Social engineering

Levy, David. S. T. Coleridge replies to Adam Smith s "pernicious opinion" A study in Hermetic social engineering. Interpretation A Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (1986) 89- 114. 

Release data related to the SCADA network only on a strict, need-to-know basis, and only to persons explicitly authorized to receive such information. Social engineering, the gathering of information about a computer or computer network via questions to naive users, is often the first step in a malicious attack on computer networks. The more information revealed about a computer or computer network, the more vulnerable the computer/network is. Never divulge data revealed to a SCADA network, including the names and contact information about the system operators/administrators, computer operating systems, and/or physical and logical locations of computers and network systems over telephones or to personnel unless they are explicitly authorized to receive such information. Any requests for information by unknown persons need to be sent to a central network security location for verification and fulfillment. People can be a weak link in an otherwise secure network. Conduct training and information awareness... 

A fourth element is closely linked to the third a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition. 

In sum, the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society provides the leveled social terrain on which to build. 

Communism was modernity s most devout, vigorous and gallant champion.. . . It was under communist.. . auspices that the audacious dream of modernity, freed from obstacles by the merciless and omnipotent state, was pushed to its radical limits grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature. 

Cases like the one just described are the rule, not the exception. They serve to illustrate that the formal order encoded in social-engineering designs inevitably leaves out elements that are essential to their actual functioning. If the factory were forced to operate only within the confines of the roles and functions specified in the simplified design, it would quickly grind to a halt. Collectivized command economies virtually everywhere have limped along thanks to the often desperate improvisation of an informal economy wholly outside its schemata. 

Hacking, The Taming of Chance, p. 105. Hacking shows brilliantly how a statistical average metamorphosed into the category normal, and "normal, in turn, into a normative standard to be achieved by social engineering. 

Central planning—Social aspects. 2. Social engineering. 

Inside a company s network, the cornerstone security measures are control of physical access, prevention of social engineering, and systems for intrusion detection and response. The former two are more of an organizational nature here, we briefly present an approach to intrusion detection, for details we refer to [78] and [75]. 

---