Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
Since hindsight is always 20/20 the interference will never be arbitrary. The government can afford good enough lawyers to ensure that there was some reason for it. Just make something up but make sure it sounds good.
Alternatively, you could elect to not use your work e-mail for personal correspondence. Too radical?
I don't buy into that separation of work and home junk. Corporate masters know EXACTLY what they're doing with those policies, and it's not just covering their legal angles.
Communication is a basic human function just like using the toilet. Does your company provide toilet facilities only to hang a sign on the door saying,"Only to be used for the processing of water and food consumed at lunchtime"?
Ideally: no one uses work e-mail for anything but slave-driven work. REALITY: The CEO has no qualms about getting the grocery list on his work account, why should anyone else?
As other point is that you accept TOS form a provider of a service, and you can allways refuse to sign such a contract
That's another cop out. If the corporations have their way we would all be signing our lives over with the simple click of an EULA. You cannot refuse to sign such a contract because the prevailing trend is to make these contracts ubiquitous. In the (not so far off) future your only option, aside from signing the contract, will be complete and utter destitute homelessness.
I doubt someone will hunt you down for writing love letters or greetings to someone.
That's not what it's about. It's about amusement. Jocks vs. nerds. Rich vs. poor. Supremacists vs. tolarants. etc. etc. etc. Legality has nothing to do with it. If you carry any views which are different from those of someone who is more powerful than you then you are potentially a target of harassment. It's not paranoia. It's a fact of human behavior which has millions of examples throughout the ages.
Jimmy Swaggart touched me and I have SEEN THE LIGHT.
Ideally, I'm a libertarian (with a small l). I really do want to see government get so small that I need a magnifying glass more powerful than the one I use when I play with myself to find them. I want government so small that they can fit on the head of a pin and still have room for a thousand angels.
But let's face reality. Big government is here. Big government, over the course of the year, will consume better than 60% of your paycheck through one hidden tax or fee or another. Big government is not getting any smaller and big government cares less than Slim Shady about what you think. Big government is going to continue to do whatever it feels like no matter who you vote for because both major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, profit enormously from big government. That is a FACT and there are no pretty words that can ever change it.
Let's also consider what would happen without big government. Without big government, the big industries would have you sign your life away with the click of an EULA. Without big government your bank would have you agree to sign over your life savings to them with every deposit in some microscopic font at the bottom of the page on the agreement for your savings account. Without big government your employer would own ALL your thoughts with the signing of an employee agreement and even McDonald's would have one. Without big government your only option (other than submitting to your corporate owners) would be complete and utter destitute homelessness.
So why fight it any more? There's nothing that can be done. Happily embrace your government overlords. Freely give up all of your human rights.
Besides... if you don't like it... you can always leave the country, right?
That is the most ignorant point of view possible in this topic. It's not about you. Get over yourself. It's about people who might be interested in you. Do you want to take the chance that someone with political power the likes of which you can't even comprehend is going to take an interest in you? And not that they just take an interest in you, but that they're going to find amusement in exercising their political power just to run you in circles? Just to drive you nuts?
The KKK used to think it was fun to go spook a bunch of black people. People around WW-II used to think it was fun to chase Asians around. Jocks think it's fun to chase geeks around. Bullies can spend all day chasing a target just because it's fun. In today's society, it's just flat out amusing for the rich and powerful to chase the lesser priveleged around.
Perhaps you are secure and cannot be taunted or chased. But who are you to make the decision to let loose the wolves on every other American?
I dont understand why everyone is so concerned about telecommunications and internet communications being tapped
You've never been a target of harassment, have you? I would love to have the power to tap your lines. Do you know how easy it would be to drive you crazy?
And why would I want to do this? Because your tax dollars pay all my bills and I'm BORED. It would be amusing as anything in the world just to watch you go crazy.
You don't think it happens, do you? For your sake I hope you never have to find out. In the mean time, I'll start collecting information for the game.
I know, I know, the oversight commitee will be corrupt, right? (I think that they make pills to ease paranoia)
It has nothing to do with paranoia. People will naturally use any available power to better their own life. Recognizing that oversight committies are not saintly organizations is the first step in clear, logical thinking.
