Victory or invasion of privacy? Bot-net takedowns - Qakbot

Wholeheartedly understand and at least partially concur with your cynicism MegaZone. It would probably be foolish to remain naive about goals and intentions.
This feels like a slippery slope of all the bad things we were warned about in 1984, Gattaca, BladeRunner, and any other dystopian future state we tend to say we don't want to be a part of.

A less-cynical side of me wants to believe there is *at least* a thin veneer of checks and balances in law agencies where more than 1 person gets to make the decision...but most of that is held together with norms and good-faith and that all seems to break down pretty quickly when the rubber meets the road. I guess - to avoid most of this the systems in question (all of them) simply have to be conceived and built (or retroactively hardened) in a way that treats security as "built-in".

The SIRT team has said this more ways than I can count. 😄

I suppose it's not easy but is there a day, in the future, that all the technologists look back on this period in our history and wonder how we got anything done? Like many of us take emergency services for granted, or building codes, or paved roads: one can't simply build something big anymore without (usually) passing through all the gates of control that came from the mistakes & learning that came before.
Maybe that can be a huge, counter-intuitive, benefit of AI to the next generation of engineers - taking some of the drudgery out of security concerns up front and eventually hardening things first (rather than invading privacy later). 

Thanks for the article AaronJB.