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U.S. Government To Get Cybersecurity Chief
cmason32 writes "The Bush administration is going to create a new Cybersecurity Chief position in the Homeland Security Department. The move is supposed to demonstrate the government's dedication to cracking down on hackers and 'cyberterror.' One of the responsibities of the position is to 'secure cyberspace.' However, critics are already noting the position is not likely to be effective."
I wouldn't just call this position ineffective. I would also call it a waste of taxpayer dollars, a way to abuse power, and a waste of time.
Eventually the americans will have THREE forms of government! The first is the regular government, followed closely by a Shadow government (For emergencies only, of course!), and finally a Cybergovernment!
Now when kids say they wanna grow up to be President, the teacher will have to ask "Will that be Shadow, Cyber, or Plain?"
I am a filthy pirate.
If you get to Guantanamo Bay before me, save me a cell, would you please?
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
A display lights up 'Secure cyberspace ON'.
Reminds me of one of my all time user requirement highlights. This was on a multi platform, multi system deployment which I was working on several interfaces for.
21.0 Error Recovery Process
When any error has occurred in across the system the user will select a fix error button. This will resolve all problems.
When I suggested that the button could call a routine to print a P45 for anyone selecting it I was accused of been unresponsive to user needs.
"Terrorism" in its many forms (I believe in the 50's they were referred to commies instead of terrorists) have been used as an excuse to pass Orwellian-style legislation here in the U.S. I think most of us would agree to as much. I see this whole homeland security program to have been little more than the legislated and executed implementation of more or less random spying on american citizens and it sickens me that this is being done in the name of patriotism. That is not what my father, nor his father fought for.
Chillingly, this mentality is now being brought to be applied to a vague concept... a buzzword. How will this be interpreted by our inadequate, bloated and outdated legal machinery of U.S. Government? Essentially, "securing cyberspace" is conceptually equivalent to "restricting information" or, for the non-slashdot crowd, the monitoring and policing of any and all communications services. Calls to your spouses and parents, its all fair game. When will it be enough? why do you, a good and honest person who has no intention of breaking the law or committing acts of terrorism, become the subject of inquiry? How far will we let this go?
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
I guess you can really tell the workers are on vacation for the holiday, because the only ones left to post on Slashdot are the goof-offs.
There are computer networks that run behind the scenes that maintain every utility that runs our lives, whether it be remotely-controllable circuit breakers on the bulk power grid, hydroelectric dam controls for power & water, the multiplexors that run the telephone systems, etc. It's cheaper to put a machine out in the field and run network cable to it, than to have a live person out at the station pushing the same buttons, so more and more infrastructure is getting networked, telemetered, and controllable...
Companies are increasingly relying on VPN and similar systems to allow workers to tunnel through the internet to connect to their business machines. Well all trust RSA encoding, but crack the operating system and you can use the tunnelling to get into a lot of restricted (price sensitive) data. Or maybe the company has a nifty database back-end to their site, and some buffer overruns gets you into schemas that weren't supposed to be exposed... Or it could be passwords on a stolen laptop. For whatever reasons, sites get hacked.
Right now, what do companies do? If they even notice the cyber attack, they fill out some NIPC forms, and the issue vanishes into the beaurocracy. Not exactly the best measure, because the NIPC doesn't have the authority like the FBI to investigate events... or read the NIPC homepage, even they admit that there were 4 government programs that were combined, each in some way did little pieces of the puzzle but noone had the big picture of the events.
My opinion? Appointing a Cyber-Security chief is a good thing, as long as there are additional steps taken to reduce the bloat of governement, by combining the other departments into one sector that can actually be effective in investigation. You have to not only create the position, but you have to give it the proper resources (like contacts at the FBI & NSA) who can properly identify crackers going after government resources, and hunt them down. Adding another level of red tape isn't going to accomplish much, but any step in the direction of securing national & private sector secrets is a good thing.