Sigal Samuel, The Atlantic;
"Even harder to sway may be those concerned not with the methodology’s
technical complications, but with its ethical complications. As Wildman
told me, “These models are equal-opportunity insight generators. If you
want to go militaristic, then these models tell you what the targets
should be.”...
Nevertheless, just like Wildman, Shults told me, “I lose sleep at night on this. ... It is
social engineering. It just is—there’s no pretending like it’s not.”
But he added that other groups, like Cambridge Analytica, are doing this
kind of computational work, too. And various bad actors will do it
without transparency or public accountability. “It’s going to be done.
So not doing it is not the answer.” Instead, he and Wildman believe the
answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it.
“That’s
why our work here is two-pronged: I’m operating as a modeler and as an
ethicist,” Wildman said. “It’s the best I can do.”"
Dylan Curran, The Guardian;
[Kip
Currier: I had a similar reaction to the author of this article when I
attended a truly eye-opening 4/20/18 American Bar Association (ABA) Intellectual Property Law Conference presentation,
"DarkNet: Enter at Your Own Risk. Inside the Digital Underworld". One of the presenters, Krista
Valenzuela with the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications
Integration Cell in West Trenton, New Jersey, did a live foray into the
Dark Web. The scope of illicit activities and goods witnessed in just
that brief demo was staggering and evoked a feeling that scenes of "black market" contraband and "bad actors" endemic to dystopian sci-fi fare like Blade Runner 2049 and Netflix's Altered Carbon are already part of the present-day real-world.]
"It’s fascinating to see how this community works together to take down “western” systems and derive chaos and profit from it. Typically, hackers in first-world countries are terrified to work together due to the multiplicative risk of a group being caught. In Russia, however, the authorities don’t seem to care that these hackers are wreaking havoc on the west. They are left to their own devices, and most users on this forum have been regular members for over six years.
A lot of the information on this forum is incredibly worrying, even if a lot of it is harmless 15-year-olds trying to be edgy and hack their friend’s phones. In any case, it’s important to know these communities exist. The dark underbelly of the internet isn’t going anywhere."