I do understand, however, that delusion is much easier for most people to live in. You derive a large amount of smug self-satisfaction by labeling others as "paranoid" and thus justifying to yourself that you are better than they are.
so they can't just tap into you for no reason at all
That's the arguable point. They can tap you for no reason at all. They just can't do anything official with it.
Where's the "This is bad because" deal?
It's not about catching bad guys or fighting crime. It's about harassment. You're not like them. They are not like you. Look back over history. People with power derive buttloads of amusement from watching plain citizens get run in circles. It's _FUN_ to drive somebody nuts. It is much easier to drive someone nuts if you can wiretap them.
Actually, that's pretty much what the US did. It asked the Taliban to extradite Bin Laden or else. The Taliban said no, and the US answered "OK, then else." War followed.
Yeah... I think the sticking point was "Can you please provide any real evidence why you're asking for this man's head, or are you just a bunch of numbskulls on a witchhunt?"
And, as the US Federal Government likes to prove on a regular basis, they're just a bunch of numbskulls on a witchhunt.
Every time we did not effectively respond to this terrorist group made them think that America was a paper tiger and further emboldened them
Cry me a river. I suppose the US has _NEVER_ done anything wrong? I suppose the UN should pass a motion which grants US corporations the equivalent of a world patent on hamstringing the competition and milking foreign people for every drop of slaving blood that they're worth?
There are legitimate reasons why the US gets targeted. It's not always a mindless bloodthirsty unprovoked event.
Jimmy Swaggart touched me and I have SEEN THE LIGHT.
Ideally, I'm a libertarian (with a small l). I really do want to see government get so small that I need a magnifying glass more powerful than the one I use when I play with myself to find them. I want government so small that they can fit on the head of a pin and still have room for a thousand angels.
But let's face reality. Big government is here. Big government, over the course of the year, will consume better than 60% of your paycheck through one hidden tax or fee or another. Big government is not getting any smaller and big government cares less than Slim Shady about what you think. Big government is going to continue to do whatever it feels like no matter who you vote for because both major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, profit enormously from big government. That is a FACT and there are no pretty words that can ever change it.
Let's also consider what would happen without big government. Without big government, the big industries would have you sign your life away with the click of an EULA. Without big government your bank would have you agree to sign over your life savings to them with every deposit in some microscopic font at the bottom of the page on the agreement for your savings account. Without big government your employer would own ALL your thoughts with the signing of an employee agreement and even McDonald's would have one. Without big government your only option (other than submitting to your corporate owners) would be complete and utter destitute homelessness.
So why fight it any more? There's nothing that can be done. Happily embrace your government overlords. Freely give up all of your human rights.
Besides... if you don't like it... you can always leave the country, right?
Exploit frameworks are very flexible, as opposed to hardcoded exploit scripts
Six months of semi-devoted development on any hardcoded script will result in a framework for something. It'd be nothing short of humiliating if they didn't turn it into a framework with some additional functionality.
We concluded that this encompasses both voice calls and text calls, including Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging calls, to wireless phone numbers
Yet it's still perfectly legal for salesmen to call my home telephone?
Keep in mind, that CANVAS has an entire compiler and gas-compatable assembler into it
That's true. I forgot about it as I was posting on this weary Friday afternoon. That's a fairly admirable feature. Most exploited *NIX machines will have a compiler but offering a compiler to an exploited Win32 machine is a good touch.
and we fund and support two other GPL projects
There a + in my perception. I'm still having problems with the glamour shots...
Our exploit code is all custom written by Immunity
Have you properly been able to circumvent ps and the task manager? Are those 0-day vulns or custom implementations of known vulns?
but let me just say that cutting and pasting is certainly something that is not a part of our development process
Okay. I admit I was being a bit of a/. troll but it really was the glamour shots and the lack of professionalism in the paper which made my stomach lurch.
I left programming for medicinal chemistry after my first year of college because I didn't want to end up hating computers by becoming a code monkey in some database factory. I'm looking forward to the day when "systems security expert" is a legitimate job description and not equated with "paranoid freak" or "reformed script kiddie".
It is, however, nearly impossible to retain the services of an attorney to present it to a court of law. It is also impossible to convince local authorities to take you as an individual citizen seriously should you try to report such an incident.
