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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."
Will the second internet have Third Life?
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
"We need a second Internet so we can make it easier to spy on you and track you."
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
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.
Sorry, but changing the "structure of the internet" because some former policeman says it would be a good thing just ain't a persuasive argument. If anything, take whatever he says and do the opposite.
"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.
-- Will program for bandwidth
"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?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I don't care about your needs to "successfully fight cyber crime" which to me translates to "successfully sniff out rats".
I care about speed, anonymity and integrity of data.
That very annoying "internets" word will be real and I won't be able to threaten to kill a puppy every time sombody that should know better uses it.
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... the FBI want's a pony.
What do we do when the second internet is overrun? Building a new internet everytime "cyber-criminals" get on it sounds expensive...
If only we could create a second, more secure Nigeria.
Education is the silver bullet.
There is only so much we can do to secure any network from attack. There will always be ways to spoof identities, and commit illegal acts. Retooling the whole thing won't make a different in that regard. We may up the bar a little, but that won't last for long. People will think of new ways to work around what we can think of today.
On the other hand, I wouldn't mind an overhaul on DNS and SMTP to slow some spammers and other jerks down.
The real problem is the diverse nature of laws between different countries and the strong enforcement in some places and near zero enforcement elsewhere. Think about it, someone in Russia can do almost anything outside their country and not be prosecuted. In other places, we have parts of the Internet filtered because of some lame moral code.
I just wish these people who don't understand the spirit of the Internet would take their marbles and go home.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I'm not going to be lectured about the internet by Dr. McDreamy.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Oh that's just great. So just because poor mr Dempsey woke up one day believing that someone wasn't ready for a fictional fight then we all should just drop the world's communications infrastructures and rebuild it according to mr Dempsey's vision. For the sake of those poor unprepared legal systems, of course. And also the world's safety. And the children, now that we are at it.
What mr Dempsey is advocating is nothing more than taking over the control of the medium. No one has it and he wants it badly, claiming that it's in everyone's best interests to be controlled by an overreaching, totalitarian organization. Well guess what mr Dempsey, the internet works great just as it is and no one benefits from having a righteous mr Dempsey, head of the internets, fighting the fight that those poor, fictional legal systems are supposedly incapable of carrying out.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
"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.
.. with blackjack, and hookers!
saying that the Internet has become a sanctury for cyber-criminals is a lot like saying the physical world has become a sanctuary for (non-cyber) criminals.
Both are probably true.
I won't disagree with the assertion that the internet is a game-changer when it comes to criminal investigations, but the idea that we should castrate it for this reason is ridiculous. The dinosaur who raised this complaint is clearly a digital immigrant. Most of his generation lacks the level of familiarity necessary to effectively investigate crimes involving the internet. The problem goes beyond a simple matter of training. A good investigator needs an intuitive understanding of how people interact with their world, including the internet, more than they need an intimate understanding of protocols.
The next generation of investigators will be digital natives. They'll have grown up with the web, email, blogs, message boards, IM, flickr, youtube, social networking, and the like. They won't all have CCNAs, but they'll have a sufficient understanding of how people use the internet to know when to bring in forensic experts.
The transition will be difficult. The digital immigrants with extensive investigative experience and the digital natives who are novices in their profession will have to cooperate and exchange their knowledge and wisdom, and in the meantime, some criminals will slip through the cracks. That's the price of progress.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Let all of the various conglomerates move all of their online advertising, and shopping, and noise to a new internet.
We all stand and applaud, then cut them off from ever returning to the old internet.
Then we can go back to the days of sharing information and having fun without that stupid "punch the monkey" ilk...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
so we can re-use our old forms. It's a bit surprising how effective this is.
--
Patrick J. Dempsey, your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting international "cybercrime." Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from nation to nation.)
( ) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) legitimate Internet uses would be affected
(x) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) it will protect us for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) users of the Internet will not put up with it
(x) microsoft will not put up with it
(x) the police will not put up with it
(x) requires too much cooperation from criminals
(x) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) many users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) lack of centrally controlling authority for the Internet
(x) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) asshats
(x) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) huge existing software investment in the Internet
(x) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
(x) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) extreme profitability of international crime
(x) joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with criminals
(x) dishonesty on the part of criminals themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
(x) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
(x) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) i don't want the government reading my email
( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
( ) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
(x) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
This guy is angling for a huge budget to do with what he wants. Which is probably scouring the Internet for free porn during office hours.
