What's Really Up with the Few Geeks' Boycott of the RSA?

The Washington Post has a breathless story of a boycott of the RSA meeting by six -- oh wait, cross that out, now it's eight security researchers!

My comment:

It's important to ask several things here.

First, is it true? This article has enough caveats that we don't know if it is. Certainly an ethics-free hacker who stole his colleagues' passport and 1.7 million documents and leaked them may not be the best judge of other people's ethics and their ramifications.

Second, who says a company can't follow customer requirements. If the NSA made a request and paid for the job, why can't the vendor provide the service requested? I'm also failing to see why this then constitutes undermining of all encryption standards everywhere, even given RSA's lion sized role. Aren't the crypto kids now advising to move to 2048 instead of 1024 bits now as an antidote? Nothing lasts forever in software, the dog barks, the caravan moves on.

NIST openly looks at open standards with all these self-same boycotting members involved if they like. Why are we only hearing from them after this enormous active measure called "Edward Snowden"?

Christian Soghoian is a Soros fellow who specialized in years of tendentious study of the security issue from the guerilla or anarchist perspective commong to Aaron Swartz and Jacob Appelbaum. These people are a faction, not the center of the industry. Soghoian's first job in the private sector wasn't, oh, IBM or Intel or something, but the ACLU. He represents a movement, not science. That has to be taken into account in evaluating these people hysterical and sensational claims to the media.

Mikko Hypponen of Finland is also an activist-guru and TED talker whose positions consistently track the pro-Snowden, anti-American government perspective. These people are not so much interested in cybersecurity for governments and corporations as they are in creating a band of anarchists with outsized international clout that demands absolute encryption for themselves in defiance of law enforcement and maximum transparency and crippling of capacity for democratically-elected liberal governments. Take a closer look.

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AND import to probe into the journalist at Washpo writing this story -- in a paper now owned by a Silicon Valley titan Chris Huges with the agenda of serving Silicon Valley's industries (he's a Facebook millionaire):

Andrea Peterson covers technology policy for The Washington Post, with an emphasis on cybersecurity, consumer privacy, transparency, surveillance and open government. She also delves into the societal impacts of technology access and how innovation is intertwined with cultural development.

Andrea Peterson (@kansasalps) is one of the guys -- she's constantly high-fivin' it with all the nerds on Twitter and endorsing and retweeting and favouriting all the radical anarchist agenda, constantly.

A look at her stories confirms her tilt.

Then a look at her Twitter (she uses the same starry/galaxy Twitter wallpaper as a lot of the best anarchist hackers) lets you know she buys the Guardian wholesale

Her big story to ensure eternal crowd-pleasing of this crown, making her beloved by nerds is a profile of Steam's Gabe Newell.

*Swooon* as one of his fanboyz says.

She dutifully and admiringly retweets her like-minded colleague Ashcan, helper of Bart Gellman who helps felon Snowden leak his damaging secrets.

Like the best of the suck-up Silicon Valley journos that you would normally find at TechCrunch or Cnet or something, not the East Coast establishment newspaper, she publishes little blow jobs like this one.

I can't help thinking if you took more senior journalists like Jackson Diehl or Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor, or even Bob Woodward, experienced in covering real foreign news and real domestic politics, a story like this might get a very, very different take, and we might end some of this hysteria.

But that doesn't happen because owners and editors think old people don't understand technology, and there is some special awesomesauce to being a 20-something woman geeking out with the geeks that helps "understand" these stories.

Um, there's not.

As someone named "plombard" in the comments said, "is that eight out of 300-400 speakers boycotting? That's only 2.0 to 2.7%. Not all that many to justify a WaPo article. I wonder if it's the first time they've ever had cancellations."