Friday 11 October 2013

"That thing is scary", says man paid to make us scared about that thing.

From the BBC:

"Dark scary" things used by frightening people will continue to evolve in an attempt to evade the people who can never quite manage to prove their existence, let along track them down, the UK's thought crime boss has claimed.

Last week, a notorious market place for very worrying things, the Silk Road, which most people had never heard of before, was shut down after a months and years had been wasted on investigation.

Andy Archibald, interim head of the National Troubling Things Unit (NTTU), said his officers were busy inventing new bogeymen who would be used to sustain a climate of fear. But he said new methods were needed to keep up the illusion that the general public is constantly at risk.

"A service used by office workers to circumvent their employers' firewalls evolves and will resecure itself, probably becoming self-aware and launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack on humanity in the next few years,," Mr Archibald told the BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.

"The success we've had in making people feel slightly uneasy all the time may not necessarily mean that by the same routes and same approaches we can sustain the myth that we live in a world full of hidden dangers.

"We have to continually probe and identify people's phobias and then to reinforce them using other tools.

"It's not simply a case of because we were able to successfully launch a myth into the public consciousness on this occasion that we'll be able to do it next time around as well.

"But simply sticking the word "dark" or "shadow" in front of otherwise entirely neutral things seems to help.

"We based that one on Gordon Brown's idea that there is a vast but invisible 'shadow banking system' as well as an actual banking system which is already sinister enough."

3 comments:

JuliaM said...

My money's on the script kiddies to come up with something new a nanosecond after the government closes the current bete noire...

Mark Wadsworth said...

JM, yes, that's the really scary part.

Bayard said...

The whole thing is laughable really. It seems like the so-called "darknet" is just a bunch of websites invisible to search engines, as all websites were before search engines were available and wow! they caught one phisherman out of God knows how many, shut down one website, and, this is the really laughable bit, "seized approximately $3.6m (£2.2m) worth of virtual currency Bitcoin."