1. I can't do my job because of X.
2. Changing X would fix that problem.
3. Therefore, we should change X.
With no regard for whether X has any value of its own. Open your eyes and look outside of your own field before you decide to change the world in your favor.
Visit the
"The problem is various legal systems are unprepared for the fight..."
I think Mr. Dempsey misspelled 'all'...
"Doing law enforcement is getting harder, so let's change the rules"
I see this now in almost every arena of law enforcement... and for good reason. It *is* getting harder to do low enforcement. The thought process is something like this: "As law enforcement, we know we're failing; we can't really stop the criminals, so let's treat everyone as a suspect." Basically enforcing laws is a traditional behavior. It is the way to maintain stability and control on society and in a similar way that traditions maintain cultural norms. Traditional behaviors are the antithesis of innovation.
Technology is changing at a breakneck pace, and increasing in the speed of change. It is hard, nigh impossible for large, bureaucratic, rules-based organizations to keep pace with innovation in technology, and the concomitant adoption by criminals.
The disturbing thing is that instead of law enforcement innovating to keep up with the demands of the job, many in law enforcement have lobbied successfully to change the rules of the game. This is most true in the United States over the last five years with the tired dirge: "give up your liberties or the terrorists will win".
I think the correct solution is to change the way we do law enforcement. Change the people who do it. Make smaller, more nimble organizations. Change the speed with which law enforcement operates. Remove entrenched, non-technical savvy deadweight from organizations. Incorporate the latest technology. Change quickly with the rest of society and keep the fundamental principles that make open society possible and successful.
And for christ's sakes, please stop degrading people by forcing them to take off their clothing and shoes to board an airplane. I know, it seems totally off topic, but the same idea we can't really stop the criminals, so let's treat everyone as a suspect.
Upon reading the article summary, I thought the guy must be nuts.
After reading the article, however, and carefully thinking about his ideas, I've concluded that he is instead an idiot.
Has this man never heard of Metcalfe's Law? His second, registration-only internet will be about as popular as BITNET and Telenet are these days. (Yes, Virginia there were globe-spanning networks before the Internet. It's true!)
While he's at it, he might as well call for a second telephone system, one that only allows people to say nice things.
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:
I call for a second FBI.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Actually, the internet is a sanctuary for cyber criminals. You don't find cyber criminals holding up armoured trucks at gun point, regular meat criminals do that, you find cyber criminals on the interwebs. That's why they're cyber criminals. The intertubes are a sanctuary for cyber criminals for exactly the same reason that the FBI is a sanctuary for corrupt FBI agents.
I totally recommend creating a second internet, and a second FBI, a second stock market, a second local primary school. Everything.
No one thing should get all the cred for harbouring criminals. If people want to be paranoid and really stupid, let them be paranoid and really stupid and have a good laugh at their expense.
I don't therefore I'm not.
I suppose that you'll need to have a national ID card before connecting to this second internet.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
Go ahead, Mr. Dempsey, start your new Internet. You act as if creating a new one requires some sort of special permission, but you'd be wrong. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from creating another Internet using TCP/IP or whatever protocol you like. You can design it any way you want. You can even run Web servers on port 90210 if you like. Hell, you might even find a way to run the whole thing on NetBEUI. I doubt it, but don't let me kill your dream. I'm sure MS will be glad to modify it so it'd work...for a price. So you go right ahead and start your new Internet. Get everything set up, then you can get back to us. If we like what you've built, maybe we'll come over for a visit. I doubt it, but don't let me discourage you.
Now, maybe I'm mis-remembering here, but I seem to remember hearing about this little doo-dad called "Internet 2." You know, for scientists and certain authorized parties and such.
But yeah, we definitely need to get to work on that "Internet 3." Screw Web 2.0, I'm already on Internet 3!
-G
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Yeah, and these newfangled "automobiles" make it so much harder for the cops to catch crooks, since the cops now have to move so much faster, and even cooperate with cops in the next county. Instead of the cops getting automobiles and some radios of their own, we should get rid of automobiles, make them illegal, and instead give everyone some other kind of automobiles that all have cutoff switches in their motors that cops can stop with their radios.
And no criminals will ever figure out how to wire around the cutoff switches. Then cops can just go back to being lazy again. Oh, and by the way, we should let the cops trample all over our rights that we discarded because protecting those rights was too much work.
I feel safer already. Don't you?
