[cap-talk] Correlating Bitfrost with Threats

[James A. Donald]

McGeer, Patrick C wrote:
> Government is *never*, in and of itself, a customer.
 >
 > It is an agent acting on behalf the people, deriving its authority 
from them.  The customer is the people, and the customer needs 
protection from the abuses of its agent.

I doubt that many of Ivan Krstić's customers plausibly fit that description.

Look.  Ivan Krstić is selling to gangs of criminals, who reasonably and 
rightly want their computers, that they paid for, to be secure against 
other gangs of criminals, and also want their computers to be secure 
against the end user.  And they also want to see the end user's data 
that the end user stores on the customer's computer.

Right conduct starts with doing what you are paid for and delivering 
what you said you will deliver.  The people who are paying the bills may 
well be paying with stolen money, but what they are paying for is 
software that makes them secure, not the end user secure.   The right 
and honorable thing is to deliver to them what they pay for, regardless 
of how they got their money.  If Ivan Krstić was delivering software to 
the end users, *then* he would have a duty to make the end users secure 
against their government.

If the end user wants liberty, he can buy his own @#$%^&* computer.  If 
a criminal gang gives you a computer, you can expect that there are 
strings attached.   As the US discovered in Iraq, liberty is too 
valuable to be given away.  Freedom cannot be free.