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Former FBI Agent Calls for a Second Internet
An anonymous reader writes "Former FBI Agent Patrick J. Dempsey warns that the Internet has become a sanctuary for cyber criminals and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet. Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials. The problem is various legal systems are unprepared for the fight, which is why he claims we must change the structure of the Internet."
Someone give this guy a VPN.
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
"We're too stupid to deal with this interweb thingy, so we need the entire world to change how things are done to accommodate our incompetence."
Yeah, that's going to happen.
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"Former FBI Agent Patrick J. Dempsey warns that the Internet has become a sanctuary for cyber criminals
Any time you have a new community or resource to exploit, there will be criminals. However, calling it a sanctuary is hardly apt. I can think of more than a few places that are a sanctuary for criminals, yet you won't see the government razing those neighborhoods and starting anew, would you? Besides, who gets called a criminal?
and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet.
Ummmm, no. What he means is that they want to form a new network that can routinely be filtered, scanned and probed with no means of anonymity (already going away) or flexibility.
Dempsey explains that, in order to successfully fight cyber crime, law enforcement officials need to move much faster than average investigators and cooperate with international law enforcement officials.
How about figuring out how to deploy a network within your own agency first, that agency employees can actually use?
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Since major cities have more crime than before why don't create new cities.
As opposed to extraditing murderers, mafiaa members etc is easy with respect to "traditional" crimes?Why hire competent people who technology as tools and adapt your law enforcement agency when you change the world around you to adapt to your incompetence?
And for those who says "Think of the children": No law can effectively parent your child for you. Do you damn duty.
When the government or agents of the government ask for something, the opposite is probably in your best interest.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
What do we do when the second internet is overrun? Building a new internet everytime "cyber-criminals" get on it sounds expensive...
"If we accept the fact that the greatest hurdle in arresting international cyber criminals is that various legal systems just aren't prepared to address the speed at which these crimes occur or the various nuances that are unique to computer crimes, then the question is: What can we do to fix the problem?"
So, he goes from acknowledging that there's a jurisdictional problem and a speed problem when it comes to law enforcement to creating a new "verified" internet where you have to "prove" who you are? Umm..no.
And he goes on to hit every hot topic in security today: DDOS, identity theft. spam, etc. And then, he makes the claim "the fact is that Internet crimes are almost always international crimes." And he doesn't back it up, rather gives anecdotal evidence of a hacker in Russia using computers in Thailand to steal data.
I am not a security expert (and I'm not pretending to be) but this "sky is falling" mentality is crap. Most identity theft (the act of stealing) is not done over the internet, its done locally. Yes, selling lists of thousands of SSNs and credit card #s happens over the internet, but the thievery itself doesn't.
In fact, this would make things worse: you're creating a global ID. Once someone steals your global ID they can do whatever they want. And once again, your ID wouldn't be stolen over the "new" internet, it would be stolen because you didn't shred a document and someone went dumpster diving.
This doesn't solve any problems.
Although Dempsey says that a solution "might be" a second internet, which to me sounds silly, he does make some very valid points on how cybercrime needs to be handled across borders.
It seems that many countries just want to forbid things, with regards to the internet, rather than adjust to a new way of looking at crime committed through the internet.
If it turns out that law enforcement can't or won't adjust to the speed in which cybercriminals operate, maybe the only way to help prevent crime is to educate the users, or even help write better software (against spoofing etc.).
Seriously, does it surprise anyone that law enforcement wants a more "secure" and hence traceable, internet? The Law is moving in on this frontier; some of the residents demand it, and cops always want more power.
Heinlein wrote about this decades ago - "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." Great read, and extremely relevant.
Soooo how are they going to stop people from just layering an anonymous protocol on top of whatever they force on to people?
Soooo how are they going to stop people from encrypting data and obfuscating it?
Soooo how are they going to stop people form implementing a "slow drip" protocol through random nodes which is also encrypted?
There is absolutely no way to police the Internet without significantly impacting response times, etc. QoS will suck and they will still never be able to touch 99.99% of the "criminals".
This has to be the only reason, in fact, and not just one of them. Cybercrime can be stopped without any monitoring!
The article talks about hacking into bank accounts and identity theft etc. So if the government wants to crack down on this, why don't they just mandate that banks have to send their customers a bootable read only flash drive that contains a basic operating system, browser, SSL certificates and a one time pad? It wouldn't matter how badly some clueless moron's computer was trojaned to hell, because the bank would only accept connections from the booted flash drive.
You can't get mugged on the internet. You can't be coerced on the internet. Criminals need YOUR COOPERATION.
The U.S. could also stop using checks like every other civilized country, because they're a ridiculously huge security hole and a huge pain in the ass compared to direct bank transfer. But all of this would make too much sense, because none of it involves more government monitoring of its citizens.
The land of the free. Where no laws must ever tell corporations what to do, but citizens must compensate for their ineptness by being spied upon.
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I am amazed that anyone is falling for the internet as a criminal nest nonsense. Obviously whenever any very large group of people does anything at all some crime must occur. It's all about proportion. How many people died world wide fighting to keep their bicycle from being stolen last year? How many died because of internet activity? We all know bicycles were far ahead in the crime stats. So should we build an entirely different society to keep bicycles from being stolen? Obviously not. And we don't need a new net either.