Two news items today confirm the inadequacy of any security system made by man. After all, once a secret is out, it’s no longer secret.
We have the simple human error of losing something combined with the natural inquisitiveness of human beings. Both these absolute facts of life should drive a big hole through any plans for National ID Cards as a means of improving security!
What are they? Oh yes!
SAS
Some servant of the State has (again!) lost a laptop. This time it contain personal and operational details of the elite SAS, heroes of history, books and film, a force of last resort. See Laptop with names of SAS men is missing: A laptop containing the names of SAS soldiers and their top-secret training exercises has gone missing, the Ministry of Defence has admitted. This is pretty poor stuff but you know, who hasn’t lost something precious? It’s easily done. In this case, it’s the keys to the armoury, almost.
17-year-old Mikeyy Mooney, a computer programmer, almost brought down Twitter over Easter, the service Wildely beloved of Stephen Fry. He said he did it out of boredom to send users to a website which he was trying to promote. (See article here).
Mooney’s activities are not dissimilar to almost every website owner in the world. We all want more hits! Ha Ha. He had the skill and Twitter, in their openly-connected arrogance, left doors open so that anyone with that skill could walk right through. It’s highly reminiscent of Microsoft.
Conclusion
You can’t make a totally secure communication system. To pretend so and blame one’s failings on a third party is disingenuous. The key word is communicate. As soon as I speak, people hear my mind. If I don’t speak, my secret is my own. That’s the fundamental dichotomy. It worked in the old days before computer, newspaper and print. Before papyrus scrolls even.
So to trust our whole country’s security to ID Cards, bought in supermarkets (yes really!), a system that’s fallible, run by humans who are fallible, is (my word of the day) bollox.
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Sorry is your word of the day fallible or bollocks?
nice one!