Thursday, April 16, 2015

Solidarity

The government's zealous War on Hackers threatens us, the good hackers who stop the bad ones. They can't tell the good witches from the bad witches. When members of our community get threatened by the system, we should probably do more to stand in solidarity with them. I mention this because many of you will be flying to SFO this coming week for the RSA Conference, which gives us an opportunity to show solidarity.

Today, a security researcher tweeted a joke while on a plane. When he landed, the FBI grabbed him and confiscated all his stuff. The tweets are here:



Chris Roberts' area of research is embedded control systems like those on planes. It's not simply that the FBI grabbed him because of a random person on a plane, but specifically because he's a security researcher. He's on the FBI's radar (so to speak) for things like this Fox News interview.

I suggest we all start joke tweeting along these lines,  from the airplanes, like:

DFW->SFO. Playing with airplane wifi. I hope the pilots enjoy the Rick Astely video playing on their EICAS system. 
LGA->SFO. Note to self. Don't fuzz the SATCOM unit while on Twitter. Takes GoGo an hour to come back up. 
NRT->SFO. Yup, the IFE will grab corrupt MP3 from my iPhone and give a shell. I wonder if nmap will run on it. 
PDX->SFO. HackRF says there's a strong 915 MHz qpsk 64k symbol/second signal. I wonder what'll happen if I replay it.
The trick is to write jokes, not to actually threaten anything -- like the original tweet above. Those of us with technical knowledge and skills should be free to express our humor without the FBI confiscating all our stuff when we land.




BTW, I know you can all steal in-flight WiFi easier than you can pay for it, but do pay for it :)


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Also possible that some member of the american public read his public tweet and reported him.