<div class="gmail_quote"><div>Firstly and most importantly, to me, your right to own, possess and sell exploits is pretty clearly protected under the 2nd amendment. I'd argue for that legitimacy in the same way I would your right to do the same with a firearm. I do however take contention with what the actual circumstances are though, a market where you can only sell firearms to your respective governments instead of an actual open and free market.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">> George W Bush walked into a room full of defense and intelligence officials, and he pointed out to them in a dry Southern way how if they </blockquote>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">> didn't think of something better that the Isrealis were 100% going to attack the Iranian nuclear program, and they were going to pull the </blockquote>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">> United States into it, and there was going to be a large serving of _extremely unpleasant_ sandwich with a small side of possible nuclear </blockquote>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">> winter for everyone involved... </blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div></div><div>> And looking around the room, the people who had never shot a gun, who that very night would go home to play an RPG so hideously </div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>> complex it has its own government, who spent the time before the meetings with high powered government officials arguing about Firefly </div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>> versus Buffy the Vampire Slayer's various scripts, people who if given have a chance would expound upon deeply held personal opinons </div></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>> regarding various subtleties in the licensing of Unix distributions,...these people simply shrugged and said "Yeah, we got this one."</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This is a bit misguided at best and I've not quite decided for myself whether you are delluding yourself or just trying to delude readers. Ignoring that the most likely candidate for how the worm ended up there in the first place-- a FTO, the MEK/PMOI, who exists on our lists because of their old habits of killing Americans and thus that participating in the cyber-side of things could be rightfully construed as material support for a terrorist organization. And ignoring that you decoupled operations from the targeted assassination of scientists aspect, as those aren't exactly thank you notes being strapped to the side of their cars-- isn't the correct answer when faced with this situation to question our ties to Israel, a country that legitimately serves no interest for the United States instead of doubling down by participating in an operation designed to help satiate their desire for blood?</div>
<div><br></div><div>About a year ago I had a box compromised after I got a new twitter follower that was of the Tibetan NGO type who had obviously had their website compromised and was in turn compromising visitors to their website-- chrome 0day in the wild on an NGOs website. Sure, it could have been some random spammers or similar, but we all know that's not what's going on.</div>
<div><br></div><div>What exactly do you think they do with the intel they collect from such operations? I just don't buy the 'hate the game not the player' argument here, if you sell someone an exploit that in turn ends up used to exfil intel that in turn ends in an extraordinary rendition or a car-bomb strapped to the side of a scientists car, you're hands are anything but bloodless and you have most certainly deployed bombs and guns unlike you speculate.</div>
<div><br></div><div>But whatever, thats life and we're all spooks now. What I have issue with is the idea that it's a free market or anything to do with civil liberties when in essence if you tried to sell the same exploits to something like Wikileaks, you'd quickly find yourself embroiled in a series of legal snafu's. And of course, if I say sell to the NSA/CIA, no one bats an eye, but if I were to suggest selling to Wikileaks or telecommix or the PLF et al, that would sound insane. At least have the decency to call a spade a spade and instead of pretending to be free-agents people should at least acknowledge that they're essentially agents of their respective states.</div>
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