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The Rise of Political Doxing (schneier.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Security guru Bruce Schneier predicts a new trend in hacking: political doxing. He points to the recent hack of CIA director Jack Brennan's personal email account and notes that it marks a shift in the purpose of email hacking: "Here, the attacker had a more political motive. He wasn't out to intimidate Brennan; he simply wanted to embarrass him. His personal papers were dumped indiscriminately, fodder for an eager press." Schneier continues, "As people realize what an effective attack this can be, and how an individual can use the tactic to do considerable damage to powerful people and institutions, we're going to see a lot more of it. ... In the end, doxing is a tactic that the powerless can effectively use against the powerful."
I guess this is why Bruce Schneier is a guru and gets the big bucks....
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
There's a simple counter-measure - don't be ashamed of anything you do. Kind of hard to exert pressure on someone by revealing their personal stuff if they don't give a sh*t.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
In the end, doxing is a tactic that the powerless can effectively use against the powerful.
...Or keep the powerless in their place.
We have secrets and embarrassing things on Facebook and other places online that will never go away and can be found if you look hard enough. Most of us don't have the luxury of being groomed from birth to be politicians and avoid these pitfalls.
Going through Sarah Palin's emails (either the official ones the judge ordered released and the New York Times attempted to crowdsource finding embarassing stuff OR the ones that the 4chan hacker whose father was an elected Democrat released) was an attempted doxxing.
What Bradley Manning did was a doxxing. Hell, so was the release of the Pentagon Papers.
Jumping even further back, the XYZ Affair was revealed by a doxxer leaking details to the (partisan) press.
Releasing your opponent's embarrassing documents has probably been going on for as long as we've had written language.
But what about Russians, Chinese, Iranians, French, Brazilians, Indians, Japanese, etc, etc, etc?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Because doxing has never been using against people that haven't done anything but mind their own business. Right?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Exactly. How long will it be before such people start to just vanish into some black hole somewhere. If that doesn't work then their family, friends, etc will likewise suffer. This is always the last resort of the more powerful to the weaker. That's what being weaker MEANS, you can't protect yourself.
And if the tactic does work? It will just become another tool of the scumbags. Turds always float to the surface.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Richard Nixon and his political team are glad people have forgotten why the press loves to "-gate" tag every scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal
When the CIA director has his AOL account "hacked", it is a demonstration of his utter incompetence, not "doxing". And the inability of top government officials to control even their own, valuable private information is politically highly significant, given how much information the US federal government is increasingly collecting about us: detailed financial and banking information, medical records, detailed census information, and lots more.
JFK doxed Nixon a couple of times back in the 1960 campaign. You can look it up.
I don't like the word 'doxing'. To me it looks like it would be pronounced d'oh-xing. I prefer doxxing. Who's with me?
The CIA wants to read my email, know what websites I visit, etc. turn about is fair play.
that's such an ignorant comment! Everybody knows that CIA is prohibited from taking action on domestic soil and can only work in foreign countries.
But how could this cause any damage to anyone? Surely, they have nothing to fear if they have nothing to hide, right? It offends me when the CIA, some media or anyone else behaves as if a) this is a serious problem and b) we should give anything more than 0 shits.
When the CIA director has his AOL account "hacked", it is a demonstration of his utter incompetence, not "doxing".
This is an excellent example, a departure point for discussion.
Per Bruce's article:
The CIA director did nothing wrong. He didn't choose a lousy password. He didn't leave a copy of it lying around. He didn't even send it in e-mail to the wrong person. The security failure, according to this account, was entirely with Verizon and AOL. Yet still Brennan's e-mail was leaked to the press and posted on WikiLeaks.
Also, unlike a certain presidential hopeful, Brennan didn't have any CIA sensitive information in his personal E-mail. It was simply personal stuff about him, nothing that compromised security.
And yet, internet sheep immediately jump to a conclusion of "incompetence", a charge that would ordinarily haunt a person in future job prospects for the rest of their life.
One obvious step would be to hold the providers accountable for security failures.
Awesome book. Also highly recommend two of his other works, "The Sheep Look Up" and "Stand on Zanzibar", if you liked "The Shockwave Rider".
"CIA wants to read my email, know what websites I visit" If this was actually true the perpetrator would have been in custody the minute he touched anything to do with the Director of the CIA. With all the magical powers attributed to the NSA and CIA in regards to capturing electronic information how could any one get away with hacking anything to do with the government? I mean supposedly the government is analyzing all the internet traffic in real time and sending out kill squads to deal with the violators.
If you believe that "the powerful" won't implement a countermeasure that makes us all regret the doxing, you're a moron.
I already regret it. This doxing is just one more reason for good people to avoid public office. There are reasons that many of our leaders are narcissistic sociopaths, and by driving away good people, this is just making it worse.
There are plenty of reasons for people to hack into politician's email. Doxing is one of them, but so is investigating wrong doing. Sometimes searching for the wrong doing can lead to bashing. People can get caught early, or have access to the "other" mail server and just dump for their 5 minutes of fame. Is that Doxing? *shrug* I think that depends on intent, and in most cases no.
Yeah, this guy tells us what security people have been saying for more than a quarter of a century. How can the rest of us cash in on this scam of repeating common knowledge and making money?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Agree. Even further on that point, I think Schneier's statement at the end of TFS is wishful thinking.
He says: "In the end, doxing is a tactic that the powerless can effectively use against the powerful."
But in fact it's more likely that doxing (as with other political takedown tactics) will be a tactic that the already powerful can effectively use against the the newly, moderately, or inconveniently powerful.
So it is indeed a bad time to be a good person running for office, especially if you're also trying to shake things up and actually do some good.
Nothing posted to
awesome !
best way to mobilize politicians. They'll finally understand why cryptography, privacy are important !
You forgot: (5) Live too long.
Socially acceptable behaviour changes over time in unpredictable ways. 10-20 years ago a mildly homophobic comment would have drawn no notice today you would get drummed out of office. Go back another decade or two and casual sexism was socially acceptable. People's, and society's, view of what is ok changes with time something become taboo and others become more accepted.
That law enforcement and security agents seem to believe that they are the guards in the panopticon, when in fact they're just another prisoner.