Slashdot Mirror
CNET's in-depth Coverage of IT security
museumpeace writes "Starting today
CNET news is running a
3 day series of reports and analysis
of government and industry responses to the challenge of making America safe. While it primarily focuses on the technology content of these tangled issues, the report also tries to sort out the impact politics-as-usual is having on this presumably critical national concern...there is plenty of muck to rake: "As if chickpeas, lentils and mohair have anything to do with national security. One congressman even stated that a peanut subsidy, with a $3.5 billion price tag, 'strengthens America's national security,'" the 335,000-member group said. "Members of Congress have been cloaking old-fashioned pork in the robes of 'security' for the 'homeland.'"Lots to read here and registered CNET readers can put in their two cents.
Throwing Money at Techology is the title of the leading report for today and that sums up much of what is going on."
Thanks, George!
John
I have no problems paying taxes if I know it isn't going into pork-projects and the pockets of Politicians. I doubt many would disagree...
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
"Throwing Money" at the problem is exactly what some users do on a personal level. There's a huge number of people who buy a firewall, antivirus program, etc. when free tools exist, and when a different browser would help solve the problem immensely. Then after spending $100 on a security suite, they wonder why the computer is acting up. "I spent money to prevent this, it can't possibly break!"
I think this shows how important it is for the community to keep non-govt supported efforts going. See for example the Internet Storm Center. Just compare the amount of useful information they put out compared with what you get for your tax dollars from places like US-CERT.
It seems to me they can never throw enough money at the IT security front to label it "Secure" there is always going to be a hole that can be found. Just like everything else that the goverment deals in they will continue to say they throw all this money on the issue only to have a considerable percentage moved to funding issues that the american public knows nothing about.
If some of the US government institutions insist on using Windows, then they should at least use open source security software, such as TrueCrypt (truecrypt.sourceforge.net).
A split government is better for all America. I support Kerry and the Democratic party in general, but I am *extremely* skeptical about having a one-party government.
I wish we could expect more from our elected officials but america is the house that greed built. It seems fitting that greed will be our eventual downfall.
A 9/11 is not likely to happen in the DPRK becuase Kim Jong Il is not stupid enough to piss off the middle east by meddling in their power struggles or supporting Israel's terrorism against the Palestinean people.
It doesn't matter who is 'right' or 'wrong' in the middle east, the fact is that 9/11 and the situation in Iraq is simply a byproduct of our own foreign policy, not anything else.
The notion of security, in a strange, Orwellian way, goes against some of the most treasured principles of this country: Freedom of thought, and freedom of the expression of those thoughts.
The point is, Freedom is security. As you give up liberties so the government can protect you, you lose the power to protect yourself from the government. And history shows that people have a lot more to fear from their own government than from external threats.
Unfortunately people tend not to focus on the large scale threats. Just like a hoodlum who knocks over a 7-11 gets 20 years while a crooked CEO who steals millions is slapped on the wrist, people ignore the fact that the US already imprisons a greater percentage of its population of any country in the world, in favor of less severe but more immediate threats.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You are, like most people, and nearly everybody in Congress, confusing the idea of secrecy with the idea of security. A properly secure system is one with the absolute minimum of secrets needed to secure it. Secrets are too fragile; once you lose one, you can never get it back. Modern cryptosystems are a perfect example of good security. Almost everything is open; the algorithm is open, the implementation is open, the protocol is open, the key generation method is open. The only thing that's secret is the actual key itself, which is only a few hundred or thousand bits of information.
Making every government operation secret will not make us safer. A terrorist organization will be able to find out as much as it wants about our power, water, and transportation infrastructure, whether we let them have it or not.
Our government is trying to keep everything from the public view, despite the fact that it's ineffective. This might be because they're stupid, which is highly plausible. It might be because they're trying to give the appearance of helping, which is also highly plausible. Lastly, it might be because they've seized on this golden opportunity to expand government power and secrecy with the support of the public. This one is sure to be popular among the tin-foil-hat crowd.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I used to work at Law Journal Extra, which was a gopher system run on Pipeline software, later bought by Law.com. There I read that the Internet was based on open protocols and was basically insecure and highly susceptible to malicious activity, which would become a big problem as it became commercialized. Then I became an editor at Foreign Affairs magazine and tried to get them to run an article about cyberterrorism. They didn't have much interest in that although they did run several articles about terrorism and the threat of WMD in the hands of terrorists. Since then there have of course been billions of dollars in damage due to viruses, and the security situation has gotten so bad that a teenager in the Philippines could put together a virus using tools that could bring down major web sites that handle tons of commercial activity, but they've still only run one piece addressing this to my knowledge. Notably the administration has been wrongly focused on the threat of WMD and not basic infrastructure security. This is because of a general lack of understanding about computers among journalists and policymakers IMO.