--
make install -not war
Dr. Montgomery, on the other hand, is more than welcome.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I guess it's a matter of taste, but holy moly, this story pretty much epitomizes the Slashdot Troll Story. At least it's a new* variety of Troll Story (see also, the RIAA-Bites-Man story, the Crazy-Patent story, the Pro-Microsoft story, the Spammer-Tells-his-Story story, the now-faded SCO story, and many more).
* I write this half-expecting someone to produce an old Slashdot story about a crackpot scheme involving setting up a New Internet in order to fight crime.
... where the agents are significantly smarter than this ex First FBI agent.
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.
Former FBI Official Imaj Oke stated today that We need a new earth due to the massive amounts of crime and terrorism on this one.
"Our current planet is so rife with criminal activity that we need to populate a new planet that will be restricted only to fully law abiding citizens." He said at an interview earlier this afternoon, "Once we have established the new planet the old one will, of course no longer be necessary and will be dismantled for parts."
Oke went on to describe the technical merits of the new planet stating that life on the planet would be fully controlled by benevolent corporate monopoly interests to ensure that nobody's intellectual property is infringed.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
Yes, we need a new Good Internet that the FBI, SS, RIAA, etc. will make safe and legal for everyone. The rest of us will stay on this one (to be renamed Evilnet).
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Pedo 2: 13, f, nyc. u?
Pedo 1: 12, f, nyc 2! Hmm, a network of only 13-year-olds.... So the real question is, would it be one giant digg?
Clearly, he hasn't read that the current Internet has a provision for this: the Evil Bit set in the IP header, as specified in RFC 3514, published 1 April 2003.
Dog is my co-pilot.
is it SPAM? Phishing? DDOS attacks? Or is it child porn, terrorism and that kind of things?
If it's the first, then it's not a new internet we need, but rather to fix what is allowing these attacks to take place.
If it's the second, then my friend, there's no solution. Crime was committed before the internet. Changing the internet won't solve crime. Child porn happens because children are kidnapped and abused. And that happens OUTSIDE the internet. Perhaps we need to spend less money on Iraq and more money on programs to prevent child abuse and all that.
If you want children not to be approached by stranger adults, then make some kind of "child ID" using a centralized certification authority or something. Or how about EDUCATING YOUR KIDS?
Just like you need a driver's license to use the public road system, or a passport to fly, you will need a Internet license.
If the identifier for a block of data is a hash of the data, you can verify its integrity without knowing a hill of beans about who or where it came from.
If the link pointing to a secured, anonymous site is a hash of the site's public key, you can verify that the site you're talking to can use the corresponding private key, which is the same thing SSL buys you. The high-priced "secure site certificates" just certify that the owner of $DNS_NAME also owns $PUBLIC_KEY; if you got a self-authenticating link from another web site you trust, the level of assurance is comparable.
If the algorithms that underpin this stuff are broken then the whole digital security house of cards is toast, including "High Assurance SSL Certificates" (Now with green pixel paint for your clients' address bars! Sorry, cross-site scripting protection not included.)
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
I heard NYPD will be testing this new concept developed by FBI: to deal with the Russian mafia problem a second, more secure Brooklyn will be set up on the outskirts of Ruby Valley, Nevada.
Can't he just recommend that routers check for the "evil bit"? It would be about as effective and much easier.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It has been a long time since I've seen such a terribly written post filled with so much garbage reach the score 5 on Slashdot. I have no choice but to debunk the entire post piece by piece.
requiring convicted criminals to use a vpn would be a step in the right direction. also much easier to implement than trying to build an internet around catching crooks.How would this help catch anyone? How would you enforce it? How do you propose that you try to catch someone violating their VPN lock? Do you expect them to post to their MySpace while they're stealing credit card infos?
so what do you do with the criminals from Africa who are connected to organized crime, who have whole 'internet cafes' and people standing watch so they can get out of there if the 'police' come, who are more than likely on the take anyways...Seriously, you don't need your own accomplice cafe to be anonymous on the internet, much less to skirt some stupid probation condition like "only use the internet through our proxy/vpn." ---- Shit, okay I need to go see a woman, apparently, so I'll just end with this:
although i Seriously doubt they're going to make it easier for the movie and music industries to track down users, and catch them 'in the act' what is going to get targeted is the stuff that really steals from the banks, and the rich and gives it to the criminals.if i had the money I'd bet a billion dollars that within a decade hacking will be traceable world wide, through hardware ids before they get the money transfered from one bank account to another one.
