[leodeid]

I'm a little confused about the point here. Security researchers often hunt down bugs that are deemed esoteric or state-actor only. Security researchers are often the sort of people who would do things like stalking. Therefore we need security researchers to find security flaws so other security researchers can't use them?

If that is the point, it seems to humanize the problem space in a different sort of way. Security researchers are people, too. Some are "good", some are "bad", but most people are in between. But instead of framing your work on targeted individual attacks as a journalist being targeted by a state-level actor, realize that there are other researchers out there with your same very specific set of skills which would allow him/her to target someone of their own choosing. In this example, perhaps the researcher is vindictively stalking an ex.

Outside of that, though, I can't help but think that there is a much more interesting and broader point about the humanity that is affected by the work you do in both security and privacy. If you consider people who are not as skilled, but still as vindictive, malicious tweets from fake accounts multiple times per day is pretty bad. Couples that share passwords can end up really enabling this vindictive behavior. (gasp who would ever share passwords to something private like that? Perhaps an abusive partner demands access to email and hangs onto a recovery key.)