For the most part I agree with you. The problem being it will never change. This diversity is society. You seem to noice only the bad in every individual or event. Everyone is made up of both parts. People want change. We rarely take the steps neccisary to make the change happen. Or we attempt steps that are construed incorrectly causing an even worse image (Iraq). The point is: You have a choice. You understand your dislikes. You can either grumble and complain about them. Or do something. If ignorant people bother you. Don't force yourself into their environment.
taxes were originally introduced as a way to fund governments-starting with "royal" type governments,well.. as a way to fund government. Government doesn't work or produce, but they need tangibles to exist, tangibles and power over it's citizenry, a way to have a carrot and a stick. "Taxes"-enforced removable of portable wealth from individuals to a collective known as government- gave them both, so they were adopted by governmnets far and wide since way back in the olden days.
That was then, this is now.
The reason why they were necessary to be collected back thenwas because "money" was tangible based back then, whether it was precious metal portable-wealth barter coins or actual "stuff" like food and firewood and cattle and so on. "Taxes" were collected using all those products.
Nowadays, we have a *completely* artifical monetary system where the "money" is created out of thin air. Literally created poof out of thin air as computer entries for most of it, and a much smaller percentage as printed up pieces of paper, where a hundred dollar "note" costs as much as a one dollar "note", and even the bulk of portable barter wealth "coinage" in common use is base metals based, ie, cheap relatively speaking to produce.
In a closer look, "taxes" are not needed on the general population at all. The only limit should be a rational limit of how much is introduced into circulation by the government so as to not over inflate beyond what has been reasonably produced and is "backed" as it were by the sum totality of goods and services produced in the last economic reporting cycle of choice.
"Taxes" are now used as a full bore command and control measure over the populations to keep the elite in power.
There is NO reason for taxes when the government prints up the money. None. Zero economic reason. there is a power wielding reason., but no economic reason. All the various tax schemes and codes at the federal "income" level, whether currently implemented or "proposed" by well meaning tax change advocates fail to address this glaringly obvious and undeniable data, and are a sham and a fraud and a mass fakeout, well meaning as they are.
For international trade there needs to be a rational multiple-tangibles based "money-trade-product" that can be used for trade, but at the interior domestic level inside a huge nation like the US, taxes are MORE archaic than buggywhips, just they have 99.999999% of the population completely faked out that they are "necessary", and that includes most of the high level political and economic "thinkers" out there who are widely published.
Until you change back from an artifical fiat currency system, taxes should just be totally abolished at the federal level. That is the only true tax "reform" needed.
Of course, "government" will need some new and improved carrot and stick combination to hold over their citizenry's heads, but that is another subject entirely.
I keep meaning to write a detailed paper on this "tax" mass societal fakeout run by the central bankers in almost all nations,especially in the US as we are a pretty important component of global trade, maybe I will soon, because this is really bugging me. It is the "emperor has no clothes" on viagra, steroids, jolt cola and crack.
I wish one of the larger third parties would adopt this as a campaign platform plank, it *would* get noticed perhaps.
Under Clinton's leadership, the budget deficit deficit of 290.4 billion dollars, to a 236.4 billion dollar surplus, in eight years. That is fiscal conservatism.
Only if you value freedom above all else. For most people this is not the case.
Indeed, I'd go as far as to say that for most people freedom is not an end at all, but a means. The remaining few go off to live in caves up mountains in the hope they will be forgotten and so have as much freedom as the laws of physics etc will allow them.
Security is useless if it does not allow us freedom, the concept upon which this nation was founded.
You need to be more careful with your demonstrative pronouns.
Anyway, that nation was founded on the concept of limited freedom for land owning, white, male people.
[...] a country which promises freedom. Of course, based on your URL, you don't seem to live in one anyway.
I don't value promises from politicians as highly as you seem to.
But you are drifting from the point which was simply that there really is a trade off between liberty and security, there is no point wishing there wasn't. If you wish to live with the liberties of an adult, you have to let go of the security of childhood. If you want to regain that security you have to give up some of your liberty. People know this and make their own choices. There is no point telling people they can't get security from the reduction of liberty, because they can see that their life is more secure than the hairy bloke living in the cave up the mountain.
The secret of living in civilisation is to live as if you had the liberty while taking the security when available. To sit at the front of the bus, you have to have both an attitude and a bus.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
My first reaction is to jump on you with both feet but you're probably a teenager because a lot of teens have thought of this. So I'll just ask some questions instead.
Re: Idea 1: what if people don't put enough money toward something important, like defense? What if they put way, way too much money toward something, like defense?
How does this make pork go away? This very example, peanut subsidies, has been cloaked in homeland security terms. Who desides which programs fall under which category? It would be decided by the same people who create or at least permit the nonsense that already happens.