Why do you need a billion dollars? I'll give you 10:1 odds on any amount you name. You don't understand anything, I am really embarrassed that Slashdot even ran this story, let alone give a post like yours a score of 5.
Seriously Slashdot, you guys fucking suck now.
I can't end this post though without commenting on the original article.
This is one of the worst written articles I've ever seen on Slashdot. It contains absolutely nothing that cannot be solidly labeled "FUD." The article itself is all over the place, devoid of real-world examples you might get from a real journalist, and reads like it has been written by a child. It's very clear to me that Patrick J. Dempsey is not very intelligent, and does not understand the types of challenges that exist for internet security, nor does he understand the liberties we're used to enjoying here in The United States of America. Case in point: this guy's argument could be made in favor of putting cameras on every street corner and requiring everyone to carry federal (or international) identification cards.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Two police agent decoys have entrapped each other.
(and the handcuff party a few days later gets kinky)
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".
Why America needs a military censorship? America entered the period of deep difficulties. The image of secure haven was destroyed on 9/11. It is not cool anymore to live or to invest in the USA.
To remain a superpower the USA needs Siberia. Madeleine Albright declared that the resources of Siberia belong to the "whole humanity" (read the West). America and its European satellites prepare for the Great Crusade. Iraq and Iran are just a springboard.
The leaders of the USA realize that the financial and economical crisis are just the first signs of the decline. At the same time the BRIC countries experience 8 - 9 % growth, and the general opinion among economists is that it's just a beginning.
Why Siberia? The territory of Russia alone is almost 5 times larger that of the whole EU. Almost all resources of the world, energy, metals, etc. are in Siberia. Who controls Siberia - controls the world economy.
The USA occupied shortly the Siberia in 1918 and 1919 but was fought out by the bolshevics. They want to replay it. America prepares for the war. The radars, the record military budget, the 700 military bases, the expansion of NATO are parts of this historical process.
The price of the gas in the USA exceeded 3 USD, soon it will be 4+. Those who were in the USA and know how it is built realize that Amrica simply will not be able to function with the expensive petrol.
When Vladimir Putin was asked of his opinion on this Madeleine Albright's ideas he answered that it showed that the course on the strengthening of the defense was correct. So the world is nearing the new great war. That is why the military censorship, the second Internet for the "democracies", is needed.
We are already working on a second "Internet" its called "Freenet" and it aims to eliminate many of the current problems with the Internet such as censorship and accountability.
Segregating the Internet!!!! Why do I get dejavu when I think of that? Oh what that's how it all started.
Honestly this idiot is suggesting we work backwards and devolve the Internet.
~Dan
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I wouldn't care if the "new internet" is highly censored, controlled and governed by tough international rules laws and security restrictions - as long as I can switch on the good old internet 1.0 aka the "anarchy net". Bank affairs and work goes through Internet 2... pr0n, IRC chatting, Quake playing, warez hunting and wikileaks reading goes through internet 1.
Here's my prediction:
As the government tries more and more to clamp down on the internet and bandwidth becomes more and more free OR the government successfully forces us to go to this "Second" internet (let's call this "surveillance net"), people will come up with a new "freenet" to lay on top of this new freedom restricting internet.
All it would take would be an open source program protocol that would pass information over the "surveillance net" by encoding the data, chopping it up, and passing it through multiple nodes (think parallel, not serial distribution) before it gets to the recipient. That way nobody (i.e. government) at any single node would be able to tell what data was being passed or even to who. This would successfully nuke any second internet benefits. With this expectation of a free internet that the general masses have grown to expect, I think you'd get a large percentage of people who were willing to be freenet nodes. (you can of course try to mandate this like bittorrent nodes where you have to be a node on the freenet in order to use the freenet).
I think all this really requires is that bandwidth be cheap and a push by the government to clap down on internet freedoms. I think we'd very quickly see a counter-revolution and open source developers would create the freenet.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
There may be a need for a "new" net, but the goals would be completely different.
Such a network would need to provide things like distributed caching by default and censorship resistance, as well as anonymity.
For example the network would cache all cachable protocolls by default, as often as it can be done. Then no site could be slashdotted again as many of the routers in between would just cache the content. A great side effect is that the identity of the originator of the request would be obscured by the routers.
Another important point is that it must not have any "single points of control" like the DNS-system or IP allocations.
Furthermore we would need to focus on every participant beeing able to route. The network must not be tree-like anymore. If you have wireless LAN and your neighbour has, too, there must be automatic peering.
