Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • November 27, 2014 5:19 AM

@ Bruce,

In the preface to one of your recent books you gave an example of a trades person comming into your house to fix a faulty service. And that the –then– reality was they were unlikely to need supervision etc.

You’ve also recently expressed doubts about the NSA / GCHQ “bugging” European cryptographers.

Can we assume that your view points are currently undergoing a realignment?

My own experiance in the past of finding out I was subject to surveillance by the authorities for no legally tenable reason was a form of cognative dissonance which transformed through quite a few of the major negative emotions. Luckily I had been through something similar when younger when another European Nation subjected a companies entire engineering and sales teams to somewhat hamfisted surveillance to try to gain economic advantage in a major contract with a third nation. The old hands on the engineering team had been under it before and had prewarned us it was likely to happen.

Usually such behaviour starts out as not personal, but political / financial, where people feel they have to succeed at any cost to protect their own future or to protect an income stream. With the result that for some with LEO or diplomatic protection, virtually anything goes. The best you can hopefor in return is to firstly watch out for them and catch them at it. Then either “out them” publicaly, or “set them up” so they fail very very badly in a way their bosses cannot ignore. I’m aware that in the US publicaly outing some with protected status is a criminal offence treated more seriously than murder. However the latter course of action has it’s own problems and is best avoided lest they seek revenge in some manner.

The problems arise primaraly because too few bosses have the actual or emotional intelligence to cut their losses rather than listening to the bleatings of their underlings saying in effect “He’s dirty, my gut tells me so, look at the way he behaves, we’ve just got to wait or put preasure on him untill he makes a mistake and then we’ve got him”, it sounds appealing and is an easy choice to go with. But as time goes on the cost of cutting loses get so high that sense and morals go out of the window and the bosses own future becomes threatened. Sadly it’s actually worse these days because the work is often “contracted out” and even the most senior of bosses will give free reign to their underlings as long as money is comming through the door, and will actually influence those beneath them to provide reports etc that will keep the money tap on.

I see no easy solution to this worsening situation especialy as there is no political will to do so, and for those subject to surveillance it can be an endless nightmare.

Perhaps one small crumb of comfort is that for the many innocent individuals they remain blissfully unaware of just what is being done to them, and thus do not have to face the cognative dissonance being aware of surveillance causes a normal individual.

Clive Robinson • November 28, 2014 6:46 PM

@ NobodySpecial,

Is shooting an FBI agent a crime ?

It’s a fair question but first you have to ask another question,

“When is an FBI officer not an FBI officer?”

To which the answer is “when they have not identified themselves to be FBI by voice or visable identification”.

I suspect you would need to go back over some court cases but I do remember a case where a Federal agent in camouflage shot a family dog, and members of the family shot the agent and in effect got away with it.

In the UK a rather unpleasant career criminal that had been involved with the gold from the Brinksmat robbery, stabed a camouflaged police officer to death on his property, he was found not guilty of murder. Though he stabed somebody else at a later time and is unlikely to see the light of day as a free man again.

Having been a contractor in the past, it’s a question that has crossed my mind on the odd occasion.

As far as the lawful occupier is concerned the agent/officer/contractor is in an illegal position even if consent to enter had originaly been given. Because the consent is conditional on the agent/officer posing as a technician performing a specific function. Thus the legal occupier seeing the agent/officer behaving outside of that function has as a minimum the right to chalenge the agent/officer as well as defend themselves against the agent/officer and if they can, arrest and detain what they now quite correctly regard as an illegal intruder.

Now the weasel part of that is “self defence” and what it means, after all “running away” is a form of self defence, and in some parts of the world “just shoting an unknown person on your property” is in quite a few cases not an action that would lead to an arrest or charge let alone a trial.

I know of a case in Texas fairly well where a young man from Dundee Scotland was traveling in a taxi, he jumped out of the moving vehical for some reason ran up a drive way screaming for help and banged on the front door, the property owner shot him through the door and claimed self defence…

I suspect that in some parts of the US that the property owner having shot an undercover FBI officer would fairly easily defend their action. However, whilst they might not suffer legal consiquences for the shoting, I suspect that their life would nolonger be the same, in that they would become a marked person subject to repeated checks / surveillance etc.

As has been observed “All cops want to capture a cop killer and take them down” it does not matter if the killing was justified or not it’s a tribal issue.