Re: Idea 2: How does a "use" tax pay for defense? If invading Iraq has made me less safe, can I get a tax refund? Are you going to tax the air I breathe to pay for EPA monitoring to help keep the air clean? Are you going to tax every ATM transaction to pay for FDIC? Under your plan, will there be a transition from FEMA providing money to hurricane survivors to collecting taxes from survivors for the cleanup?
Since most "use" taxes these days are sales taxes imposed by states, let's get to some more local questions. When a recovering junky steals my car stereo to pay the use tax on methadone, do I pay the police officer filling out the report immediately or should the police station send me a bill? When the fire dept. puts out my kitchen fire, am I the only one who pays the tax or do my neighbors pay as well since the dept. prevented the fire from spreading to their houses? Do the people living two doors down pay less than the people next door? If I buy a 30' yacht,will it be tax-free if I only sail in international waters?
OK, the point is, there's no way every tax payer can be well informed about how much money is needed for any given government activity and not only is there not a "use" to tie every government activity to, very often the people that are benefiting from that activity are the ones who cannot pay.
We have this now. It's called voting.
...where the money is not just printed up out of thin air now.
Show me details of where "money" comes from. the actual digits, both electronic and paper and coin. I want to see detailed proof it's based on something other than just printed up paper or digitized up, created from nothing. We'll leave clad coins out because obviously they are metallic, and we'll both agree that paper and ink is paper and ink, what I am asking is proof that this money existed before the Fed decides to create it. Please provide references and an audit trail going way back that is viewable by the public. Proof, not rhetoric or indignation, actual bonafide proof that this money is something, that it's not as I assert just created out of thin air.
What I wrote, if you read it more carefully, would still address and provide your list of governmental services, it eliminates the redundancy and skimming aspect to the current system,it addressed the issue of inflation and what limits need to be put on the money supply in circulation, and is a lot closer to what we currently have as a system than what you might apparently think.
this is why I made a kool aid reference, people just haven't acknowledged where "money" comes from here. You have to start with the same set of data, my data suggests money that we have now is artificially created and is based on nothing more than force of government and inertia. If you or anyone can prove that these FRNs are based on anything else, or actually existed as money before they were created in a computer, I sure would like to see it.
The cause of this wave of terrorism really doens't have a lot to do with US government policy and less to do with Israel/Palestine.
It is because there is a great deal of anger and frustration brought on by the use of the money we have spent on oil in the Middle East not on public education and infrastructure and the other things required to build a First World society, but on building up the bank accounts of the kings and sheiks and princes whose countries have the oil and perhaps more important, on the security apparatuses and military organizations necessary to keep angry internal customers from putting them permanently out of business.
Their main tactic for keeping their citizens off their backs has historically been using religion as a tool to persuade their people that their troubles are not a result of their own government's inaction, but caused by EVIL WESTERN INFIDELS!!!
That's most of us.
In the course of this, they've worked with their religious institutions and religious leaders to create a generation of anti-Western fanatics ripe for exploitation by terrorists and are funding the spread of this ideology everywhere in the Muslim world.
The long-term solution to this is to reallocate much of the "War on Terror" funding to programs to replace oil from the Middle East with carbon-neutral biomass and solar energy solutions like the Solar Power Satellite program scrapped by the Bush Administration. Simply deleting the "snake oil" items like biometric ID from the anti-terror budget should by itself fund a good part of this. A rational analyis of the budget should find many places where we can cut funding without cutting security, and a few places where we should spend more money.
There is also an excellent chance that energy alternatives will also wind up much, much cheaper than $53 a barrel oil, whose price is escalating with no relief in sight, unless we make some. Stronger money, stronger nation, and this also will make it possible to spend more money on the military in the long run should we find that we have to.
Cutting off the funding the oil nations require to keep their governments in business against the will of their citizens and to export terror into the Western world means future terrorist efforts will have to be locally funded.
While this doesn't mean that terrorism will be eliminated, it will reduce its incidence and severity to something law enforcement can deal with as European governments have successfully dealt with terrorists for generations. The older Europeans around here will remember terrorist organizations like Baader-Meinhof and the Red Army, and that law enforcement working with intel agencies nailed them. The people responsible for the al-Queda bombing in Spain are already behind bars. Did the Europeans turn their societies into police states to make themselves safe from terror? Other than the Brit experiment with Orwellian surveillance they are engaged in, no.
This kind of bill does not need to be passed in the heat of an election. We are more secure with NO law rather than this one. Buying snake oil doesn't buy security, it's more likely to be a political payoff to the snake oul vendors using our money.
For more information on the technology side of energy replacement, click here for a summary with links to the DOE, University of New Hampshire, and NASA sites relevant to a program of this sort.
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