Another idea would be to make it work on scaresly connected networks. Imagine you have a mobile device. It could try to fetch your encrypted (!) e-mail and fetch it whenever you have a connection. Every router in the connection would try to accept the request and cache the response until you have a connection again.
Most of the security and crime problems associated with the Internet are problems with the client, not the network. In other words, Microsoft Windows is the problem.
If desktop clients ran each browser window in a separate jail, and downloaded programs were constrained by NSA SELinux type mandatory security, or a virtual machine monitor, to stay in their individual compartments, most of the attacks on personal computers would stop working.
If it weren't for those armies of zombie PCs out there, hiding where something unwanted was coming from on the network wouldn't work. Look what's happened to spam. Today, essentially all spam involves compromised machines. Any that doesn't is shut down, fast.
Ir's all Microsoft's fault.
So once again police is finding it difficult to keep up with technology and ask us to limit the technology for investigation purposes. This seems to be just yet another attempt at introducing a police state in the wake of 9-11. I say no thanks!
The internet as we know it today has evolved from an ideology of a few researchers. Vennevar Bush, who proposed the Memex system in 1945 that made it possible to link information sources via interactive computing. Ted Nelson, who thought of the hypertext system, which links texts with keywords in a very different way and that we still use today. And Tim Berners-Lee who brought the dreams of this information network into reality with his World Wide Web. The ideology of these men was that information should be available everywhere, for everyone, at any time, for free. Everyone should participate in this World Wide Web and should be unrestricted in any use. From this freedom, that is more and more restricted by some governments, hackers from all over the world have developed better software and even helped making the internet what it is today. Hackers are the watchdog of the ideology of this freedom and get there support from internet users from all over the world. The Aibot hacks wouldn't be so successful if the Slashdot community didn't support it at the time.
The internet shouldn't be made more 'secure' by the government. The internet as we know it, is designed as a network which gives everyone the opportunity to participate. Restricting these 'rights' would be against the ideology from which the internet is build. We should see the internet as a public domain, where users are responsible and should watch for cybercrime and fight it. Let's think of securing the internet by participating as users instead of giving this out hands to the government.
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.
My Sig: SEGV
Although it isn't what this guy is looking for, we do have SIPRNet.
Exactly how long does he think it will take before someone, somewhere, installs a router between the old Internet and the New Internet?
I would guess it might take slightly longer than a nanosecond. But not by much. Most of the first New Internet routers will be installed in schools, to protect the children. I'm pretty sure that there is at least one evil grad student in one of our schools who is fully capable of configuring a router.
On second thought, the New Internet would probably be connected to the Old Internet before it even boots up for the first time.
Could someone tell law enforcement and the media that they must have missed the memo where we all stopped using "cyber" a long time ago?
Seriously... every time I hear "cyberthis" or "cyberthat", it's inevitably someone in law enforcment, the media or k-12 education (but talking about some enforcement issue). The cops are the worst... every unit they create is cyber-something... I guess they think it sounds cool. In actuality, it's more like hearing your grandpa say "gettin' jiggy with it".
However, if they're serious about such an endeavour they should go study with those who've already begun this sort of thing: China.
I'm sorry, Mr. Dempsey, sometimes a job just has to be hard.
- I am made of meat.
Accountability is a good thing. This is not a question of accountability, it's a question of whom you are accountable to.
It's a very short step from finding scammers and criminals and holding them accountable to finding political dissidents and persecuting them. You cannot have one without the strong likelihood of the other. If the potential for abuse occurs, then abuse is inevitable.
blah blah blah
"You were hiding jews in your house ? Prepare to die !"
Accountability means that you are accountable to someone. That someone can easily abuse his powers; Hell, even the finnish police, the police of the state repeatedly voted the least corrupt in the world, began abusing the kiddie porn filter immediately after it was implemented. There is no authority worth the trust accountability requires.
Unfortunately, in Real Life, accountability is a neccessity. While it inevitably leads to abuses, lack of it means us violent monkeys live up to our murderous nature and rape, kill and loot each other. That's why we have governments, nation-states and courts of law.
However, it is impossible to murder anyone in the Internet. It is just as impossible to rape them, or cut a single hair from their heads. It is impossible to even rob them - altought it is possible to spy on them enough to gain access to their online accounts, which is one of the reasons why I don't have any. In fact it is impossible to do anything except say something nasty to them.
