Re: <nettime> Hacked Team

[Jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>]

dear Morlock,

On Fri, 10 Jul 2015, morlockelloi@yahoo.com wrote:

> Exonerating makers of malicious tools because they did it only for the
> irresistible appeal of money (as opposed to being inherently evil and
> wanted to screw activists) is ridiculous.

this is not exactly what I intend to say with my message. In fact I do
believe that scientists and researchers in general should be responsible
and ethical in what they do. Let this argument just rest for a moment as
I don't really want to dig into this discussion, which is somehow too
complex for this medium. Just consider the history of science and
freedom issues connected to it, for instance with regards to anatomical
dissection, atomic bomb research and such...  rest assured I have a
fairly conservative approach to that myself, yet not a religious one.

My point is about keeping balance and the intended audience of my
message is mostly the activists reading, whose vast majority I perceive
to be infuriated against some mercenary hackers, without really
perceiving the big picture. And yes I have acquaintance to one of the HT
developers, which basically makes me sad about the whole story, but I'm
not a judge nor a lawyer and I'm really not seeking exemption for any of
them here.

> They knew exactly what they were doing. Just following orders is not a
> valid defense, for some time now.

Right. I'm just asking about those venture capitals, some of which seem
to be even using public funds, to boost espionage activities of the
military-industrial complex I tried to describe and in clearly illegal
directions (as in supporting western allies adverse regimes).
Actually, following Brett's last mail, one can quickly notice that
360capitalpartners has even received funding from the EU commission, now
I'm wondering what is their ethical charter on the many other projects
they support, covering fields that may also be very sensitive.

I'm very interested in how does that sounds in the ears of activists and
how do we plan to react to the bigger picture, in case we like to
organize a response after having burned the witches that need to be
burned, pardon me if I still find that as smelling disgusting, yet I'm
not willing to exonerate them from being spooky and evil at times. Not
sure about you in fact, but I'm so perverse I do find interesting to get
to know people that present themselves as spooky and evil at times,
while the rethoric of white-hats today is rather boring to my ears
especially when it does not takes into account the bigger picture.

Perhaps this narrow mindedness of white-hats is a signal that even the
hacker movement of today is mostly driven by personalizing individualist
positions and a sort of turf war on the shores of what we consider
ethical. Meanwhile we all seem to agree that bugging an activist laptop
is oh-my-god very bad, without contemplating the fact there are more
neo-fascist activists in Europe than anything else.

> Eventually, it will come to those just following orders, programmers
> and engineers, enabling efficient population control, and doing it
> just for $100K+ salaries and stock options. It always does.

You are right and yes, it already does. Actually the Silicon Valley
salaries are now up to $350K/y in the best cases. I'm just wondering
about how we will distribute the responsibility for... "illegal usage of
algorithms": will it trickle up to the funds helping to scale their
deployement in mass-production and even disregarding exportation laws,
or will it hit the freedom of research, eventually leading to some sort
of "authorization" or "license" to access, develop and publish certain
algorithms?

I ask this because when I read the reaction of most activists being
driven mostly again the researchers, the latter is the scenario I
predict to take place.

Hoping this clarifies my concerns,

ciao


-- 
Denis "Jaromil" Roio, Dyne.org Think (& Do) Tank
We are free to share code and we code to share freedom
Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf
GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02  C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10
Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil


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