sweno Wrote:And I doubt that any country would have a back door in their system that could be abused by third parties.
Most people are idiots and most programmers are people. Add on to that that most systems are made by the lowest bidder (or made by the one who greases the wheels the best) and most of the people doing programming work barely know how to turn on a computer and then you start getting an idea of why that is a silly idea. A very silly idea.
Add to that budget and time pressures and the sheer complexity of most IT systems and one can understand why even competent programmers often leave security holes all over the place. And even if system security is nearly perfect admins can get up to all kinds of naughty stuff given the proper incentive. And most admins are overworked and underpaid, and if all of that isn't enough they tend to have connections to the outside world, so a kidnapping or two can break even the most scrupulous admin, but given that there are ussualy hunderds of people who have accsess to the system finding one bad apple is ussualy not too hard. Many of these systems are also geographically dispersed (like say the passport system, where every embassy has some accsess to they system) so it's often not too daunting of a challange to insert yourself into the loop somewhere.
But i am far more worried about criminal accsess to the data than anything else, forinstance the proposed national ID database in brittan would be worth more on the black market than the US defense budget, assuming the glut of supply wouldn't drive down the price. As a practical matter no-one has any idea on how to secure such large databases against attack. Many security companies say they do but none of them have ever been sucsessful in stopping attacks.
The most advanced security model that is widespread in normal peoples hands at the moment is the unix security model which is used on mac OS and most linux boxes among other places, and that dates back to the early 1970's or so. The threat profile has changed a little since then but there is comparativly little work done on better security models. windows security model is actually more reminicient of even earlier security models, one of the reasons vista was so hated is because they brought it closer to the unix security model and it broke lots of things, even though they left backdoors in for old programs.
There are some ideas for better security models, but most of them require pretty much all current software to be scrapped. Not likely to happen. The best around is something like SELinux as designed by the NSA but even that has short comings.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."