totalitarian states hack companies (Diginotar) or individuals (Germany) for surveillance.

While many will state “I have nothing to hide why should I worry?”, the argument is never about personal privacy vs national security, but about Freedom vs Control. Loss of privacy IS loss of freedom. We must remember that any right that is given away will never be returned. The moral right of a government is derived solely from the consent of the people whom the government represents.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

“My criticsim of the West, especially of liberals, is that they take freedom for granted.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali

How about if the government set up video cameras and microphones in every room of your house, would that be ok? No, because you would have lost your freedom to be a private individual – privacy is necessary for healthy psychological function in modern societies. Governments watching what you do on your computer is the same as having CCTV in your home. Now imagine giving governments the power to watch your every move without you even knowing it. How could you fight such a government if it became repressive? You couldn’t because those liberties would have been lost.

Another good comment after the video;

Tyrannical governments are not going to spy on everyone in order to find out who hates them because they already know that the majority of the population hates them and because they cannot incarcerate the majority of the population. All they want to know is who is brave enough to oppose the government. I know this fact because I was a dissident in communist Poland and I learned it from the secret police and from other dissidents. In North Korea, not crying hard enough at the funeral of Kim Jong-il was interpreted as anti-government demonstration, punishable by incarceration. German Nazis had blockleiters (block leaders) who spied on the people living in the same building. Soviet Union had the same kind of spies, called dvorniki (house-men). The purpose of these spies was terrorizing the population. It did not matter who was arrested, as long as a few people were arrested every year.

Even if ordinary people manage to create a guerrilla army, they cannot overthrow tyrannical governments, e.g., the governments of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Hafez al-Assad (Hama massacre), and the North Korean government because the governments have better weapons and their soldiers have better training. All historical examples of guerrilla victories are victories against weak, non-tyrannical governments. The American war of independence (revolution) was won by the French navy. Egyptian military leaders told Hosni Mubarak that if he did not step down voluntarily the army would force him out. Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by Western air-force aided by militia armed and trained by the West. Taliban and Haqqani Network exist because they receive support from Pakistani ISI. Any tyrannical government can enslave its population because we, the people, do not have modern air force and we cannot defeat the government air-force with rifles and RPGs. Any tyrannical government that possesses nuclear weapons and is willing to defend itself with genocidal attacks is invincible.

Privacy was a problem for companies and governments to solve, and technology has allow people to meet the challenge.