Yet another region of law where only large corporations have any chance of achieving enforcement.
Security lists have many "elite" and "old school" style posters and groups that present situations, exploits, and bug reports.
Industry respected security lists are not plagued with this sort of juvenile rubbish. The worst it gets is moronic abbreviations (u 4 b, etc.) and people still use handles over their birth names. The only places that you see leet-speak is when people are screwing around on IRC or on fringe security sites where wannabes try to make up for their lack of proficiency. Respected security lists make professional presentations of factual material.
So the only question is, how much was this guy paid, and how tasty was the Kool-Aid?
That's exactly what left a knot in my stomach. I've seen comparable parody writings out of sixth graders. So at the end of the day we have four guys with the combined mentality of a sixth grader purporting to be computer security specialists and pimping out a GTK interface to a python script as a security analysis tool.
It's no wonder that real computer security specialists aren't taken seriously by corporations. Our front men are script kiddies.
I wasn't particularly impressed. First it was the glamor shots of the employees, then the pie chart and the 0 in ownership. I guess I'm starting to get old when I expected to see something marginally professional from people have their own Incorporated entity.
Computer security enthusiasts will never achieve any measure of professional acceptance as long as script kiddies somehow manage to form business organizations. It reeks like the Joker from Batman.
What is CANVAS but a GUI over a database of known exploit code... written as a python script? Did these guys really write anything or just c/p the whole thing together?
Any small victory that we win against big government will be ruthlessly exploited by big industry long before the resulting freedoms can benefit individual Americans
This is the crux of my argument. What freedom could we as a people hope to win for ourselves that wouldn't be used by big corporations first to increase their profit margins? Unless we continue to empower big government then big industry will turn us all into indentured serfs in no time. As individuals we cannot afford the same privelege of law that big industry can.
Say we identify an area of infringement where big government is abusing it's power. If we win that freedom we as citizens may sit more comfortably in our chairs on our patios but BIG INDUSTRY will be actively looking at ways to use that freedom to suck more money from us at the cash register. We cannot fight that.
Unless you have a magic plan to fix everything overnight then any freedom we whittle from the government will be whittled from us by the industry.
And I think the mental images of communism
Any society in which the government controls, directly or indirectly, greater than 50% of the movement of assets is communism. In such a system the CONTROLLING MAJORITY is governmental. The citizens no longer have a controlling majority. The definition of democracy is, according to www.m-w.com, a government system in which the ultimate authority rests in the citizens. We do not have the ultimate authority. Argue about voting all you like--democrats and republicans are two sides of the same bread and third parties have no chance of breaking the collective stranglehold. Look at the size of our federal budget compared with our GNP and tell me honestly that we don't have a communist society.
Free-market capitalism with thousands upon thousands of government rules and regulations is communism. That's reality. That's the nation we live in. That's the result of all the pomp and display that you see on television when Kerry and Bush get up to give their meaningless speeches. At the end of the year the only true fact is that a larger percentage of your paycheck will end up being spent by someone else who has no real interest in you but seeks to line the pockets of their own powerful allies.
Metasploit gives you the chance to get the access that you would need to install
That's what I was alluding to. Previously someone had to c/p code together to get the job down. Now metasploit does it for you. Big deal? If anything metasploit allows us to shake the public out of their delusion that it takes some immense amount of skill to pull this off. Any sufficiently motivated first year programming student could put it together. The impression that cracking a computer was a realm of supreme skill and ability was holding back the public acceptance. Their own ignorance was their safety shield and their justification for labeling true computer security enthusiasts as paranoid.
Metasploit is the red pill for the matrix. No longer can the public put their head in the sand and deny how easy it is to take complete control of another system.
I don't see this as increasing the abilities of script kiddies. They've been using rootkits for years. If anything their numbers may increase by 10%. The more important effect, in my opinion, is to dispel the public's self-imposed ignorance about the probability that this happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks
Since hindsight is always 20/20 the interference will never be arbitrary. The government can afford good enough lawyers to ensure that there was some reason for it. Just make something up but make sure it sounds good.
Alternatively, you could elect to not use your work e-mail for personal correspondence. Too radical?
I don't buy into that separation of work and home junk. Corporate masters know EXACTLY what they're doing with those policies, and it's not just covering their legal angles.
