Cybersecurity and Piracy on the High Seas

Schneier points out an interesting article comparing modern cybersecurity to piracy on the high seas in the early 1800s. The article extends the comparison into projected action based on historical context. "Similarly, in many ways, current U.S. policy on the security of electronic commerce is similar to Adams' appeasement approach to the Barbary pirates. The U.S. government's inability to dictate a consistent cyber commerce protection policy is creating a financial burden on the U.S. private sector to maintain a status quo, when those resources could be used to mount a more-effective Internet-focused defense. In the case of financial fraud on the Internet, the costs associated with fraudulent transactions are currently borne by private companies, which then have to pass those costs on to their customers. This basically creates a system in which the financial institutions are paying a type of 'tribute' to the cyber criminals, just as Adams did to the Barbary pirates."

Comments

What do you know?

[DrHackenbush]

Interesting. Government is less effective than private companies. Who would have guessed?

Re:What do you know?

[smooth wombat]

Government is less effective than private companies. Who would have guessed?

Yeah. Look at what a great job private companies (Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Citigroup) did making loans. They were so effective at making loans, the government had to bail them out.

It's great to criticize government (I'm usually first in line) but when you're comparing something that large to one company, you can't. It's like comparing an oil tanker to a cigarette boat. Who do you think is more nimble?

Re:What do you know?

[maxume]

Saying the government bailed out all of those companies is a gross and horrible oversimplification.

People who Bear Stearns owed money to got bailed out. Bear Stearns no longer exists as a company(most of the operations continue to exist under J.P. Morgan).

Countrywide and Citigroup didn't get anything more than cheap credit from the government.

Re:What do you know?

[morgan_greywolf]

No, the U.S. government gave a line of credit to J.P. Morgan Chase and essentially ordered them to bail them out -- IOW, paying off Bear Stearns' creditors.

Re:What do you know?

[DarkOx]

Yeah. Look at what a great job private companies (Bear Stearns, Countrywide, Citigroup) did making loans. They were so effective at making loans, the government had to bail them out. That is the real tragedy of it all the government did not have to bail them out. They chose to at the expense of everyone as well as the future to help at a few people who should have know better. Bear Stearns should have been allowed to fail. The investors should have lost it all. That the game called investing. You can win and sometimes you can lose. Bear Stearns was posting huge profits by investing in risky loans themsevels. This was foolish, lost of people knew it. Lots of people did not get suckered in to loads with crazy and unknown payment scheduals, lots of people chose not to invest in Bear Stearns, no matter how good it looked.

In the end if the Governement had not chosen to ROB ( yes rob take MY money with the THREAT of FORCE ) me by using my tax dollars in a giveaway to bail out some bankers they would be gone. Ultimately Bear Sterns practices proved to be unvaible and inefficent the market had it been leaft alone would have eliminated that inefficency, leaving only more effient ( in this case more conservative ) banks behind and the same for hedge fund mangers and the idiot investors.

What the government did is break the free market! As the FED buying up these risky ( already expected to fail as far as the markets concerned ) securities from other banks and lendors like Countrywide well that is a travasty too. That does not benifet anyone living on main street its only good for big investment bankers. Conuntrywide had a liquidy problem and they could have solved it without a bailout.

Don't you think they can produce a list of customers who always pay on time and in greater amount then the schedule demands. Those are probably the same people who have other assets. If they needed capital so bad they might have approached those people who are using debt responsibly and made an offer. They could have said hey give use 20 or 30K tomorow and we will write down 60K off your loan. They get the cash they need today you get the time value of your money back. Maybe those responsible individuals would have even been rewarded with basicaly wipeing out all the intrest costs on their loans. That would have been great for middle class Americans.

It would have transfered wealth from the wealthy to the middle without any government force. It would have been the market at work. So if you are thinking gee maybe the goverment should help me out prices are going up and I am getting squeezed left an right, consider maybe what you should ask for is the goverment to just stop ripping you off, to pad the wallets of the already wealthy.

