[conspire] (forw) [Felton LUG] The Confidentiality of Zoom Meetings

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> IMHO, I think was good that he didn't say how he got SSN.  Being
> associated with a university with major CS department, there are
> likely a lot of ideas that are not available to every wanna be
> hacker.  

Sure.  On the other hand, as someone who's, quite a few times over the
decades, looked into what is required to research someone's SSN, I just
don't believe his implication that it was straightforward to do that
bit.

Basically, AFAIK it requires corrupt dealings on the side from someone
in a very trusted position at Social Security Administration or perhaps
one or two other highly sensitive Federal agencies.  In theory, one
could imagine outsourced dealings by those agencies with business
entities that give them _some_ access to _some_ SSN data, but I'd
require some convincing for this hypothetical outsourcing involving big
fractions of the dataset at any one time.

(Mind you, the de-facto use of SSNs as an authentication token in the
USA by some business entities is insane, but that's another topic entirely.)


> Meanwhile, the Mercury is not likely to "print" a story about food for
> CABAL.

Not even if I post my best recipes?  ;->