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Boxcutter Boy: White Hat?

I haven’t fully worked this through yet, but there are some unavoidable parallels between this guy who broke the Fed’s secruity to put those boxcutters on the planes, and the so-called ‘white-hat’ hackers, who break systems security… both supposedly in an effort to expose and cure security problems, in each environment.

As a professional server jockey, (And thereby inherently, a network security person as well) I’m intently aware of, and have formed opinions about, the White-Hat crowd, over the years. This new situation with the boxcutters and so on, on the planes; all it does, to my mind, is to give a physical manifestation to the argument the so-called “White Hat” Hackers have been making all along.  This is simply a different application of the same argument.

The right or wrong part I’ve not worked out yet, frankly, on either one.  But I’m not sure, whatever conclusion we come to, that we can treat one differently from the other. I’ll be interested in seeing your mail on this one.