I am a middle class American. I work hard and I am responsible with money I carry only secure debt( debt owed on assests salable for that amount or more) my house. This credit crisis should have been a boon for me; but Uncle Sam stole from the poor and gave to the rich. That is what always happens when the government regulates. Even if your are big liberal you know Hillary and Obama are members of the top 1% or so and they are never going to do something thats good for you or the poorer classes. They are as selfish as everyone else, maybe more so and I have little help McCain will be any better. Congress is the real problem anyway. The president only matters in that a good one might stop some of Congresses downright criminal behaviors.

Re:silly

[thygrrr]

Err, it's not about software piracy.

Oddly enough...

[Moryath]

the "Barbary Pirates" were actually privateers and muslim terrorists.

The response the US got back from the Barbary ambassador was that their taking captive sailors and forcing them to either convert or be killed was "founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise." (quote the direct words of Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja , the Dey of Algiers to Britain).

Muslim terrorism isn't a new thing, it's been going on since Mohammed killed Safiya Bint Huyyay's entire tribe, cut her father's head off in front of her, raped her, then declared it a "marriage" the next day when his troops started grumbling that he always got the hottest chicks for his personal slaves.

Re:Oddly enough...

[CRCulver]

While the religious basis of the Barbary pirates' acts is contentious (as is Washington's supposed insistence that the U.S. is a specifically Christian nation), I'd highly recommend reading up about the Barbary Wars in London's Victory in Tripoli . Most Americans don't learn much about these skirmishes in school, since the usual course is just to skip from the American Revolution straight to the War of 1812 when covering wars. That's a pity, because the fight against the Barbary pirates was a big part of shaping the U.S. military into what it is today. It's not for nothing that the Marine's song references the shores of Tripoli (the Halls of Montezuma line is also a sadly forgotten episode).

Re:Oddly enough...

[WaltBusterkeys]

Most Americans don't learn much about these skirmishes in school . . . . That's a pity, because the fight against the Barbary pirates was a big part of shaping the U.S. military into what it is today.

There's just not enough time in most school history classes to teach the kids something meaningful about all of the very major wars (Revolution, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam) that even some of the medium-sized wars (French and Indian, 1812, Korea) get short shrift. It's not a coincidence that Korea is called the "forgotten war." It'd be great if every high school kid had as much curiosity and interest about history as you clearly do, but it's just not the case. One survey, admittedly not very scientific, found that 57% of high school students didn't know that the Civil War was in the last half of the 19th century.

That's pretty bad. I'd much rather fix that than worry about teaching them about Barbary pirates. Maybe the right solution is more edu-tainment programming; it seems that your lesson to be taken from the Barbaray pirates is not dates and places, but more of a zeitgeist about the forces that were acting on the US in the early days. Some of that can be captured in a good period piece--think Pirates of the Caribbean, except not entirely fictionalized.

Similarly, it looks some somebody has already made silly videos about " protecting web booty" to riff on the pirate/cybersecurity theme.

Re:Oddly enough...

[Zadaz]

At my school we got halfway through the American Revolution, then went straight to the summer break. When we came back in the fall we were studying WWII, leaving me to infer that the colonies had won independence.

I didn't even know there was an American civil war until I visited the south, where I found out it's still being fought.

Re:Oddly enough...

[SydShamino]

There's just not enough time in most school history classes to teach the kids something meaningful about all of the very major wars (Revolution, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam) that even some of the medium-sized wars (French and Indian, 1812, Korea) get short shrift. Why are we concentrating on the wars at all? What about the things that shaped our country's history between the wars?

My wife has been reading a 1930s high school U.S. history textbook, and has been fascinated by the descriptions of interpersonal relationships between various politicians at different stages in the country's history. The period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War in a modern text usually merits a page or two about Andrew Jackson, then the build-up to the war in terms of slavery and economic strife. The period between the Civil War and World War I often gets the same treatment.

