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.
Isn't the amount of money thrown at computer security a little high compared to the cost of setting up a free firewall like iptables and verifying that it works with nmap a little high?
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Of course. Peanuts can be highly effective weapons in the right hands. Especially if the terrorists have allergies. Or you could hurl the peanuts like small pebbles. Or you could .... um, look over there, a three headed monkey!
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
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).
Day 1: Throwing money at technology. - I have no problem with this. Most of us in some way work in the IT field and this means more money and jobs.
Day 2: Companies profiting from fear. - It's usually the stinkin' rich guys fearing for their luxury sports cars. This means they enlist security companies to safeguard themselves. More money for the little guys.
Day 3: Global assault on anonymity. - This one I have a problem with. I'm a little worried about private companies tracking our movements and stalking us for our money. We have a choice not to deal with that company and take our money elsewhere. But when the government does it, there is no escape. It's either let them do it or flee the country (not a very easy task for some).
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.
Part of the problem is that the concept of security, paradoxically, works against the very thing that it is designed to protect. Government agencies compete for the same pool of money and resources; not everyone will win the biggest slice of the $86 billion package. There are inter-agency rivalries, "politics-as-usual", and even backstabbing, as each group struggles to even understand what "security" means, and what it means to them in particular.
So, two things stand out to me:
1) Inconsistency in the vision of national security as each agency/special interest group has its own idea of security, complicated by divergent political interests and even hostile political rivalries, and further hindered by the administration's own unclear directives of what constitutes national security (you can't lead from bottom-up; there must be a cohesive, unified vision from top-down).
2) 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 demands of national security will sometimes rely on classified government contracts, covert operations, and the famous "wall of silence". Yet the human nature in this nation is such that we have TV programs like "Fleecing of America" by NBC that will "expose" the "vast abuses" by the government, at the expense of the average working taxpayers. We all want to know, but our very own livelihood demands sometimes that we NOT know. The wherefores and the how-to's of this controlling of information are very much at the heart of national security. (This is part of the reason why something like 9/11 is not likely to happen in a totalitarian state like North Korea, where the concept of privacy and freedom of the individual is absent.)
...during the gay marriage debate:
Isn't that important? Isn't that the ultimate homeland security -- standing up, defending marriage, defending the right for children to have moms and dads, to be raised in a nurturing and loving environment? Isn't that what this debate is all about?
Link
Throwing Monkeys at Technology????? Will this outsourcing nightmare never end???????
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
...chickpeas, lentils and mohair...
...peanut subsidy...
...pork in the robes...
Anybody else get hungry after reading this...?
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
One particularly large area where money is being aggressively thrown at is Technology, which is being seen as the solution to all the security problems (diplomacy, better foreign policy would work better IMHO), which is where the article gets the name from. It's not just about IT (or "cyber") security.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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.
Actually, two... there's two things I've always felt about taxes and taxation....
First, I agree that we need a government to form a cohesive society, and that government necessarily needs funds to operate. But the question is how big does the government NEED to be and how much should it spend on certain programs.
Idea 1: Keep income taxes, but allow people to decide where their income tax dollars go. For example, if I was a strong supporter of the "War on Terror", I could allocate more towards military... I think you'd see the pork go away as fast as lightening.
Idea 2: no income taxes, just "use" taxes... collected taxes can ONLY be used for what they were collected for... For example, gasoline tax can ONLY be used for road maintenance. People who use larger and more gas guzzling vehicles will pay more for the maintenance of the road. People who use the road very little pay very little (directly). Taxes collected on gasoline CAN NOT be used for anything not related to transportation infrastructure. Again, you'd see a LOT of pork projects die... how are you going to subsidize peanut farmers with that system?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
...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.
Tech Public Policy stuff