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Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!
If only the internet had its own version of Lost in Space’s robot to herald every lurking hazard or menace with an unequivocal warning. Unfortunately Robot B-9 isn’t available. So in his absence we’ve compiled a list of candidates we consider to be this year’s most dangerous. We’ve taken a broad view of danger, though—it’s not just about who is potentially a danger to public safety, but also about entities who might be considered a danger simply because they rock the status quo.
National Security Agency
Sure the NSA is not the most dangerous in the traditional sense. After all, the agency is supposed to be there for our good, right? Or at least the good of American citizens. But 18 months of revelations about the agency’s seemingly endless surveillance activities—and those of its UK partner GCHQ—have made it clear that many of its actions present a real danger to the internet. Yes, the NSA is tasked with collecting signals intelligence against targets suspected of being a national security threat. But installing backdoors in products, weakening encryption standards and algorithms, hacking entire telecom networks and tapping the undersea cables of private companies like Google and Yahoo show just how dangerous and out of control the agency can be. The internet is still a Wild West, but the NSA may just be its biggest outlaw.
Harris Corporation vs. U.S. Marshals Service
The Harris Corporation and the U.S. Marshals Service are tied for going above and beyond to conceal information from the public, courts and defendants about law enforcement’s use of so-called stingray technology. Harris is the leading maker of stingrays for law enforcement, which simulate a cell tower to trick mobile phones and other devices into connecting to them and revealing their location. Federal and local law enforcement agencies around the county have been using the devices for years—in some cases bypassing courts altogether to use them without a warrant or deceiving judges about what they’re using to collect the location information. Why? They say it’s because Harris’s contract includes an NDA that prohibits customers from telling anyone, including judges, about their use of the technology. It’s hard to know who’s really initiating the secrecy, though—Harris, because it wants to protect its proprietary secrets from competitors, or law enforcement agencies, because they’re worried suspects will find ways to counteract the devices. The secrecy reached an extreme level this year when agents with the U.S. Marshals Service in Florida swooped in to seize public records about the use of stingrays to keep them out of the hands of the ACLU.
Edward Snowden
Depending on where you sit, the NSA whistleblower is either the most dangerous man on the internet or the most heroic. Maybe he’s both. Eighteen months into the release of his leaked documents, the world has learned about the NSA’s unconstitutional bulk collection of phone records; its efforts to undermine and weaken encryption used not only by ordinary citizens but by the U.S. government itself; its battle with companies like Yahoo and Google to get their customer data; and its offensive operation against system administrators at telecoms to undermine their cellular networks. In the view of some, Snowden has dangerously exposed critical intelligence operations aimed at combating would-be terrorists and other enemies of the state; but to others he’s shone a much-needed spotlight on programs that skirt the edges of the law or, in the case of the bulk phone records collection program, trample it altogether. And more than a year after the leaks began, the revelations are still coming.
Kim Jong-un
Because whether North Korea was behind the Sony hack, the mere suggestion that Kim Jong-un was somehow responsible for the intrusion and threats against theaters got Sony to first cancel the release of The Interview then debut it online to a record $18 million in sales, making it the first time a major studio film was released online the same day it launched in theaters. Film-goers have been trying for years to get studios to release video-on-demand simultaneously with theater releases, but Kim Jong-un, or a perceived threat from him, accomplished the feat in a matter of days. All of this means that in addition to having a dangerous arsenal of nuclear weapons, Kim Jong-un is a dangerous market influencer.
Cody Wilson
Cody Wilson may be only 26 years old, but he’s already made a career out of a series of the most controversial digital projects ever conceived. A radical libertarian, Wilson rose to fame as the creator of the Liberator, the world’s first fully 3-D printable gun. His goal: to let anyone create a lethal plastic weapon with a click anywhere in the world, and in doing so demonstrate how new technologies can render the entire notion of regulation obsolete. More recently, he’s collaborated with Amir Taaki on Dark Wallet, an application designed to make bitcoins untraceable. And in October he launched the Ghost Gunner, a computer-controlled milling machine designed to let anyone create a metal body for an AR-15 from a simple blueprint.
Amir Taaki
As bitcoin becomes increasingly tamed and regulated by mainstream financial institutions, Amir Taaki has fought to bring the cryptocurrency back to its roots: independent, uncontrollable and deeply subversive. With his partner in thoughtcrime Cody Wilson, Taaki has led the development of Dark Wallet, the program designed to allow bitcoins to be spent untraceably, ensuring their use in the Dark Web economy and other less-than-legal applications. Earlier this year, he also won a Toronto hackathon by coding DarkMarket, a prototype for an entirely peer-to-peer bitcoin market—like Silk Road but without any central server or administrator—that could make online black market commerce that’s practically immune from a law enforcement crackdown.
Verto
With the death of Silk Road and more recently Silk Road 2, all eyes on the Dark Web have turned to Evolution, their successor for title of the internet’s top anonymous market. The figure behind this hidden site? A pseudonymous black market kingpin who goes by the name Verto, and who also founded the Tor Carding Forum, an anonymous marketplace for stolen credit card numbers. Unlike the Dread Pirate Roberts or Defcon, the talkative administrators of Silk Road and its sequel, Verto has kept a low profile as Evolution has grown to amass more than 22,000 listings of mostly illegal products. And unlike Silk Road, which confined itself to the sale of drugs and counterfeit documents, Evolution also offers weapons and stolen bank account credentials, a sign that the Dark Web could become far darker under Verto’s reign.
Preet Bharara
Get caught committing a high profile crime anywhere on the internet, and there’s a good chance Preet Bharara will be the face that haunts your nightmares. Bharara has made the Southern District of New York a top jurisdiction for computer crime cases, and prosecuted some of the most high-profile felony cases of the last several years, from Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond to alleged Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht. He’s still pursuing the extradition of Megaupload creator Kim Dotcom. And this year he oversaw the U.S. Department of Justice’s role in Operation Onymous, which took down dozens of Dark Web markets, including Silk Road 2 and two of the other top six online drug markets. With the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder, Bharara’s name has been floated as one of the top candidates for the nation’s top justice job. Hackers beware.
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