06.30.09
The Daily Dishwater on Cybersecurity
You can’t get away from it even when you try. There’s no running away from corporate pundits and their obsessions with cyberwar and cybersecurity.
They all copy from the same script, comprising an army of really concerned swell people marching in lockstep, repeating the same things over and over, all selflessly warning the nation, readers, politicians, anyone who will listen, about the dangers. Watch out for China! Russia, too! Estonia was defeated in the first cyberwar!
“The risks are real,” writes someone named L. Gordon Crovitz at the Wall Street Journal.
“Why has no one ever told us this?” I hear you ask. Well, no, if you’re reading this post DD knows you’re not asking.
“Cyber attacks on Estonia and Georgia by Russia in recent years forced government, banking, media and other Web sites offline,” Crovitz continued. “In the U.S., the public Web, air-traffic control systems and telecommunications services have all been attacked. Congressional offices have been told that China has broken into their computers. Both China and Russia were caught having infiltrated the U.S. electric-power grid, leaving behind software code to be used to disrupt the system. The risk of attacks to create massive power outages is so serious that the best option could be unplugging the U.S. power grid from the Internet.”
The only thing missing is the stuff about cyberwar maybe being as bad for the nation as limited nuclear war. But that was covered yesterday, anyway.
“If cyber war is a new form of war, wouldn’t most Americans adjust their expectations of reasonable privacy to permit the Pentagon to intrude to some degree on their communications, if this is necessary to prevent great harm and if rules protecting anonymity can be established?” it is asked.
Make the Pentagon the nexus through which all American fun and business on the Internet is conducted. That’d be great! Can’t see why anyone would argue with that.
“We’ll look back on the current era, with the military constrained from defending vital domestic interests … ”
Roll the Lockheed Martin commercial.
“We’ve detected an anomaly. Our nation is under attack. How bad is it? Traffic’s off the chart! They’re pinging more targets! Isolate, prevent damage! Got ’em!” [Noble and uplifting music swells in background]
bonze said,
July 2, 2009 at 1:24 am
DD, the nation is in peril! Extraordinary measures are required! Bow down to your national cyberlords and submit your computers to their probes!
Jack Goldsmith raises the alarm at the NYTimes: “President Obama has recognized the need to educate the public about computer security. The government should jump-start this education by mandating minimum computer security standards and by requiring Internet service providers to deny or delay Internet access to computers that fall below these standards, or that are sending spam or suspicious multiple computer probes into the network.”