An ideology of violation

One of the goals of this blog is to cast doubt on the ideas going around, especially in tech circles. This text is by Jaron Lanier, and it raises an important ethical question, particularly for those of us who are interested in security. The text is Jaron Lanier’s; the links and notes are mine.

An Ideology of Violation

by Jaron Lanier

All those nontechnical, ignorant, innocent people out there are going about their lives thinking that they are safe, when in actuality they are terribly vulnerable to those who are smarter than they are. Therefore, we smartest technical people ought to invent ways to attack the innocents, and publicize our results so that everyone is alerted to the dangers of our superior powers. After all, a clever evil person might come along.

That is Lanier’s own summary of the ideology. The full text starts from the voluntary code of conduct that Jimmy Wales and Tim O’Reilly proposed after the bullying of Kathy Sierra¹, which went nowhere; moves on to the researchers who spent two years working out how to use mobile phone technology to hack pacemakers and switch them off by remote control in order to kill a person

, and to the ones who published how to pick one of the toughest locks around and compared their triumph to Turing cracking Enigma

; defends “security through obscurity”, which in biology goes by another name, biodiversity; and closes by noting that anyone who complains about the rituals of the elite violators will be accused of spreading FUD(*).

(*) FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.