{"id":2349,"date":"2010-07-28T08:10:26","date_gmt":"2010-07-28T07:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/?p=2349"},"modified":"2010-07-28T09:42:19","modified_gmt":"2010-07-28T08:42:19","slug":"on-poorly-reasoned-media-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/?p=2349","title":{"rendered":"On Poorly-Reasoned Media Articles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Finnieston<\/a><\/p>\n

I don’t know if you’ve been following the whole WikiLeaks story, of how some 90,000+ classified documents concerning the war in Afghanastan were leaked<\/a>, or whether you think it’s a good thing for democracy or not<\/a>. I’m not about to answer that question, but I did have a few thoughts, in light of the latest article in the series: Shortcomings of US Drones<\/a>, and in light of my current reading, The Quest for Responsibility: Accountability and Citizenship in Complex Organisations<\/a> (TQR<\/b>, from here out)<\/small>.<\/p>\n

Taken in light of what I’ve been reading in TQR, I’d have to say that there was a proper procedure which probably wasn’t followed prior to leaking this information (whistleblowing in the military is protected, the same as whistleblowing by civil servants). So, the person doing this … well, certainly didn’t follow procedure. I don’t know how I feel about that, particularly, but I must say that there’s a definite agenda on the part of WikiLeaks, and I’m not entirely certain that I can fathom it. Nor do I wish to, particularly. I am fairly amazed, though, that nobody’s asking questions about the motivation and procedural correctness surrounding this leak. I read lots about WikiLeaks in general, but nothing about how any grievance could have been addressed within the military rather than dumping masses of data into the public domain.<\/p>\n

\"Woodlands<\/a><\/p>\n

The latest article, in which der Spiegel<\/i> paints a grim picture of unsecured, military databases being carried off when military drones crash … well, that bothers me just a bit, because I’d like to think that somebody bright enough to design a remote-controlled weapons platform would at least know how to secure the thing from having its data stripped out by an opponent. I mean, 5 minutes of thought says to me:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Encrypt the hard-drive using strong encryption,<\/li>\n
  2. Require an external key be provided to even launch the operating system (on a USB stick, or something of the like),<\/li>\n
  3. Load in some encrypted keystores onto each of the onboard missiles when the platform is initialized, such that they are required for boot in the event of radio-loss<\/li>\n
  4. Continually update the encryption requirements as those missiles are spent (so that, when the device reestablishes radio communication, you’d be able to remotely boot the system, or could provide a missing key),<\/li>\n
  5. Design the system to go into a safe shut-down in the event of a certain number of minutes of radio silence, or upon a signal provided by an impact-sensor.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Now, that probably sounds like a lot of gibberish … but, basically, it would require a monetary expenditure which far outstrips the value of data supposedly “lost to insurgents.” Does anybody believe that, in addition to the “remote-controlled ‘zero-out’ procedure,” the manufacturers didn’t include an extra $100 worth of hardware (and free software) to make these things less vulnerable? When their per-unit price is supposedly around $4.5 million each?<\/a> Please.<\/p>\n

    This is not a political rant, this is merely a rant against stupidity.<\/p>\n

    -D<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I don’t know if you’ve been following the whole WikiLeaks story, of how some 90,000+ classified documents concerning the war in Afghanastan were leaked, or whether you think it’s a good thing for democracy or not. I’m not about to answer that question, but I did have a few thoughts, in light of the latest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hobbitsabroad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}