So, why would we need accountability in the Internet ? Who, exactly speaking, is actually being hurt by the spam, botnets or porn ? No one.
No, this "accountability online" is simply a guise for tracking down the people who leak nasty secrets of politicians and corporations, in order to punish them and thus cause a chilling effect. Internet and especially the anonymous protocols working on top of it - such as Tor and Freenet - are every politicians worst nightmare: an information propagation channel they can't block. "The truth shall set you free", so is it any wonder that every overlord in history has tried to prevent it from getting out ?
A democratic society - indeed, any free society - needs an anonymous communication channel with no accountability of what you say. If that is also useful for criminals, then that is simply the price you have to pay. The alternative is freedom of speech a la Soviet Russia: you are free to pee on Lenin's statue while shouting "down with communism", but you'll be sent to a Siberian labor camp for it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
WASHINGTON D.C. (AP) -- "All we're saying is that we want our country to be a real country again, one where we can have faith in our constitution, one that is grounded in the rule of law," said Jason Smith, spokesperson for the group "Americans For a Free America (AFFA)." Smith continued: "we have the backing of several million Americans. Our group is committed to ensuring that our government returns to being constitutional, and that our country stops this slide that has turned it into a "dictatorial banana republic." Our charter states that this must be accomplished using constitutional, non-violent means, and part of what needs to be done is that we need a "second FBI." While it is clear that most agents in the FBI we have now are honest, hard working Americans who believe in protecting our country AND the rights of it's citizens it is just as clear that there is a criminal group operating above (and infiltrating within) the FBI."
When contacted for comment on the AFFA group, agent Johnson of the FBI commented: "It is clear that AFFA is a domestic terror group, all they want to talk about is freedom when we are fighting an endless war. We need to be able to do whatever we want because most certainly this group may kill babies, torture puppies and bomb buildings. This cannot be allowed."
When presented with the quote above, Smith replied "This is why we're calling for a second FBI, the criminals in our government have ruined the first FBI by either asking them to, or allowing them to commit crimes against the people; and be clear, we are not saying most FBI agents are criminals, that isn't the case, my uncle was a fed, but the corruption at the top and in certain "joint task forces" ruinz it for the 98% of good, America loving agents."
When asked what evidence the agency had of anything illegal acts by AFFA, or why they would suspect that a group committted to peace, freedom, and the rule of law would commit such heinous acts, I was detained and questioned for 10 hours about if I was part of a domestic terror group and whether I supported the constitution. I was released after I agreed to publish the following statement: "I now see that the the FBI is right, this group and their type is dangerous. We are all in danger, danger is everywhere, and the internets is where it hides."
My net is completely safe:
My ISP caps my download so I can't download evil viruses
My ISP throttles my p2p traffic so I can't download music and become infected with the terrorist virus and become one of them like the RIAA video says
My websurfing experience constantly pops up with anticybercrime tools that I can buy for only 19.95, I have 204 of those tools installed so far
I have norton, so my internet apps are all blocked anyways and my computer is too slow to let me experience the web and get terrible cybercrime done to me.
Also, I installed vista SP1 and now my computer boots to a blue screen so it is even safer.
Why another internet?
PS. Without my PC, I decided to go play outside and got hit by a bus. Damn you internet!!!
Well, if you feel that way, lets get away from the anonymity of the ballot box, eh?
I mean, you *would* support posting publicly your voting record for all elections wouldn't you? I mean, no need not to be held accountable for who you voted for in each election (or if you voted at all), right?
There are many reasons for true anonymity...political expression is just one of them. Of course with anything out there...you can use it for good and evil, but, if we were to toss out everything that could be used nefariously, we'd not have many freedoms or possessions left.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The ballot box is an unfortunate example, because it leads to confusing anonymity with confidentiality.
I have no problem with someone knowing that I have voted, and indeed a record of this fact is kept to ensure that I can't vote twice. I am thus not an anonymous voter, and I hope we'd agree that allowing arbitrary anonymous votes is not likely to meet with democratic success.
Who I voted for is a different question. That is private/confidential information. Since the information is not publicly available, I don't believe it is necessary for me to put my name to that information.
As it happens, there is also no crime that can be committed by voting in a certain way as long as I am casting my vote(s) according to the rules of the election, and no-one else's rights can be infringed by my doing so. Thus there would be no legitimate need to break confidentiality anyway. I think this is a separate issue to the anonymity question, though.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.