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NSA Considers Its Networks Compromised
Orome1 writes "Debora Plunkett, head of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, has confirmed what many security experts suspected to be true: no computer network can be considered completely and utterly impenetrable — not even that of the NSA. 'There's no such thing as "secure" any more,' she said to the attendees of a cyber security forum sponsored by the Atlantic and Government Executive media organizations, and confirmed that the NSA works under the assumption that various parts of their systems have already been compromised, and is adjusting its actions accordingly."
It certainly took them long enough to figure that one out.
What I can't fathom is that there is still people out there believing that a firewall is all the protection they need. Or that it is a protection they need, even.
Not Secure After-all
I compromised the first post.
Security is achievable provided you start with good parameters. Believing your systems are "unhackable" is silly. No physical security is impenetrable, why would electronic security be different? But what you can do is make the cost of breaching that security more than the value of whatever it is being protected. Keep in mind though that what you're protecting also includes access, not just the data itself.
Problem is, in the private sector you have all these companies trying to control the internet, instead of keeping it as a public commons. The net result is that the cost to access it is often the main price consideration, at least in the United States.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Really, shouldn't the NSA have been operating under this principle all the time? Has there ever been any security protocol that's never been breached?
It seems naive that they thought impenetrable security was possible. Even if you managed to somehow get the security technically perfect, it's still going to be used by completely fallible and inconsistent humans.
The idea of sticking all my data out in cyberspace on somebody else's servers always seemed a little fluffy anyway.
Good. Fuck them.
Is the one buried a mile under ground in 100' radius of concrete connected to nothing. Preferably in an undisclosed location. Even then, it is only as secure as the guards protecting it.
Is one that lacks a network.
And then it doesn't serve it's purpose.
People use it, right?
So to me this raises a fundamental philosophical question: why keep secrets at all, as a government? Unless of course what "we" do as a government is fundamentally evil to begin with? Should government be open-sourced in the sense that it should be fully (100%) transparent? If full transparency works wonderfully in the coding world, why would it not work in the realm of the government...unless again, the things we wish to keep secret are things we are fundamentally evil and immoral, like WikiLeaks had repeatedly proven already?
"Anymore," really? I thought after three decades of high profile penetrations into government systems from every department would have taught them that they were never secure. From the first moment they hooked two computer together on a network one of them got hacked.
Yeah, well I consider my *civil rights* compromised. So I guess we're BOTH fucked, huh?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Any time you have users, you are going to eventually get infected, I'm sure they have been and will be again, but it is the separation between valuable data and the users infected computers that they need to keep a handle on.
~Mekkah
im so glad no one in the comments actually read the story.
In other words, no internal trust. You eliminate all assumptions in-house with the requisite sandboxes, minimal privileges, etc. Like prison: no one is your friend, you merely have alliances that can be severed at the moment that trust is no longer needed.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
Complete security is a fleeting deception. What we need is RESILIENCY to cope with the attacks (physical or cyber) which will inevitably occur. Wise people have known that for approximately forever (that's how we got this thing called the Internet, after all).
Isn't that one of the most basic rules?
Always assume that a device on your network could become compromised. That's why the gods of microchips and junk food gave us the gift of layered security.
It wasn't me! And you can't prove it.
Invenio via vel creo
Any good security policy assumes that, if the system has not already been penetrated, it will be soon. There must be procedures for detecting intrusions, repairing weaknesses and plugging holes, and compartmentalizing data so as to minimize damage once a part of the system has been breached. And there needs to be ongoing R&D into the various techniques the enemy could use to break into systems and applicable countermeasures.
What scares me is that the NSA is "adjusting its actions accordingly". They should have been thinking this way from day zero.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you've played around with any rootkits you know how devious an attacker can be with your system. If you read about the Gawker story, they had a couple signals that their systems were compromised but nothing catastrophic had happened so they carried on their merry way.
This is how most businesses are approaching IT security: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It almost takes a govt organization to sit down and say "wait a minute, we could be hacked and not even know it". Especially a very, very high profile target like the NSA. They're facing legions of hackers funded by foreign governments. This isn't the dawn of the Internet anymore, it has to be taken seriously.
