One of the worst is the cyber-security political purist. The person who has drunk the kool-aid so badly and/or likes to use their knowledge to beat others round the head with it. The person who likes to talk about things like "risk/threat modelling" but actually doesn't:
a) Have a real understanding of the needs of the people they say they are trying to help
b) Have the courage to make tough calls related to ideal vs good security.
Working in the NGO security space we get these people all the time. Send them out in front of a bunch of African/Middle Eastern/Asian/Russian activists who have been risking their lives for years for democracy etc etc and all they do it spend three days showing off, berating people and then leaving. Telling everyone that TAILS/PGP/Linux/TrueCrypt etc etc is for everyone and that anything else "is gonna get people killed," so by extension shouldn't be done. There are people who have made entire careers around taking that attitude, which most of the time actually leads to demoralisation and a long-term decrease in security.
It's easy to recommend the hard "cover your ass" stuff because you don't like the NSA, it's harder to say "Hmm, ok we gotta assume some risk that the NSA doesn't care what we're looking at and use a solid Google two-factor here and see how we get on...now how do we stop the security guard from selling you out?"
a) Have a real understanding of the needs of the people they say they are trying to help
b) Have the courage to make tough calls related to ideal vs good security.
Working in the NGO security space we get these people all the time. Send them out in front of a bunch of African/Middle Eastern/Asian/Russian activists who have been risking their lives for years for democracy etc etc and all they do it spend three days showing off, berating people and then leaving. Telling everyone that TAILS/PGP/Linux/TrueCrypt etc etc is for everyone and that anything else "is gonna get people killed," so by extension shouldn't be done. There are people who have made entire careers around taking that attitude, which most of the time actually leads to demoralisation and a long-term decrease in security.
It's easy to recommend the hard "cover your ass" stuff because you don't like the NSA, it's harder to say "Hmm, ok we gotta assume some risk that the NSA doesn't care what we're looking at and use a solid Google two-factor here and see how we get on...now how do we stop the security guard from selling you out?"