Discuss: America Should Unleash Cyber Privateers | Hacker News Reader

Discuss: America Should Unleash Cyber Privateers

realcleardefense.com

3 pointsGaishan7 comments

If you want to legitimize that kind of action against us by the entire world, sure.

I would prefer not to do that, however. At least, not until we have no choice.

Once you click that “Pirates Go!” button, there’s not really any way to un-click it.

> Once you click that “Pirates Go!” button, there’s not really any way to un-click it.

Did Queen Elizabeth I start and stop the activities of state-sanctioned ‘Privateers’ carrying to raid Spanish ships or not?

History not only claims that she did it also records the penalties for stepping out of line as a Pirate

  If you were caught committing piracy without permission from the queen the penalties were severe. Once caught most pirates were held at Marshalsea Prison in Southwark (now the location of a library) before being taken to execution docks in Wapping to be hung. Once they were executed, their bodies were left tied to the shore until three tides had washed over them. Some of the bodies, for example the notorious Captain Kidd, were then covered in tar and displayed in a gibbet at prominent locations on the Thames at Blackwall Point (located at the tip of the Greenwich Peninsula) and Cuckolds Point in Rotherhithe (now the location of Pageants Crescent) to act as a deterrent for anyone who might be contemplating piracy.

~ https://www.johnsand.co/news/a-brief-history-of-pirates-in-l...

That was at a time when they were able to wield a lot of power over the privateers, and give them strong incentives to play the way the government wanted.

That’s much harder these days. When a cyber privateer can potentially wield enough power to crack into DHS or the FBI and download all the data on all of their employees, and then expose or sell that information on the black market? That’s handing a nuclear weapon to an infant and telling them to play nice.

> That’s much harder these days.

Hegseth appears keen to bring back live public gibbeting.

> DHS or the FBI and download all the data on all of their employees

Most of whom should be reasonably in the public domain anyway - masked enforcers snatching people of the streets and into a black hole of "where'd they go, how are they now?" was once confined to tinpot dicatorships.

> That’s handing a nuclear weapon to an infant

Uh-huh. Maybe take a breath or two?

I was actually wondering about that while reading this. Doesn't every country already have groups of cyber-defense and probably also cyber-offense? Why would this be any really different than just recruiting the people who are already doing this stuff?

There’s a difference between people actually officially working for the US military or the US government, versus cyber privateers.

Yes, we definitely have the former. NSA has been around a while, and not everyone working there is an actual government employee. They still have some contractors

And the US military has had the USAF Tiger Team for a while, and I’m sure there are other groups as well.

It’s the cyber privateer stuff that concerns me.

Here I was thinking that the US couldn’t lean any more enthusiastically into the cyberpunk dystopia that whole branch of science fiction had forewarned us about, and now somebody goes ahead and publishes this.

What happens when some of these licensed Privateers ‘accidentally’ crash a foreign hospital’s ventilators in the ER and people die? Do we foreign plebeians get redress or is just a shrug?

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