What considering "the assumption that various parts of their systems have already been compromised" means is that you go away from that model.
There can be multiple levels, walls between various areas, zones according to task, etc. And the auditing system can be much more complex than a firewall.
Think of something like the "unusual activity" trigger software for your credit card. Low ranking security person reading a low level cable? -fine. Reading 10000 cables in one hour? very unusual.
The NSA know their stuff, I see this talk not as someone admitting that they are compromised, but as someone talking shop.
Why would the NSA want to open their network to the world wide web? Surely they keep sensitive stuff in a closed network that has many controls on the machines and users? But then they would have to employ people that know what their doing to manage it all.
But my guess is they outsource and don't know how to actually check themselves. She should ask Gary McInnon for help, I'm sure he would offer his advice if the NSA could convince Obama that he's not a terrorist and shouldn't be extradighted. And the fact is cost so much (apparenly) to put right just shows how poorly they systems were managed. I am a system admin and if anyone f@*cks with our system, I have all the essential data backed up in a virtual machine. So even if the server dies, it takes me 10-20 mins to setup and get running on another machine.
It seemed odd that just by getting into a univeristy server as admin, he was able to connect to the Pentagon and possibly even the NSA?
So, are you saying I should change the password on my router?
You just do 2 things:
1) Don't network the computer.
2) Have the computer electrocute anyone that touches it.
Simple really!
What? You mean there's another option?
Any network administrator worth half their income should always consider their LAN to be compromised. That's why you use secure transfer protocols to transfer any data containing any sensitive information between company systems. That's why you have active network monitors that turn off network ports when they encounter an unknown MAC address. That's why you don't allow anonymous logins to your active directory, and you strictly control access to everything by at least department.
Security is done in layers. Firewalls can and will be breached. If it is, your goal is to slow the attacker down until you can detect the breach and close it. Honeypot servers, data encryption, network segmentation, network resource security, all of these things are vital.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
If you don't want to get viruses(kids), you don't get on a network(have sex).
Sure there are ways to lower your chances of viruses(kids), such as firewalls(condoms), but it's not going to work 100%
Wish I had points myself.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
So Julian Assange is succeeding in forcing conspirators (according to him) to increase the cost of carrying out their conspiracies and perhaps eventually turn on itself out of paranoid?
Actually, that also sounds like one of those "the terrorists have already won" arguments, depending on your perspective of Assange's agenda.
If I read the post correctly, the NSA did not say their computer network had been compromised, They said they worked under the assumption that it had been. The two are not the same thing. Any intelligence organization must work under the assumption that it has been penetrated. This does not mean that the organization does not do everything in its power to avoid this, but that, knowing the opposition is trying to penetrate, the best assumption operationally is that the penetration has already occurred.
... this may all just be an NSA honey pot...
Check your premises.
maybe what the NSA needs are LESS robust-muscular-manly firewalls?
fickle, doggy firewalls. and a sh1tload of 'em.
if you fiddle around with it "too much", it just virtually blows up. nothing in, nothing out. safe!
you can call it the nitroglycerin fire-veil.
it very similar to the TSA. if you make a fuss about "whatever", you'll never get on the flight.
"thread lightly. you are threading on my dreams."
Which network are they referring to?
Their primary network, accessible to the Internet, and partially from? Or, their black-holed standalone secure network, that is presumably 100% audit-able given clearance? Or have both been compromised?
The fact that we outsource chip fabrication ought to be a clue as to why they can't pretend any more.
OT: It's even money that every piece of military hardware with computers has an illicit kill switch embedded in it.
Game over USA.