How much about some of those wars truly matters? Who besides a history scholar cares the name of the British general in the Revolutionary War? Why cover WWI at all? Just leave that to a Western Civilization history class, which would certainly devote more time to its causes. Maybe mention it in terms of the mass-production revolution, and use it to lead into the subsequent economic boom, and leave it at that.

Talk more about the things that shaped the government, politics, and disagreements that our country still faces today, and you'll have students leaving the classes with a better understanding of the country they live in now. Memorizing dates and names from war to war leaves almost everyone forgetting everything, and never learning anything.

(Oh, and I loved my U.S. history class way back when, got a 5 on the AP test, and have done research on the Civil War. Please don't attack my credibility or say I just hate the wars or just hate history; comment on the merits of my proposal.)

Re:Oddly enough...

[khallow]

Well, hard to say. First, whether the Vietnam War was "frivilous" is a matter of opinion. It's cast as such. As I see it, the US did have legitimate concerns about the so-called "domino effect", namely that if communism (as practiced by the USSR and China at the time) could establish itself in Vietnam, then neighboring countries would be destabilized as well. A better approach would have been to enable Vietnam to be sufficiently independent of China, like Yugoslavia was from the USSR. That probably would have worked since Vietnam was already playing a bit the USSR against China. Then the US could have had some leverage down the road to make Vietnam a more democratic country and inclined to support US interests in the region.

If one looks at the actually conduct of the war, you can see how it was going to be impossible to win definitively by the US. North Vietnam was hardened by the long struggle against France while South Vietnam was created on the spur of the moment and never really worked. At some points, South Vietnam's military and political leaders seemed more interested in profit (say by selling heroin to US troops, for example) than fighting. The US and South Vietnam couldn't invade North Vietnam directly. Nor could they effectively hit the supply lines for guerilla efforts in South Vietnam, again because so much of it was on someone else's territory. Strategically and tactically, it was a major failure for the US and a disaster for South Vietnam.

I think the primary result from the US's point of view was the discrediting of the US government. This was solidified by the resignation of both President Nixon and Vice President Agnew due to scandal. Further, I think it contributed to a lot of the social changes of the era (though many of the bigger changes predate the Vietnam War, like racial desegregation and increasing immigration). Militarily it has ended casual use of the draft, the US version of forced conscription, and helped steer the US towards its current army structure. A couple of innovations (from the US point of view) were improvements in combined arms (for example helicopter-supported infantry or close air support), targeting ordinance (the so-called "smart bomb", wire-guided missiles, etc), and the use of special forces. A lot of the tactics and technology used in places like Iraq were developed in the wake of Vietnam.

Re:Pah

[TripMaster Monkey]

***WARNING***

Link in parent is malicious. Do not click.

(Honestly, dude...it's getting old...)

The modern internet piracy dictionary

[imyy4u2]

Looks like modern pirates would have a lot of words to relearn...

Hijacking - 1. Taking over a post on Slashdot.

Terrorism - 1. DOS attack against all the root DNS servers simultaneously. 2. Slashdotting a website.

"Arrrr..." - 1. Phrase uttered by someone who has just been linked to goatse.cz

One-Eye - 1. Asshole.

Pirate Flag - 1. Used to indicate a box has been pwned. 2. Used by Maddox (maddox.xmission.com) as a TM.

Booty - 1. A woman's butt.

Instead of Car Analogies...

[amplt1337]

...now we have bad boat analogies. Great.

Looks like the argument is "the government should be more involved in actually doing something." This is undoubtedly true; it's the government's job to set safety standards and to fight crime.

But really this is just an article that says "Hey, why not have the government fight crime?" with nautical window dressing. The author's better off scuttling the piracy angle.

21st century version of a protection racket?

[PoliTech]

"The Bashaw, ruler of a semi-autonomous Ottoman province, was the leader of the loose confederation that became known as the Barbary States, and he ran an 18th-century version of what we today would call a protection racket."

So is it the anti malware vendors running the 21st century version of a protection racket?

Apparently so from TFA, ... either that, or it's just more FUD to encourage government control (read taxation) of the internet.

