07.08.11
The plutocrats want defending from the cyber-paupers (continued)
As seen on the TV Google News tab.
That’s mine, right under the lameness from TIME.
A TIME blog, called TechLand, muses on a scripted routine now fifteen years old.
And that’s because you can walk right in off the street at such places and be uninformed and incurious. Today this is an asset because a grasp of history and the vast sprawl of the issue gets in the way.
Online security risks have become increasingly prevalent with the likes of Anonymous and LulzSec continuing to expose the sorry state of corporate network security, and policymakers are clamoring to “do something??? to address the threat. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in Washington to employ the rhetoric of war when talking about cybersecurity, which is a very dangerous tendency.
For example, in a Washington Post op-ed today, Senators Lieberman, Collins and Carper argue for cybersecurity legislation, saying, “The alternative could be a digital Pearl Harbor — and another day of infamy.???
“Electronic Pearl Harbor, electronic Pearl Harbor, electronic Pearl Harbor, ad nauseum.
I quote from the Federation of American Scientist’s Secrecy Bulletin. In 1998:
“I certainly agree that the notion of an electronic Pearl Harbor specifically, and more generally of information warfare, has been hyped to the point of nausea,” said the vice president of one intelligence contractor that has multi- billion dollar annual revenues from its work in information technology. “This is but the latest of many fads in ‘the Community’,” he told S&GB, “and like most of its predecessors, [it] has just enough substance to require that serious attention be paid, but not nearly as much substance as the Cassandras of the Community would have us believe.”
Quite a bit has changed in the intervening period. It’s not a fad anymore, it’s a way of life.
And billions on-line are now confronted daily with malicious software and criminal activity. In 1998, the average citizen’s exposure to such things was orders of magnitude less.
Another big change has been the total decoupling of national security interests, including computer security, from virtually anything have to do with the great mean — the middle class — in this country.
Now, the entire public debate is basically high-button threatre designed to convince everyone of the need to protect the plutocrats from the paupers in cyberspace.
And here is a piece I wrote a couple weeks ago, which said just that, is reprinted again today at Globalsecurity:
A cursory reading of [the historical record] of beware-of-electronic-Pearl-Harbor notices since the late Nineties reveals their sameness. All of them are ultimately based on the simplistic idea that unknown enemies on the other side of the world can overturn substantial portions of the US by flicking a few software switches.
This is essentially the result of two things: Now way-old American national security infrastructure near psychotic paranoia over magical technological surprise that never occurs and now way-old methodology on massaging the national treasury for funding.
The other bits in the current arguments about cybersecurity and cyberwar are the warnings that the financial system could be hit …
The argument that the US financial system ought to be protected from electronic Pearl Harbor would, if all Americans actually knew of it, strike them as ridiculous.
It’s easily observable that people are much more interested in protection from the racket that’s the American financial system. Cyberwar and hack attacks on it, when compared to the damage inflicted by Wall Street misbehavior, are absurdly small things.