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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

I disagree.

> "hacking has left teenage basements and has become weaponized and used by governments around the world"

Source? Particularly with respect to "weaponized". The worst I saw was North Korea alledgedly being responsible for pirating a crappy movie, and a 10 minute shutdown of github a few months ago.

> "Military self defense."

Who and what are you afraid of? And how does this policy help with that? No truly dangerous information would ever come close to US borders. This, just like massive traffic collection, can only be said to be an invasion of privacy for the average man. The people we'd like to catch were never at risk at all.

I just don't buy into the fear, and I see the consequences as huge.

Terrorism is modern day McCarthyism.

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> > "hacking has left teenage basements and has become weaponized and used by governments around the world"

> Source? Particularly with respect to "weaponized". The worst I saw was North Korea alledgedly being responsible for pirating a crappy movie, and a 10 minute shutdown of github a few months ago.

Arguably it has been "weaponized" by the NSA and their allies. See, stuxnet and related threats. There is good reason to believe other nation state actors also have "weaponized" threats. For instance the recent "man-on-the-side" DDOS attack via the great firewall on github. There is also a healthy business for buying and selling vulnerabilities and exploits and the .gov organizations are known buyers.

So yes, I think it is fair to say that "hacking has left teenage basements". That part of the statement the gp's statement it obviously true when you look at say sophisticated carder rings.

> > > "hacking has left teenage basements and has become weaponized and used by governments around the world"

> Source? Particularly with respect to "weaponized".

The best known examples are Flame/Stuxnet. [0]

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-isr...

Terrorism is modern day McCarthyism.

Yes, sure. But it's modern day McCarthyism viewed through the lens of loss of profits from the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is, without a Russian Bear to scare people with, the US intelligence community can't get money at will. Once Osama bin Laden was shot to pieces, Al Queda lost a lot of its terrorizing power, so now it's "ISIS" or "ISIL" or "Islamic State". There's Al Shabab and Iran and probably some others to have always been at war with waiting in the wings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet

The worst I saw was ... a 10 minute shutdown of github a few months ago.

Way to trivialize it. That attack lasted 6 days.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article/chinese-government-linke...

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