Communication is a basic human function just like using the toilet. Does your company provide toilet facilities only to hang a sign on the door saying,"Only to be used for the processing of water and food consumed at lunchtime"?
Ideally: no one uses work e-mail for anything but slave-driven work. REALITY: The CEO has no qualms about getting the grocery list on his work account, why should anyone else?
As other point is that you accept TOS form a provider of a service, and you can allways refuse to sign such a contract
That's another cop out. If the corporations have their way we would all be signing our lives over with the simple click of an EULA. You cannot refuse to sign such a contract because the prevailing trend is to make these contracts ubiquitous. In the (not so far off) future your only option, aside from signing the contract, will be complete and utter destitute homelessness.
I doubt someone will hunt you down for writing love letters or greetings to someone.
That's not what it's about. It's about amusement. Jocks vs. nerds. Rich vs. poor. Supremacists vs. tolarants. etc. etc. etc. Legality has nothing to do with it. If you carry any views which are different from those of someone who is more powerful than you then you are potentially a target of harassment. It's not paranoia. It's a fact of human behavior which has millions of examples throughout the ages.
Jimmy Swaggart touched me and I have SEEN THE LIGHT.
Ideally, I'm a libertarian (with a small l). I really do want to see government get so small that I need a magnifying glass more powerful than the one I use when I play with myself to find them. I want government so small that they can fit on the head of a pin and still have room for a thousand angels.
But let's face reality. Big government is here. Big government, over the course of the year, will consume better than 60% of your paycheck through one hidden tax or fee or another. Big government is not getting any smaller and big government cares less than Slim Shady about what you think. Big government is going to continue to do whatever it feels like no matter who you vote for because both major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, profit enormously from big government. That is a FACT and there are no pretty words that can ever change it.
Let's also consider what would happen without big government. Without big government, the big industries would have you sign your life away with the click of an EULA. Without big government your bank would have you agree to sign over your life savings to them with every deposit in some microscopic font at the bottom of the page on the agreement for your savings account. Without big government your employer would own ALL your thoughts with the signing of an employee agreement and even McDonald's would have one. Without big government your only option (other than submitting to your corporate owners) would be complete and utter destitute homelessness.
So why fight it any more? There's nothing that can be done. Happily embrace your government overlords. Freely give up all of your human rights.
Besides... if you don't like it... you can always leave the country, right?
Dumbass, I was agreeing with him using a technique called "sarcasm".
If you got nothing to hide
That is the most ignorant point of view possible in this topic. It's not about you. Get over yourself. It's about people who might be interested in you. Do you want to take the chance that someone with political power the likes of which you can't even comprehend is going to take an interest in you? And not that they just take an interest in you, but that they're going to find amusement in exercising their political power just to run you in circles? Just to drive you nuts?
The KKK used to think it was fun to go spook a bunch of black people. People around WW-II used to think it was fun to chase Asians around. Jocks think it's fun to chase geeks around. Bullies can spend all day chasing a target just because it's fun. In today's society, it's just flat out amusing for the rich and powerful to chase the lesser priveleged around.
Perhaps you are secure and cannot be taunted or chased. But who are you to make the decision to let loose the wolves on every other American?
I dont understand why everyone is so concerned about telecommunications and internet communications being tapped
You've never been a target of harassment, have you? I would love to have the power to tap your lines. Do you know how easy it would be to drive you crazy?
And why would I want to do this? Because your tax dollars pay all my bills and I'm BORED. It would be amusing as anything in the world just to watch you go crazy.
You don't think it happens, do you? For your sake I hope you never have to find out. In the mean time, I'll start collecting information for the game.
And it's no small surprise that you were modded "troll". We can't have people like you upsetting this delicate social order.
As soon as the government governs without the consent of the people, and the people say NO MORE then the government legally has no power
That's a real good joke. Ideally, you're right. Now, back to reality, when the people say "NO MORE" that's when they become inmates.
I know, I know, the oversight commitee will be corrupt, right? (I think that they make pills to ease paranoia)
It has nothing to do with paranoia. People will naturally use any available power to better their own life. Recognizing that oversight committies are not saintly organizations is the first step in clear, logical thinking.
