Story
This episode of Law and Order is about a woman murdered by people in Access Nation, a company that sells information to their clients in order to get valuable information from her that the company can sell to its clients. The issue in this episode is the “right to privacy” of individuals.
Conflict
The conflict of this episode is how will they be able to prosecute and prove that Access Nation is violating laws about privacy.
Observations
Man : So how do you break somebody's password
Woman : I told you wouldn't come see me anymore
(pressed some few keys)
(after a second)
Done
In my opinion, I think it will take time to break a password depending on what kind of algorithm we use to break a password. In this episode, they quickly broke Corel Word Perfect's Password. In my experience, 128, 256 bit encryption will surely take time, most of the time to be able to figure out the password, a program will test all possible combinations of letters A-Z, a-z and 0-9.
It is only possible to break a password quickly if they are able to use a very fast and smart algorithm that can test all possible character combinations or maybe just because of luck.
Just an example it took me forever just to recover a winzip password. The winzip archive used a 256bit encryption and that means a lot of work.
Opening emails will immediately make the worm run to your computer
Opening emails and reading it's content is safe, what is not safe is downloading and running the attachment. Most of the time, the attachments are worms and viruses.
The Company Access Nation is able to know can know names of people in a community, know if a maid is a criminal, etc...
We all know that there are companies who use multiple dataminers to get information but it is not possible to be able to know almost anything about a certain
person. Will you be able to know what a person does everyday using just a computer program that secretly runs in your system? What if that person is not using a computer?
In this episode they give an impression that Access Nation can name anyone and tell if he or she is a criminal or not. If Access Nation has that kind of power, they should have at least know something about their client so that they can assure that the information they sell won't used in doing crimes.
It seems like firewalls and anti-viruses is useless against Access Nations worms and spywares
It seems like in this episode, anti-viruses and firewalls are useless against Access Nation because all of them are saying that privacy is a luxury, I wont be opening my email again,etc.. Giving the impression that there's no hope of stopping companies like Access Nation in accessing sensitive and valuable information.
Reaction
Today, right to privacy is often violated. You do not know where will a dataminer will leech into you. Worst is that you do not have any sign that a worm or a dataminer is already doing its dirty job inside your system.
Dataminers have varied purpose. Some dataminers may have the purpose seeing what you always view so they can pop-up related ads. Some may have the purpose of logging your usernames and passwords. Worse of all is that some may have the purpose of logging sensitive information about you. It may be about your money, personal life, etc... Almost like the one shown in Law and Order : Acces Nation Episode.
So how are we going to prevent this from happening? For me, it is advisable to always scan for possible dataminers, worms, spyware, etc... This way you can at least minimize the risk of sharing sensitive information about you. Another solution is that you install a security software that can monitor all incoming and outgoing data from the internet.
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