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Friday June 20, 2008

Bear Stearns’ Knuckleheads & the Future of the Future

Here’s an article addressing the Bear Stearns debauchle and how e-mail played a roll in Cioffi and Tannin’s undoing.

I was talking to my wife about this last night… I can’t believe that these two boneheads were capable enough to leverage the kind of money and power they were privvy to and still manage to lack the common sense to encrypt their emails when discussing private and sensitive matters. As much as this sub-prime blow out should disturb anyone with any interest in the national and world markets, these folks total lack of discretion (not to mention reprehensible ethics and respect for their fellow human beings and clients) should send a signal of clear and approaching fucking catastrophe in the near future.

If Cioffi and Tannin’s complete ignorance about the visibility of e-mail - or complete disregard - is any indication of how many of this world’s top power players conduct themselves electronically it should be clear that those who want the world’s most valuable secrets probably already have them.

As of late we’ve been hammered over the head about China’s electronic espionage, but if you think China exists alone on that frontier you’re nuts. Every world power, every organized crime syndicate, every corporation and public and private body is either involved or about to be involved in this gaping wound of the invisible world we all inhabit, though only few have woken up into.

It’s high time that everyone take the time and interest to understand these silicon based machines which dominate nearly every aspect of our lives and demand that same level of interest and accountability from each person they conduct business and personal affairs with. Continuing to ignore the physics of the invisible world of information will soon prove to be as ill conceived and radioactive as when, back in the day, lunkheads used to make dinnerware from uranium.

Wake up folks, we’s in the future.

Consciousness, Politics, Technology, The Weird — Tags: , , , , — Viking Brian @ 9:36 am


7 Comments »

  1. The leading job requirement to be a banker is a proclivity for saying “Why not?” when presented with a retarded-ass idea. The good old days of bankers lending fractional reserves on interest–the three-yard scrimmage and some dust approach to profit–has been replaced with this madmen pirate mark-to-model pump-and-dump collateralized socialized-risk complex derivatives world, i.e., snorting coke and screwing the cheerleaders under the bleachers while your linebackers are in the parking lot slashing tires. They don’t need to understand email security because the way they operate is just accepted business practice for the banking elite. That’s why it’s not encrypted. Hell, I have seen email boxes where guys would spend all day sending out porn from their work address. It’s not like IT doesn’t know that. Do you think if they encrypted it that would stop the SEC from charging them? Of course not, they’ll just run a decryption on it, they’re a gov’t body, they’ve got all the time in the world.

    Compare this with the Bush administration, which routinely sent offical intraoffice communications via Yahoo addresses. Now that’s hiding in public.

    Comment by nathan — Friday June 20, 2008 @ 10:56 am

  2. So in the Godfather 4, there will be an IT guy?

    Comment by HotKarl — Friday June 20, 2008 @ 11:37 am

  3. I agree the SEC could crunch the numbers on the encryption and probably break it eventually, or just, much easier, subpoena their passwords. My point is not the SEC, but all the other people who may take an interest in a banker, CEO, doctor, lawyer, shrink, priest, prostitute, etc. and their information. Corporate, insurance and interpersonal espionage is already rampant and it’s going to get bigger. It’s time that people start holding one another to a higher standard of conduct (of both information security and ethics (the former is at least measurable and slightly achievable)). And just because information can be subpoenaed isn’t an excuse to be lazy otherwise.

    And while I’m on a rant here encryption should extend well beyond e-mail. Both Vista and OSX 10.5 have native full disk encryption that should be used by everyone, period. For earlier OSes and thumb drives, etc. TrueCrypt is a great and free solution.

    Comment by Viking Brian — Friday June 20, 2008 @ 11:40 am

  4. I don’t mean to come off on as antagonistic. I’m just saying, the idea of privacy isn’t even well-precedented legally–it might just be a passing fad in human sentiment. 300 years ago no one even used the word “privacy” because it was just assumed tacitly and, more importantly, no one had cameras. It wasn’t until newspapers got photographers that it became an issue–but even then the legal system never really formalized anything about it, save things that were assumed already, like doctor-patient and attorney-client and confessor-confessee.

    Being a freak pretending to be a white-collar square, I for one don’t like the way this is headed, since at a moment’s notice someone can feasibly pull up all sorts of information about you. It’s like Facebook–if you “break up” with someone it notifies everyone? Why, so your fucking vulture friends can swoop in? Early adopters have a strange tendency to accept the vicissitudes of technology without examination or modification. And likewise most people don’t understand the need to establish legal protections and precedents. I mean I don’t care if the IT guys know that an ex-girlfriend sent me 26 emails full of lurid details in half an hour because I was at work later than I expected. And I don’t anticipate my supervisor or department heads ever finding out. But quite possibly they could, quite easily, and that’s the problem.

    The other question is, who is running interpersonal espionage? Why is it considered okay? Why post something embarassing? At home the lady checks up on her teenage cousins for her aunts, and like you all pointed out on the Cory Doctorow show, kids are going to start seeing technology as a control technique rather than liberating one.

    I don’t have any solutions.

    Comment by nathan — Friday June 20, 2008 @ 1:05 pm

  5. Yeah, I don’t know that I consider interpersonal espionage “okay” at all, nor, for that matter, do I really consider many things people do in the name of living “okay”. Most things I see people doing and most ways I see people chosing to live their lives I find pretty appauling - and that is on all sides of the cultural spectrum.

    But no matter what my personal view on the world is, folks will go their own way and, should I chose to live amongst these people, I need to accept their world view as having as much of an impact on me - and most likely more - than my own choices about how I live in the world. Depressing? Possibly. Challenging? Totally. It keeps a brother on his toes methinks.

    All of this brings up a very interesting question: What is the value of living with a set of personal ethics if no one else shares them and in fact indulges in the contrary?

    I have no solutions either. On most days that seems like a good thing.

    Comment by Viking Brian — Friday June 20, 2008 @ 3:16 pm

  6. having no solution and doing whatcha do… the self evident solution.

    Comment by HotKarl — Sunday June 22, 2008 @ 12:39 am

  7. I don’t mean to take the hippie-dippy route on this one, but i’ve been wondering for a while now if all this internet stuff is our way of teaching ourselves we’re all connected already.

    Which by the way does not mean i’m going to throw all my deep dark secrets online for all to see, but it seems like no matter how hard we try, we’re getting more and more connected. In fact, a large majority of Generation Y seems to deeply enjoy letting the entire world know every last gruesome detail of their lives on facebook, myspace, twitter, loopt, etc.

    Comment by True — Tuesday June 24, 2008 @ 4:58 pm

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