July 19, 2018
MarkBernstein.org
 

Beyond Villainy

A very interesting problem arose at Hypertext 2018.

We must now assume that the US President, and at least some of the advisors and family members he has appointed, have delivered secrets to Russia. As a result, none of our secure systems can be trusted. For example, we cannot be confident that the passcodes to all electronic medical records are not available to Moscow, WikiLeaks, or the highest bidder.

When our national nightmare ends, we’re going to need to change a lot of locks and reset lots of passwords. When we do so, we we also must assume that any committee or team tasked with doing this might include a mole.

It’s possible to work around the presence of potential moles, but it complicates everything. We’re going to have to start thinking about this now.