You can't have it both ways

[dave562]

Either the government stays out of regulating and securing the internet or they don't. Which one do you really want? Do you want the government to be responsible for internet security enough to give them free reign to the point where they have control over all content? Or do you want to hold private industry responsible for securing their business transactions?

I'm of the opinion that the government should be there to hold private industry liable for any breaches of personal data that leads to fraud. If someone steals my credit information and makes purchases with them, the credit card company should be on the hook for not verifying the identity of the person who made the purchase. The merchant should be on the hook for not verifying the identity of the purchaser. The whole system needs to be changed. Instead of giving out free credit, they need to only give credit to those who ask for it. Turn it from a push to a pull system and validate the hell out of the puller.

On an only semi-related tangant, I'm waiting for the explosion in fraudulant health care claims. The health care cards themselves are simple pieces of paper. It is easy to get a picture idea with your picture and someone else's name on it. With the cost of health care skyrocketting in this country it is only a matter of time before people start getting health services under someone else's name. And I already know what is going to happen... the person whose name got abused is going to be liable for it, not the health providers who okayed the procedure in the first place.

WTF is this guy talking about?

[TubeSteak]

We can go back to the example of how this strategy can be a success by looking at U.S. efforts on the illegal drug trade's supply lines across the Caribbean. The harassment, search and seizure activities effectively raised the cost of transporting illegal drugs, thereby forcing many drug cartels to build more-expensive transportation networks, and in some cases forcing criminals out of the market altogether. The US War on Drugs has led to lower prices and higher purity of the product being smuggled into the country.

The rest of this article is full of similar crap ideas and analogies.

Aaron Turner, who manages security technology transfer and commercialization for the Idaho National Laboratory, previously worked in several of Microsoft's security divisions. Oh. I see.
I guess it's easier to create an international body to oversee the internet than get Microsoft to put out a secure product.

Re:WTF is this guy talking about?

[RiotingPacifist]

The US War on Drugs has led to lower prices and higher purity of the product being smuggled into the country. Nice choice of words, the real question is weather what gets sold is higher or lower purity, id guess that if the stuff is higher purity it just means local dealers cut it with more shit.

And whoever decided to call tenager who were thinking of copying music pirates, sould realise 2 thing:
1) You cant copy a bar of gold only take it, so the analogy is as fundamentally flawed as all those Wifi analogies!
2) Pirates are cool
Infact who ever made pirates of the carabian really shot themselves in the foot with regards to piracy "Come watch our film, because pirates are cool. NOOO! dont copy it pirates are bad!"

Credit card fraud? Bah

[IdeaMan]

His analogy of credit card fraud to piracy just hogwash. Credit card fraud typically doesn't occur by ISP's snooping on internet traffic because that is just too dangerous to the ISP's business and reputation. It's just easier to crack open someones database to harvest the numbers.

His analogy works far better when talking about Net Neutrality. You could say that ISPs are charging tribute based on packet type. The closest you could get is if a foreign country started blocking traffic to Amazon, or if say a British ISP started removing/substituting ads from American websites.

Article summary:
Its like if you were driving your car filled with Natalie Portman dolls filled with hot grits across the Atlantic at 5 furlongs per fortnight and the RIAA stopped you and robbed all the dolls. Except on the net where its LOCs of data per fortnight, not dolls. What he's saying is that we should call out the US Army to kill all the RIAA lawyers, but of course that should be illegal but they changed the law recently because of the Katrina reaction so now it isn't.

Shhh!

[TheOldSchooler]

Don't let W. hear this. Next thing you know we'll be sending the Internet Marines to invade Romania.

Re:silly

[JamesP]

And as the old saying says...

Say no to Piracy! Don't steal ships.

As History Shows

[Stormcrow309]

Hell, lets resolve this like they did back then. Give me an unit of marines, a naval squadron, and three times as many mercenaries. I will just shoot the hackers. Sing the song be damed, we'll just shoot them in the head.

So what? Piracy is not This.

