Who's afraid of Mallory Wolf?

bear bear at sonic.net
Tue Mar 25 12:07:40 EST 2003



On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Ian Grigg wrote:

>On Monday 24 March 2003 19:26, bear wrote:

>> him running roughshod over the law.  He set up routing tables
>> to fool DNS into thinking his machine was the shortest distance
>> from the courthouse where she worked to her home ISP and
>> eavesdropped on her mail.  Sent a message to every fax machine
>> in town calling her a "Jezebellian whore" after getting the
>> skinny on the aftermath of an affair that she was discussing
>> with her husband.
>
>I love it!  Then, I'm wrong on that point, we
>do in fact have some aggressive MITMs
>occuring in some mediums over the net.
>Steve Bellovin pointed one out, this is
>another.
>
>Which gets us to the next stage of the
>analysis (what did they cost!).


Wait.  Time out.  Setting aside the increased monetary
cost of her reelection campaign in a fairly conservative
state capitol, and setting aside the increased difficulty
of raising money for that campaign, the main costs here
are intangible.

On a professional level, she had reduced power in office
because of the scandal this clown created publishing her
personal email, but the intangible costs go both directions
from there.

Toward the personal end of the spectrum, discussing the
aftermath of an affair with one's husband is sensitive and
personal, and making that whole thing public can't have done
either of them, or their marriage for that matter, any good.

In the public sphere, this is a case in which information
gained from an attack on email was being employed directly
for undeserved influence on government officials.  Being timed
to interfere with her reelection makes it a direct means of
removing political opponents from office,  and it has
probably had a "chilling effect" on other council members
in that benighted city who might otherwise have voted in ways
Phred didn't like.  What he did was nothing less than a
direct assault on the democratic process of government.

I don't think mere monetary costs are even germane to
something like this.  The costs, publicly and personally,
are of a different kind than money expresses.  And we're going
to continue to have this problem for as long as we continue to
use unencrypted SMTP for mail transport.

			Bear



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