I don't think we'd make that distinction if the Syrian government developed (and then lost) the special explosive formula that allowed it to be smuggled past our defenses unprotected.
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Replying to @ericgeller
I guess a lot of that depends on whether it was politically expedient. But I take your point.
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Replying to @MalwareJake
I just think there's an obvious difference between a foreign government's incompetence and its active assistance. We'd of course still take some steps if it were incompetence.
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Replying to @ericgeller
That's a fair distinction. There's a lot of nuance to this discussion and a lot of unknowns. Based on what we know today, would you call this incompetence on our part? More importantly, do you think the US gov would consider it actionable incompetence if it were anyone else?
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Replying to @MalwareJake
Yes, I would call this incompetence. Keeping the vuln a secret is intentional, but losing control of it is not. That's the most relevant part IMO.
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Replying to @ericgeller @MalwareJake
That'd be a better argument if, like explosives, digital weapons (exploits) were one-time use. A better analogue here are biological weapons, with their endless reproducibility. There, we would rightly ask if gov should have risked producing/storing them at all, given this risk.
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Replying to @Snowden @MalwareJake
But the argument that the U.S. needs to craft digital weapons can be made, whereas I don't know that you can argue that we need biological weapons.
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Replying to @ericgeller @MalwareJake
I'm not sure I'd go so far with such certainty. The current justification for digital weapons are literally the same for every other class of CBRN threat: "parity" and "unilateral disarmament." Conventionally, we take the claims for granted rather than critically evaluating them.
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Replying to @Snowden @MalwareJake
Well, I didn't say certainty! I just said one could make the argument.
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Yes, but the argument that "our rivals have them, so we must also" was once energetically rejected as the central platform of the US ideological brand. Dragnets, assassinations, torture—we could, but claimed we would not to distinguish "us" from "them." Were we mistaken to do so?
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Replying to @Snowden @HelpSnowden and
Snowden, do you know when you'll be pardoned in the US?
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