Perilocity

Our Friend Unfairly Maligned in London's Court

Many of you are concerned as am I about our friend who has been hauled into court in London and unfairly maligned for the "crime" of distributing some government communications that he got from an anonymous source. I know our friend also has been a bit playful out of wedlock, and even had a son that way, but I don't see what that has to do with the matter at hand.

Our friend represented his agency in the matter of procuring and forwarding the communications "as a public act, dealing with the public correspondence of public men." His accusers were having none of it:

Into what companies will the fabricator of this iniquity hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or with any semblance of the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye &em; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. Having hitherto aspired after fame by his writings, he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters...

His accusers made him out to be a vindictive destroyer of public confidence. He had "forfeited all the respect of societies and of men" and was not a gentleman, rather a common thief.

I am happy to hear our friend has been released by the court in London, although two days later he was fired from his job as deputy postmaster general of North America.

Data, Reputation, and Certification Against Spam

I'm giving a talk today at the Internet2 workshop on Collaborative Data-Driven Security for High Performance Networks at WUSTL, St. Louis, MO. You can follow along with the PDF.

There may be some twittering on #DDCSW.

-jsq

Availability Is Not Security If an Abandoned Sea Anchor Cut the Cable?

I see in some fora people are still arguing that security involves countering malicious actors, and availability alone is not security, even if people are depending on availabity.

Were all those recent cable cuts in the Med. and the Persian Gulf not security issues, even though some of the affected companies are now planning to spend $300-400m on physical security to fix the problem?

If the culprit had been a Russian mobster or Al Qaeda or the CIA rather than (in one case) an abandoned ship anchor, then it would have been security, but now it's not?

-jsq