While on vacation last week, I finished up a few new cyber-policy books and one of them was Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake. The two men certainly possess the right qualifications for a review of the subject. Clarke was National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism during the Clinton years and also served in the Reagan and two Bush administrations. Knake is an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where he specializes in cybersecurity.
Clarke and Knake’s book is important if for no other reason than, as they note, “there are few books on cyber war.” (p. 261) Thus, their treatment of the issue will likely remain the most relevant text in the field for some time to come.
They define cyber war as “actions by a nation-state to penetrate another nation’s computers or networks for the purposes of causing damage or disruption” (p. 6) and they argue that such actions are on the rise. And they also claim that the U.S. has the most to lose if and when a major cyber war breaks out, since we are now so utterly dependent upon digital technologies and networks.
At their best, Clarke and Knake walk the reader through the mechanics of cyber war, who some of the key players and countries are who could engage in it, and identify what the costs of such of war would entail. Other times, however, the book suffers from a somewhat hysterical tone, as the authors are out here not just to describe cyber war, but to also issue a clarion call for regulatory action to combat it. Ryan Singel of Wired, for example, has taken issue with the book’s “doomsday scenario that stretches credulity” and claims that “Like most cyberwar pundits, Clarke puts a shine on his fear mongering by regurgitating long-ago debunked hacker horror stories.” Bruce Schneier and Jim Harper have raised similar concerns elsewhere.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
McCotter’s Plan to Expand DMCA-Style Take-Downs
by Jim Harper on April 25, 2010 · 10 comments
The “Cyber Privacy Act”? No it ain’t!
Michigan Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R) has introduced a bill to create a take-down regime for personal information akin to the widely abused DMCA process. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act established a system where copyright holders could as a practical matter force content off the Internet simply by requesting it.
McCotter’s proposal would similarly regulate every Internet site that has a comment section. He thinks it’s going to protect privacy, but he’s sorely mistaken. Its passage would undermine privacy and limit free speech.
I’ll take you through how McCotter’s gotten it wrong.
The operative language of H.R. 5108 is:
The Federal Trade Commission would enforce the failure to abide by requests as it does unfair and deceptive trade practices. (Meaning: penalties.)
So if someone posts his or her name in a comment section and later regrets it, the operator of that web site would have to take it down. Sounds nice—and that is the right thing for webmasters to do when the circumstances warrant. But what about when they don’t? Continue reading →