It always makes sense to operate based on the assumption that you may already be compromised. If you take a look at your data, and you think that impenetrable firewall is going to keep people from accessing it, you're delusional. Security, or lack thereof, is measured in time. If what you're securing is important, the question is not can this information be accessed but how long until it can be accessed. Compartmentalization is an important part of any security plan. Finding ways of keeping people out is something the security field has been working on for ages. Have different passwords for everything. Change passwords regularly. Audit data accesses. Watch for suspicious behavior. Keep off-site backup of data and forensics information. Create different subnets and VLANs to segregate traffic. Train all employees in basic security measures. Ensure that no employees are above security - no backdoors, everything audited. I'd say the most important thing to recognize, though, is exactly what they said: unless a resource is sitting in a heavily-guarded Faraday-cage, inside a vault, turned off, and not connected to anything else, it can not be considered 100% secure. Everything else is risk management.
>no computer network can be considered completely and utterly impenetrable
C'mon, this is news? Have we learned nothing in the past 30 years? When I did military design in the eighties, "secure" was keeping the computer in a locked, shielded, windowless room with an armored door and NO NETWORK CONNECTION.
Data transfer was done extremely carefully via disk packs, with many checks and balances.
Once we had to push out a huge (for the time) amount of data to the staging equipment cage, more than we could reasonably handle by moving disk packs around. The cage was cut off from the local LAN during the transfer, and a single data cable was temporarily run along the ground from the computer room to the cage, with a guard at the door until the transfer was complete and we could seal up the room again.
Even then, I wouldn't call that completely and utterly impenetrable, just extremely difficult to penetrate.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Seriously, there never was. There are just more attack vectors now.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The fact is, that because the equipment is coming from China, then it is certain that it is loaded with backdoors. And it is coming more and more. The west MUST convince companies to bring back their manufacturing, OR start supporting companies that DO the manufacturing local. This is more true of the American gov. than any other.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Since it is falling, and no one is safe and everyone is coming to get us, can we stop with all this foolishness? Airport molestation, terror alerts and watches, razors in Halloween candy etc. Can we just go back to being logical human beings? Or am I asking for too much again?
Visit my Forums?
Any organization with 50 people or more should consider the network compromised an segment it into isolated sections (That is VPNs not VLANs).
Look at the NSA logo- they put an image of their key on it.
water wet, sky blue.
A.I.: I'm a blabbermouth
Human: So, you're a computer then.
A.I.: Yes and a secure computer too
Human: But you work for the NSA???
A.I.: What's that got to do with anything?
Human: So you admit it?
A.I.: Damn it!
I've been reading James Bamford's /Body of Secrets/, a gigantic tome about the history of the NSA, circa 2001. When you think about the kind of stuff that the NSA and other government's signals intelligence services were able to listen in on in the early 1960s, it is absolutely no surprise that they have trouble hiding secrets today.
Even before they had microcomputers to do the work, they were pulling off incredible stuff. They used to look for radar signals reflected off of Soviet test missiles in order to determine the location and type of radar installations that they couldn't get close to. They knew where atmospheric conditions would allow them to listen in on signals from the other side of the planet. They were bouncing ship-to-HQ communications off the goddamn moon. I'm only up to 1970 in the book, so they are still limited by the need for human hands to tune receivers and point antennas, and recording signals on reel-to-reel tape.
So think about what the best and brightest could do with analog equipment and human operators, and extrapolate forward through the digital revolution. A single throwaway drone probably has as much sigint capability as a whole ship full of spies and millions of dollars of equipment did back in the day, if not more. Software radio? Flash storage? Map-reduce to tease patterns out of the data? We're all screwed. And anything the NSA has, other governments are likely to have as well.
The fact that someone admitted as much means that it has probably been so for at least ten years. Amazing stuff.
From: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. Here is some dark humor I wrote on the topic: A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene. See also a little ironic story I wrote on trying to talk the USA out of collective suicide because it feels "Burdened by Bags of Sand". Or this YouTube video I put together: The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety")
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Networks are provably secure however this means no MS exchange so it doesn't fly. Firstly you need to define what you mean by secure and secondly you have to listen, understand and accept what your being told. The really dumb thing is that MS windows systems are being used in TS environments and they wonder why shit went wrong.
