Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
If you haven’t been following the intrigue around Wikileaks and the security companies hoping to help the government fight it, this stuff is not to be missed. Recommended: “How One Man Tracked Down Anonymous—And Paid a Heavy Price,” on Ars Technica. “A Disturbing Threat Against One of Our Own,” on Salon. The latter story links [...]
(HT: Schneier) Here’s a refreshingly careful report on cybersecurity from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s “Future Global Shocks” project. Notably: “The authors have concluded that very few single cyber-related events have the capacity to cause a global shock.” There will be no cyber-”The Day After.” Here are a few cherry-picked top lines: Catastrophic [...]
I’ve been looking into the cybersecurity issue lately, and I finally took the time to do an in-depth read of the Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency report, which is frequently cited as one of the soundest analyses of the issue. It was written by something of a self-appointed presidential transition commission called the “Commission [...]
Based on two (1, 2) previous cyber security bills, a draft bill that has been circulating around town backed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would give the White House sweeping new powers over companies that operate “covered critical infrastructure” or (CCI). And more than that, the bill would eliminate a vital aspect of the [...]
Washington Times reporter Shaun Waterman has a characteristically excellent article out today about U.S. cybersecurity authorities failing to secure their own systems. According to a new report by government auditors, systems at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), part of the Department of Homeland Security, were not maintained with updates and security patches in [...]
Individuals, shadowy criminal organizations, and nation states all now have the capacity to devastate modern societies through computer attacks. It’s simply not true. The author must not know the meaning of “devastate,” which is, according to the handiest Web dictionary, “to lay waste; render desolate.” There is no such capacity—anywhere—to do such damage through computer [...]
The Washington Post reports today on an article coming out in Foreign Affairs in which Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III reveals a successful 2008 intrusion into military computer systems. Malicious code placed on a thumb drive by a foreign intelligence agency uploaded itself onto a network run by the U.S. military’s Central Command [...]
Check out national security reporter Shaun Waterman’s report on lapses in security using techniques that only recently became known as “social engineering.” Ms. Sage’s connections invited her to speak at a private-sector security conference in Miami, and to review an important technical paper by a NASA researcher. Several invited her to dinner. And there were [...]
Congressmen working on national intelligence and homeland security either don’t know how to secure their own home Wi-Fi networks (it’s easy!) or don’t understand why they should bother. If you live outside the Beltway, you might think the response to this problem would be to redouble efforts to educate everyone about the importance of personal [...]
Reliable national security reporter Siobhan Gorman at the Wall Street Journal has broken a story about an Internet surveillance program called “Perfect Citizen” to be managed by the National Security Agency. Reading about it is frustrating, and for me blame quickly settles on Congress. Our legislature is utterly supine before the national security bureaucracy, which [...]
May 23, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
