http://emergentchaos.com/archives/2008/08/tsa-breaks-planes-and-a-link-to-infosec.html The Emergent Chaos Jazz Combo Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:20:40 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://emergentchaos.com/archives/2008/08/tsa-breaks-planes-and-a-link-to-infosec.html/comment-page-1#comment-4987 albatross Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:28:22 +0000 http://emergentchaos.com/?p=2872#comment-4987 I suspect one issue here might be defining the roles of the different people. TSA employees ought to be working out ways to get into planes in unauthorized ways, since that lets an attacker put a bomb on a plane without blowing himself up. But there's a place and time for penetration testing, and it's not on a safety-critical production system that's in use. Similarly, while it would be nice for someone from the FDA to work out what frequency and power of microwaves will mess up a pacemaker, the cardiac ward of the local hospital isn't the right place to go around testing the pacemaker-jamming gear. I suspect one issue here might be defining the roles of the different people. TSA employees ought to be working out ways to get into planes in unauthorized ways, since that lets an attacker put a bomb on a plane without blowing himself up. But there’s a place and time for penetration testing, and it’s not on a safety-critical production system that’s in use. Similarly, while it would be nice for someone from the FDA to work out what frequency and power of microwaves will mess up a pacemaker, the cardiac ward of the local hospital isn’t the right place to go around testing the pacemaker-jamming gear.

]]> http://emergentchaos.com/archives/2008/08/tsa-breaks-planes-and-a-link-to-infosec.html/comment-page-1#comment-4986 Jim Burrows Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:37:53 +0000 http://emergentchaos.com/?p=2872#comment-4986 So long as we believe that the definition of "safe" is "100% safe" and that anything else is "unsafe" and thus "in danger" and therefore a problem, we as a culture will do this sort of thing. This is important to us in many roles throughout our lives, as citizens, security professionals, engineers and designers, parents or teachers (professional and otherwise). We need to remind the world that, as democrats and thinkers from Pericles to Jefferson have said, a little loss, a little blood, is the price we pay for liberty and that liberty is what actually makes us safer. Think of it as an investment in the future. So long as we believe that the definition of “safe” is “100% safe” and that anything else is “unsafe” and thus “in danger” and therefore a problem, we as a culture will do this sort of thing. This is important to us in many roles throughout our lives, as citizens, security professionals, engineers and designers, parents or teachers (professional and otherwise).
We need to remind the world that, as democrats and thinkers from Pericles to Jefferson have said, a little loss, a little blood, is the price we pay for liberty and that liberty is what actually makes us safer. Think of it as an investment in the future.

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