Want to be a Spy? Better Check the Browser History First
Think you’ve got what it takes to be a government spy? Your online activity may indicate otherwise.
The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence has just spent a whopping $800,000 to find out what your Internet habits say about your personality — and your ability to take on 007-style tasks. Specifically, the money will be used for research to find “which specific cyber-behaviors are normative, acceptable, or favorable” and how “risky IT activities or problematic cyber-behaviors” correspond with “traits, characteristics, or behaviors [that] can serve as risk or resilience indicators,” Wired.com’s Danger Room reports. The goal is to come up with a set of standards to hold against new recruits — a kind of Web surfing background check of sorts.
So, ready to see if you’d pass the test? Some of the behaviors believed to be signs of a non-spy-worthy person, according to an initial explanation of the research, include:
- Social network usage
- Disclosure of information in computer-mediated activities
- Compulsive Internet use
- Involvement in computer groups (especially those allied to stigmatized practices)
providing false information within computer-mediated communications about oneself or others- Procurement and distribution of pirated materials
Ouch. Guess your Bond days may be over before they began. Sorry, agent.
For anonymous surfing, nothing beats Tor.
http://www.torproject.org/
Darn. I guess I’m not so sleuthy after all. (Is “sleuthy” a word? Firefox doesn’t say it is. o_O)
Nope, sleuthy is coming up negative for me too.
I’m always amazed when Firefox tells me I’ve been making up words.
* Social network usage
* Compulsive Internet use
Aw…
* Involvement in computer groups (especially those allied to stigmatized practices)
providing false information within computer-mediated communications about oneself or others
And… depending on what this means, maybe.
Surely:
*Involvement in computer groups (especially those allied to stigmatized practices)
providing false information within computer-mediated communications about oneself or others
Would be good spy activity? If you can make up a name and can reply when someone uses it people will spycheck you less.
And this thing about pirated materials… I’d say what software pirates do is less of a crime than what the mega corporations are up to. I mean, who would buy a sofa if they were’nt allowed to have more than one person on it at a time? Who would buy a car that only accepted fuel from BP? Who would buy a microwave that could only cook popcorn?
Yet gamers and people in general have to live with it. I buy the games I feel deserve my money. Once or twice I’ll buy a game based purely on the hype, and when I realise it for the rubbish it is, I cannot return it because I’ve activated it and now it’s locked to my computer.
In conclusion, piracy should in no way be taken into conideration when deciding if you should be a spy or not.
Buying pirated stuff, I will admit is wrong, but until the publishers realise they should not force us to put up with shoddy software because we put our trust in them and bought it on release day I will continue to try before I buy.
Edit: Note that I am not advocating buying pirated software. The piracy I was talking about is the downloading of said software.