Diffie: Don't secure the internet, it needs crime

These ideas sound a lot like one of the more amusing texts by Marx that I rediscovered just the other day. In Swedish it's called "brottets produktivitet" which roughly translates to "the productivity of the criminal".<p>With every crime a chain of business emerge where only first link is in itself criminal. For the internet security companies, graffiti removal services, security consultants, lawyers, anti-theft system resellers, locksmiths, insurance company and so on – it's business as usual.<p>I've found a part of text here: <a href="http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/deleon/pdf/1905/apr14_1905.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/marxists/archive/deleon/pdf/1905/apr...</a><p><i>“A philosopher ‘produces’ ideas, a poet poems, a preacher sermons, a professor text-books, and so forth. A criminal ‘produces’ crimes. If we look more closely at the relation in which this branch of industry stands to society, not a few prejudices will drop. “It is not crimes alone that the criminal ‘produces’; he also ‘produces’ criminal legislation, and, as a consequence, he is also the first mover in the ‘production’ of the professors who ‘produce’ lectures thereon, along with the inevitable text-books in which these professors cast their lectures as ‘goods’ on the markets of the world. . . . “Furthermore, the criminal ‘produces’ all the criminal and correctionary branches of society—police, judges, hangmen, juries, etc., besides all the several branches of industry demanded by these, and all of which constitute just so many categories in the scale of social labor, develop different faculties of the human mind, create new wants and new means whereby to satisfy them. . . . “The criminal ‘produces’ an impression—good or bad, as the case may be. He thereby ‘renders a service’ to the moral and aesthetic sentiments of the public. It is not only text-books on criminal legislation that the criminal ‘produces’; he ‘produces’ not merely the penal law itself, and consequently the legislators of that law. He also ‘produces’ art, literature, novels, even tragedies as shown by the appearance of Mullner’s Tanjte, Schiller’s Robbers, the Oedipus, and Richard III. The criminal breaks the monotony and humdrum security of bourgeois life, he thereby insures it against stagnation, and he arouses that excitement and restlessness without which even the spur of competition would be blunted. Thus the criminal furnishes the stimulants to the productive forces.”</i>

It's unfortunate that he invoked the ridiculous broken window fallacy (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy</a>) in the course of making his real point, which was that making the internet secure or reliable from the bottom up is prohibitively expensive and that security and reliability should be layered on top only where required.

Ignoring the nonsense logic quoted here, the Internet <i>does</i> need crime because any medium that does not have crime does not have true freedom of expression.<p>A street where it's impossible to be mugged is also a street that you cannot freely walk down with no restrictions. Something fundamental about the act of walking down the street would have to be removed for it to be completely free from crime.<p>Similarly, a computer that can't get malware isn't a truly general-purpose computer -- it cannot run an arbitrary program.

Somewhat related link: <a href="http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-the-savior-of-us-all" rel="nofollow">http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-t...</a><p>"What if I told you that Batman is not the true hero in the Dark Knight saga? What if I told you instead that if The Joker did not exist, Gotham would be overrun by organized crime families and the corrupt politicians that live in their pockets? And what if I told you that there is mathematical proof of this argument's validity?"

Silly notion, this is the same logic we use when we bomb a country then send people in to fix it up again.

I think you will always have cyber-crime or any type of crime for that matter. One thing that keeps a limit on the number of things that are considered criminal is that there is only so much that can be enforced. If people stopped doing things like murders it would free up enforcement resources to go after smaller perceived wrongs.<p>This article is quite vague, I don't see how it would be possible to make a truly secure internet without figuring out how to develop 100% non exploitable software.<p>The article also doesn't seem to draw a strong distinction between security and cryptography, this is something I have to explain to people <i>all the time</i>.

The comments on this article, including Marx and an indirect link to a journal article about game theory in a biology journal are a great example of the "je ne sais quoi" that keeps me coming back to hn.