05.09.12
Cyberwar: The high-button rent-seekers
National Public Radio has a long record of producing garbage on cyberwar. And I’ll skip most of a recent piece except for the end — which pretty much fulfills the definition of the adjective, “reptilian:”
Some national security leaders argue, in turn, that there have been times in U.S. history when the country has to make security investments whether they make business sense or not. The need to prepare for a massive cyberattack, they say, is such an occasion.
Larry Clinton’s response: Then the government should pick up the check.
“If the government was interested in paying the private sector to do all these things, probably we would go a long way toward doing it,” he says. “But the government so far, [with] the Lieberman-Collins bill, wants it all done for free. They want the businesses to simply plow that into their profit and loss statement, and the numbers are staggering. You simply can’t do it.”
First, it’s necessary to understand Larry Clinton is a spokesman for a trade group of big weapons manufacturers and Pentagon contracting businesses (Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Science Applications International Corporation) with cyber-defense arms called the Internet Security Alliance.
The Internet Security Alliance knows that if American corporate business which holds the telecommunications, energy, banking and transportation infrastructure is asked to pay for strengthening cyber-defenses they’ll simply decline to spend at the level US arms manufacturers would like to see. If they spend any more than usual, at all.
Therefore, the ISA is very interested in having the government pay for everything, as it more strongly guarantees revenue streams.
Think of it like the business model adopted by the banksters. Risk is shoved off. The government picks up the entire tab and the defense industry profits.
It’s very easy to be supercilious with the Internet Security Alliance.
It’s website is plain, showing a trade group of no-confidence inspiring circle-jerkmen and rent-seekers from arms manufacturing.
But wait. Maybe I’m being unfair. Let’s take a look at what the ISA website claims are its primary goals:
ISA advocates a modernized social contract between industry and government …
Developing a 21 century policy platform for government to work productively with industry through a “Social Contract …
To understand what the ISA means, substitute the phrase “rent-seeking” for “Social Contract,” which the business group misuses horribly.
Generally, the “social contract” has been used to mean humans ought to live in a civil society, one in which government imposed order and protected the weak and the average from the predatory, who if allowed to prevail would, as Thomas Hobbes described famously, make life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The “social contract” doesn’t say anything about the government guaranteeing the business of corporate computer security and arms manufacturers because without them, our life might be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” because of cyberwar.
What the Internet Security Alliance wants, like much of what big corporate America advocates for, is “rent.”
Rent-seeking, as defined by a Glossary of Political Economy Terms:
The expenditure of resources in order to bring about an uncompensated transfer of goods or services from another person or persons to one’s self as the result of a “favorable??? decision on some public policy. The term seems to have been coined (or at least popularized in contemporary political economy) by the economist Gordon Tullock. Examples of rent-seeking behavior would include all of the various ways by which individuals or groups lobby government for taxing, spending and regulatory policies that confer financial benefits or other special advantages upon them at the expense of the taxpayers or of consumers or of other groups or individuals with which the beneficiaries may be in economic competition.
That the ISA would actually pay corporate mouthpieces to write such self-serving shite about a so-called non-existent “Social Contact” tells you everything you need to know about the group.
Robert David Graham said,
May 9, 2012 at 7:20 pm
ISA is a special thing. They extort money from companies. Their pitch is “we lobby government for stuff, so you must give money to be sensitive to your viewpoint, or what we lobby the government for might hurt your interests”.
George Smith said,
May 9, 2012 at 7:34 pm
Why am I not surprised.
mcthorogood said,
May 10, 2012 at 6:51 pm
I heard the NPR program about the cyberwar and I agree with your assessment of the situation. To use an old hacker’s term, NPR and Cybercom was stirring up FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Deception) and most people in the U.S. are dumb enough to eat it all up.