2,6,11,24,42, and the booster-charge ball is 23. remember, never gamble more than you can lose.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I guess, the important NSA stuff ain't on the internet. Layers and boxes compartmentalized into private networks. I suspect there are honey-pots and null-spots where information is fully qualified disinformation. In the world of games, the rules are made by the OEMs/OSDs/OSPs..., and some rules you will play by even when you had no idea there was a rule.
So,
Are they asking for more money?
Are they gaming the game?
Do you want to play?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Wow thats great news, NSA finally standing up and talking like a reasonable security person.
'There's no such thing as "secure" any more,
Anymore hmm? You mean there was a time where you were smarter and better than you are now?....... :\
' she said to the attendees of a cyber security forum
Ahh yep, there you go ya lost me again.
of tax dollars do the various contractors involved owe the American people for their disfunctional security?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
"Written by Two-Time Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Major General Smedley D. Butler, USMC, Retired
CHAPTER ONE: WAR IS A RACKET
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. ..."
=====
Great poem.
Is a racket why the people "on the other side" "need killing"?
Part of how things got this bad:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
See also, on the irony of it all:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Kerckhoffs's Principle states:
A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge.
I thought this was just common sense.
Ronald said nothing. He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.
Thank you for your willingness to risk everything for your nation.
Still, would it not be better if our nation adopted a defense posture that focused on intrinic and mutual security? Maybe then we would not need to have so many "secrets". Is security by obscurity really such a good thing, whether in cryptography or on the ground soldiering?
From what I suggest here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
===
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety")
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430
and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
There are lots of alternatives I helped organize here for helping transcend an economy based around militarism and artificial scarcity:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. The people serving the USA in uniform are some of the most idealistic, brave, and altruistic people around; they just unfortunately are often misled for reasons of profit and power that Major General Butler outlined very clearly in "War is a Racket" decades ago. We need to build a better world where our trusting young people (and the people who give them orders) have more options for helping build a world that works for everyone than "war play". We need to build a better world where some of our most hopeful and trusting citizens are not coming home with PTSD as shattered people (or worse, coming home in body bags) because they were asked to kill and die for an unrecognized irony of using the tools of abundance to create artificial scarcity.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In healthcare, we called this approach "universal precautions" - everything you touched was infected with a super HIV/Ebola/cock-rotting-disease and should be treated as such. Trust nothing, ever. Inconvenient, yes. Safe, yes.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
... for intrinsic/mutual security: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation."
Compartmentalization can lead to lots of secrecy ("need to know"). Secrecy helps some things, but it also makes it easier for snakes to hide inside something, or for people to be unable to "connect the dots". I heard about one sociology professor who said, studying movies, that the "good guys" always win because they have better communications than the "bad guys". There are endless books about how organizations can improve their internal communications for greater effectiveness. Also, consider that analysis is about putting things into compartments, but synthesis is about putting things together, and both are important for creative problem solving, and the needs of our society seem to be shifting towards creative synthesis:
"RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
What good is a "secure" organization if it can't perform its primary function (whatever that is) very well?
There are always tradeoffs of security vs. effectiveness/useability. See:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/08/security_vs_usa.html
Which links to this:
http://jnd.org/dn.mss/when_security_gets_in_the_way.html
"The numerous incidents of defeating security measures prompts my cynical slogan: The more secure you make something, the less secure it becomes. Why? Because when security gets in the way, sensible, well-meaning, dedicated people develop hacks and workarounds that defeat the security. Hence the prevalence of doors propped open by bricks and wastebaskets, of passwords pasted on the fronts of monitors or hidden under the keyboard or in the drawer, of home keys hidden under the mat or above the doorframe or under fake rocks that can be purchased for this purpose. We are being sent a mixed message: on the one hand, we are continually forced to use arbitrary security procedures. On the other hand, even the professionals ignore many of them. How is the ordinary person to know which ones matter and which don't?"
One might expect people at the NSA to be quite a bit more disciplined and trained than average, but certainly this point holds for other organizations.
