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Comment by dfsegoat | Hacker News Reader

Think of a scenario where certain government employees have accounts on some Private sector service: Maybe a Grindr or Tinder -- if they can work to obtain any sort of compromising information from those services - they can then use it to manipulate government employees ("Do what I say, or i'll out you")... In fact, pretty sure a Chinese co. recently obtained controlling interest of Grindr.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/technology/grindr-sells-s...

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> Maybe a Grindr

Which is owned by a mainland Chinese firm [1].

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/12/technology/grindr-china-bei...

We can inoculate ourselves to this threat by not caring about what politicians, government workers, and other people in general do in their private romantic lives.

"Do what I say or your wife finds out you're cheating on her" is still leverage even if the public doesn't care that you did it.

Just the reverse. Because a target can be compromised by what they do in their private lives, we, (meaning our intelligence people), have to care about what they are doing in their private lives.

I'd imagine that in the game of compromising targets, it doesn't really matter what the general public thinks of the target's behaviors or actions. The only thing that matters is that the target have a psychological profile consistent with wanting to keep their behavior or actions secret. As long as the target has the requisite characteristics with respect to ego, that target can probably be compromised if you can find something on them.

Even if I buy your idea that human nature can change that way (and I don’t) you only tackled the ‘C’ in MICE. How do you solve Money, Ideology and Ego?

Well, a think a spouse might justifiably care in the case of cheating.

At which point that's just the cycle of karma closing the loop, no?

> At which point that's just the cycle of karma closing the loop, no?

You misunderstand. No one cares about Alice's personal life, karma, or happiness. All they care about is manipulating Alice and what a manipulated Alice might do. Alice's desire to hide her cheating from her spouse could lead Bob's trade secrets to getting stolen. Bob did nothing wrong here to have his "cycle of karma closing the loop."

Never give Alice your passwords and always have a lock code on your cell phone. Anything else is a moral hazard in my opinion. Bob is complicit in this case IMO.

If my spouse were to attempt to extract data from my work laptop she would run smack-dab into my password. If on the other hand Bob has extracted highly confidential data onto a freely available machine, then Bob is not only complicit, Bob is culpable. Don't be Bob.

If we take this further and Bob's employer made it that easy to extract highly confidential data then they are their own worst enemy.

For example, if a foolish Google employee attempts to stalk an ex-partners confidential data from within Google, they will be terminated and escorted out of the building within 60 minutes. Be like Google here.

You misunderstand again. Bob isn't Alice's spouse, he's Alice's employer. Bob legitimately gave Alice access to confidential information in order to do her job. But, unknown to him (unless he intrusively investigated her personal life), Alice could be blackmailed into abusing that access because she cheated on her spouse.

Bob isn't "complicit" or "culpable" he's a victim.

I think you're overconfident in simple security measures and have a poor understanding of human security threats.

i read the example as alice being an employee of bob, not a spouse

It is not karma if the country ends up paying, though.

Now we will also get a few posts normalising cheating.

I don't think the general public can.

Hopefully the agencies have already thought of this, but it would be pretty easy to set up a honeypot with a veteran TS or higher clearance employee and tell him to set up fake accounts and see who comes knocking.

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