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Martin Seeger@masek@infosec.exchange

Working at front lines of the IT and having fun there. Been around the Internet since 1992 and still in awe what has become of that little baby. Currently wanted for repeated "Nerd Sniping" on all continents.

Personal interests:

- IT Security
- Computer Games & TTRPGs
- Cycling
- Cooking & Baking
- Books, Movies, TV-Series (mostly F&SF)
- 3D printing (new!)
- Everything that blinks, has buttons to press and looks remotely gadgetoid

Everything i write, post, tweet, blog or blurp is just my personal opinion and is not the opinion or policy of my employer, my cat or my goldfish.

I post in English and German. Will try to mark each post correctly, but errors happen. Sorry for that.

I apologize if I am not following you back. This happens as my stream is already getting more posts than I can read.

Location: Europe, Germany, Schleswig-Holstein, Kiel/Kronshagen
LC_LANG: en_EN, de_DE
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Joined: 2026-09-08 15:35:26
2 notes, 0 following, 0 followers

Martin Seeger@masek@infosec.exchange (2026-10-03 18:02:27)
Surveillance Considered Harmful
There is an interesting detail emerging from the attempted terrorist attack on Flydubai Flight 1073.

According to current reports, the co-pilot had already been barred from flying by Oman Air because of concerns about extremist views. Yet somehow he ended up flying for Flydubai. And somehow an Omani citizen, from a country whose pilots are not allowed to fly into Israel, ended up in the cockpit of a flight to Tel Aviv (Source: https://apnews.com/article/cf64a228799e6e788e834cac2a489ab2).

This happened in a region containing some of the most heavily surveilled societies on the planet. Saudi Arabia, where the aircraft eventually landed, is a particularly extreme example: internet activity, social media and private communications are subject to extensive state surveillance (Source: https://freedomhouse.org/country/saudi-arabia/freedom-net/2025). Other Gulf states are not far behind in the scale and reach of their surveillance.

And yet here we are. This points to a more fundamental problem with surveillance as a weapon against terrorism.

What does a terrorist actually want?

Physical destruction is only the means. The real target is psychological: fear, distrust, disruption and ultimately the fragmentation of society. A terrorist cannot destroy a society through physical violence alone. But it may be sufficient to make that society afraid enough to start damaging itself.

And this is where mass surveillance becomes dangerously counterproductive. A functioning society depends on trust: trust between citizens, trust in institutions, and the assumption that most people around us are not our enemies. Terrorism attacks exactly that trust.

Mass surveillance does, too.

It tells everyone that everyone is potentially suspicious. It normalizes observation, suspicion and self-censorship. In trying to make society more resilient against individual terrorists, we risk weakening the very social cohesion that makes a society resilient in the first

Martin Seeger@masek@infosec.exchange (2026-09-07 22:29:35)
OH: "This isn't a distributed system, it's a collection of single points of failure"