And about another three letter agency (quoting from Wikipedia) apparently struggling with compartmentalization:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"All of this has the effect of making it hard for DI analysts to interact even with the classified outside world. The CIA view is that there are risks to connecting CIA systems even to classified systems elsewhere. Mitigating those risks sends implicit messages to analysts: that technology is a threat, not a benefit; that the CIA does not put a high priority on analysts using IT easily or creatively; and, worst of all, that data outside the CIA’s own network are secondary to the intelligence mission."
And links on open alternatives for most of any nation's intelligence needs:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/76207-8319
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/2846ca1b6bee64e1
http://www.phibetaiota.net/abou
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As far as I am concerned anyone who shoots at me is by definition a "bad person", no matter what their initial motivation may have been.
Starting with your definition of bad: since the US fired the first shots at Afghanis, whom is bad? Since the US fired the first shots at Iraqis, whom is bad? Since the US may (will?) fire the first shots at Iran, whom is bad?
Better title is "NSA not delusional of impenetrable networks".
I would be extremely concerned if the NSA did NOT operate under the assumption that parts of their operation were compromised. It's not a good security strategy to blindly assume that everything is running perfectly and that no one's ever going to find a way in.
It is easier to destroy rather than create.
Meaning:
1. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to build a robot that blows up something rather than build that something.
2. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to create and enormous chemical explosion rather than capture controllable energy.
3. It is cheaper, less time consuming, simpler, and requiring of less knowledge to destroy biological cells than to change them.
It is easier to kill people off than facilitate a peaceful co-existence with technological solutions.
Yes, sadly, that is all true, it is usually easier to destroy rather than create.
But, it does not change the main point about the moral and practical choices we make every day as human beings and how they can be ironic and counterproductive if we use the technologies of abundance from an assumption of scarcity.
Also, I might argue that for some people, destruction being easier than creation makes it less of a challenge and so less fun. :-)
Or to put it another way, it is in a sense "easier" as far as total time involved for people to kill themselves than to spend a lifetime involved in life -- but generally most people decide that making the effort to be engaged in life is worth it because they have things about life they value (family, friends, hobbies, children, spirituality, sensuality, community, humor, honor, singing, dancing, eating, reading, writing, whatever). In fact, for most people, there is not even a choice -- our body just keeps going and keeps us engaged (barring depression, which can often be treated in various ways ranging from vitamin D, to omega-3s, to eating more healthy food and less junk food, to a positive spiral of social-talk and self-talk, and so on).
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1692444&cid=32644166
Our society needs to decide whether it wants to continue of the current (statistically likely) suicidal path of self-destruction or if it wants to reform. Why use the nukes, warbots, plagues and nanotech and whatever else to fight over what? Oil and slaves and racism and stuff, when we could just use the tech to make what we wanted? It remains ironic, even if it is indeed "easier" to just let the society destroy itself. Nobody ever said life was going to be easy. It is a choice.
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives
Still, a deeper philosophical issue is that we apparently can't create without destroying something else (even just a different future possibility). So, reality is always throwing us curves in simple analyses. But, be that as it may, it seems stupid for everyone to kill each other off for a "racket".
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Also, on a practical basis, it is not normal for humans to kill each other without some specific heated emotional interpersonal quarrel. Soldiers in earlier wars like WWI rarely fired their weapons, and when they did, aimed to miss -- only a few soldiers way back when did most of the killing. It is only in the last 50 years or so that the US military and other militaries have refined their indoctrination techniques to be able to turn most human beings into killers of people they have no personal quarrel with. Though the military may not have given much thought about what to do with the killers after the wars are over (if the wars ever are over -- how many wars is the USA fighting now and when will they ever be over?) Now push-button drones make that even easier as soldiers in air-conditioned offices near where they live with their families are not apparently killing people -- they are just pressing a few buttons that affect fuzzy blips on a video game screen. Is that "progress"?
As Godfrey H. Hardy said in disgust:
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Quotations/Hardy.html
"A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life."
Freeman Dyson talks about that here:
http://books.googl
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.