I do understand, however, that delusion is much easier for most people to live in. You derive a large amount of smug self-satisfaction by labeling others as "paranoid" and thus justifying to yourself that you are better than they are.
so they can't just tap into you for no reason at all
That's the arguable point. They can tap you for no reason at all. They just can't do anything official with it.
Where's the "This is bad because" deal?
It's not about catching bad guys or fighting crime. It's about harassment. You're not like them. They are not like you. Look back over history. People with power derive buttloads of amusement from watching plain citizens get run in circles. It's _FUN_ to drive somebody nuts. It is much easier to drive someone nuts if you can wiretap them.
Actually, that's pretty much what the US did. It asked the Taliban to extradite Bin Laden or else. The Taliban said no, and the US answered "OK, then else." War followed.
Yeah... I think the sticking point was "Can you please provide any real evidence why you're asking for this man's head, or are you just a bunch of numbskulls on a witchhunt?"
And, as the US Federal Government likes to prove on a regular basis, they're just a bunch of numbskulls on a witchhunt.
Every time we did not effectively respond to this terrorist group made them think that America was a paper tiger and further emboldened them
Cry me a river. I suppose the US has _NEVER_ done anything wrong? I suppose the UN should pass a motion which grants US corporations the equivalent of a world patent on hamstringing the competition and milking foreign people for every drop of slaving blood that they're worth?
There are legitimate reasons why the US gets targeted. It's not always a mindless bloodthirsty unprovoked event.
What are you trying to hide Mr. Terrorist? :-)
Jimmy Swaggart touched me and I have SEEN THE LIGHT.
Ideally, I'm a libertarian (with a small l). I really do want to see government get so small that I need a magnifying glass more powerful than the one I use when I play with myself to find them. I want government so small that they can fit on the head of a pin and still have room for a thousand angels.
But let's face reality. Big government is here. Big government, over the course of the year, will consume better than 60% of your paycheck through one hidden tax or fee or another. Big government is not getting any smaller and big government cares less than Slim Shady about what you think. Big government is going to continue to do whatever it feels like no matter who you vote for because both major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, profit enormously from big government. That is a FACT and there are no pretty words that can ever change it.
Let's also consider what would happen without big government. Without big government, the big industries would have you sign your life away with the click of an EULA. Without big government your bank would have you agree to sign over your life savings to them with every deposit in some microscopic font at the bottom of the page on the agreement for your savings account. Without big government your employer would own ALL your thoughts with the signing of an employee agreement and even McDonald's would have one. Without big government your only option (other than submitting to your corporate owners) would be complete and utter destitute homelessness.
So why fight it any more? There's nothing that can be done. Happily embrace your government overlords. Freely give up all of your human rights.
Besides... if you don't like it... you can always leave the country, right?
Exploit frameworks are very flexible, as opposed to hardcoded exploit scripts
Six months of semi-devoted development on any hardcoded script will result in a framework for something. It'd be nothing short of humiliating if they didn't turn it into a framework with some additional functionality.
We concluded that this encompasses both voice calls and text calls, including Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging calls, to wireless phone numbers
Yet it's still perfectly legal for salesmen to call my home telephone?
The telemarketing lobby must be getting slow.
Keep in mind, that CANVAS has an entire compiler and gas-compatable assembler into it
/. troll but it really was the glamour shots and the lack of professionalism in the paper which made my stomach lurch.
That's true. I forgot about it as I was posting on this weary Friday afternoon. That's a fairly admirable feature. Most exploited *NIX machines will have a compiler but offering a compiler to an exploited Win32 machine is a good touch.
and we fund and support two other GPL projects
There a + in my perception. I'm still having problems with the glamour shots...
Our exploit code is all custom written by Immunity
Have you properly been able to circumvent ps and the task manager? Are those 0-day vulns or custom implementations of known vulns?
but let me just say that cutting and pasting is certainly something that is not a part of our development process
Okay. I admit I was being a bit of a
I left programming for medicinal chemistry after my first year of college because I didn't want to end up hating computers by becoming a code monkey in some database factory. I'm looking forward to the day when "systems security expert" is a legitimate job description and not equated with "paranoid freak" or "reformed script kiddie".
This isn't complicated
It is, however, nearly impossible to retain the services of an attorney to present it to a court of law. It is also impossible to convince local authorities to take you as an individual citizen seriously should you try to report such an incident.
Yet another region of law where only large corporations have any chance of achieving enforcement.
Security lists have many "elite" and "old school" style posters and groups that present situations, exploits, and bug reports.
Industry respected security lists are not plagued with this sort of juvenile rubbish. The worst it gets is moronic abbreviations (u 4 b, etc.) and people still use handles over their birth names. The only places that you see leet-speak is when people are screwing around on IRC or on fringe security sites where wannabes try to make up for their lack of proficiency. Respected security lists make professional presentations of factual material.
So the only question is, how much was this guy paid, and how tasty was the Kool-Aid?
That's exactly what left a knot in my stomach. I've seen comparable parody writings out of sixth graders. So at the end of the day we have four guys with the combined mentality of a sixth grader purporting to be computer security specialists and pimping out a GTK interface to a python script as a security analysis tool.
It's no wonder that real computer security specialists aren't taken seriously by corporations. Our front men are script kiddies.
I wasn't particularly impressed. First it was the glamor shots of the employees, then the pie chart and the 0 in ownership. I guess I'm starting to get old when I expected to see something marginally professional from people have their own Incorporated entity.
Computer security enthusiasts will never achieve any measure of professional acceptance as long as script kiddies somehow manage to form business organizations. It reeks like the Joker from Batman.
What is CANVAS but a GUI over a database of known exploit code... written as a python script? Did these guys really write anything or just c/p the whole thing together?
Most people just assume that if it has no horrible hacks, is formatted ok, and has some documentation, then it is good code
Typically that's all it really takes and it still astounds me how so many college-educated programmers can't even keep up this level of good code.
From my original post:
Any small victory that we win against big government will be ruthlessly exploited by big industry long before the resulting freedoms can benefit individual Americans
This is the crux of my argument. What freedom could we as a people hope to win for ourselves that wouldn't be used by big corporations first to increase their profit margins? Unless we continue to empower big government then big industry will turn us all into indentured serfs in no time. As individuals we cannot afford the same privelege of law that big industry can.
Say we identify an area of infringement where big government is abusing it's power. If we win that freedom we as citizens may sit more comfortably in our chairs on our patios but BIG INDUSTRY will be actively looking at ways to use that freedom to suck more money from us at the cash register. We cannot fight that.
Unless you have a magic plan to fix everything overnight then any freedom we whittle from the government will be whittled from us by the industry.
And I think the mental images of communism
Any society in which the government controls, directly or indirectly, greater than 50% of the movement of assets is communism. In such a system the CONTROLLING MAJORITY is governmental. The citizens no longer have a controlling majority. The definition of democracy is, according to www.m-w.com, a government system in which the ultimate authority rests in the citizens. We do not have the ultimate authority. Argue about voting all you like--democrats and republicans are two sides of the same bread and third parties have no chance of breaking the collective stranglehold. Look at the size of our federal budget compared with our GNP and tell me honestly that we don't have a communist society.
Free-market capitalism with thousands upon thousands of government rules and regulations is communism. That's reality. That's the nation we live in. That's the result of all the pomp and display that you see on television when Kerry and Bush get up to give their meaningless speeches. At the end of the year the only true fact is that a larger percentage of your paycheck will end up being spent by someone else who has no real interest in you but seeks to line the pockets of their own powerful allies.
Metasploit gives you the chance to get the access that you would need to install
That's what I was alluding to. Previously someone had to c/p code together to get the job down. Now metasploit does it for you. Big deal? If anything metasploit allows us to shake the public out of their delusion that it takes some immense amount of skill to pull this off. Any sufficiently motivated first year programming student could put it together. The impression that cracking a computer was a realm of supreme skill and ability was holding back the public acceptance. Their own ignorance was their safety shield and their justification for labeling true computer security enthusiasts as paranoid.
Metasploit is the red pill for the matrix. No longer can the public put their head in the sand and deny how easy it is to take complete control of another system.
I don't see this as increasing the abilities of script kiddies. They've been using rootkits for years. If anything their numbers may increase by 10%. The more important effect, in my opinion, is to dispel the public's self-imposed ignorance about the probability that this happens.