[westbake]

Software "piracy", entertainment "piracy", phishing ... the author is obviously conflating these things under the banner of IP and suggesting that there's an economic argument similar to one raised when the US was a free republic. The differences are glaring and obvious:

• This is an attack on US Citizen rights to share and conduct commerce in a free way.
• There is little common economic interest because the victims are media and software monopolies and users of their products.
• The fight against industrial espionage and phishing is easily won by avoiding Microsoft Windows but those responsible are everywhere and nearly impossible to track, where pirates hide in well known, impossible to avoid places.
• There already are massive law enforcement efforts to catch frauds.
• Oh yeah, that big one, pirates murder people and steal real property. Sharing things is good. Draining bank accounts is bad, but it's not murder. The copyright warriors are nuts.

Dude, WTF are YOU talking about?

[LanMan04]

The US War on Drugs has led to lower prices and higher purity of the product being smuggled into the country. I would *love* to see the logic behind that one. I'm sure you have no citation because it doesn't make any sense.

Did the street price of booze go up or down during Prohibition? I'm betting up.

Muslim != terrorist

[kurisuto]

It is an anachronism to use the term "muslim terrorists" to refer to criminals of the early 19th century engaged in piracy for profit. Whether you think American and European policy in the Middle East over the last century has been right or wrong, it is fairly safe to say that "muslim terrorism" over the past few decades has been a consequence of those policies. It is a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st centuries.

When you look at the historical record over many centuries, it's hard to say whether Muslims or Christians have been worse in terms of violent acts. On their side of the ledger, Christians have the crusades (which included the slaughter of the Rhineland Jews, among other atrocities), the complete annihilation of the Cathars, and the burning of accused witches, just to name a few of the more obvious examples.

Most Muslims and Christians aren't terrorists, either now or at any time in history. There are obvious political or propoganda reasons for repeatedly using the words "muslim" and "terrorist" in the same context, but I don't think that doing so is helping the cause of sustainable peace.

Re:Muslim != terrorist

[Moryath]

Muslims who kidnap people and either kill them, or enslave them, unless they convert?

I'd call that terrorism. Fully Koranic-supported terrorism, btw.

Not much.

[mcmonkey]

Interesting. Government is less effective than private companies. Who would have guessed?

It seems you (and the authors of the article) are missing a key point. Yes, international trade grew on a foundation of international and maritine law, but only after the Marines went in and kicked some Barbary butt. In that sense, government is more effective than private companies. (At least, private companies that don't have their own army and navy.)

Countries were able to reach peaceful agreements on how they would treat each others' ships at sea and use each others' ports only with the very real threat of military action.

To make an analogy to the internet, is there a real threat the USA will take militry action against Russia if that country continues to be a source of internet crime?

It's nice to say all countries in the 21st century have an interest in peaceful, orderly trade via the internet, just as countries had an interest in peaceful, orderly trade via shipping in the 18th. But the reality is, open shipping came at the point of a gun. If the analogy holds up, then is the same true for the internet?

Mod Parent UP

[postbigbang]

Very few political entities are bereft of terrorism. Schier once again makes numerous mistakes in pointing to the culpable. The culpable are: all of us, ranging from users teaching users, to ISPs, to the website owners, to the makers of protocols with holes like Swiss cheese (and apologies to the Swiss). It could be fixed, but no one wants to claim the nexus of responsibility.

The terrorism label is a red herring, great for propaganda and useless war mongering. No one doubts the existence of many organizations that will murder, some en masse, in the name of their cause.

It's IMHO even worse

[Moraelin]

Well, IMHO the worst analogy is even in the summmary. Basically: (A) businesses lose money to fraud, which supposedly is like (B) the government paying tribute to the pirates.

I mean... Umm, excuse me? They don't look at all similar to me. Just because they share one element, it doesn't automatically make two things similar.

If it automatically did, we'd have a hell of a lot of ridiculous "similarities" all over the place. E.g., (A) the government still can't stop cars from killing innocent people, (B) Stalin and Pol Pot killed innocent people too. Ergo, any western government is no better than those murderous regimes. E.g., (A) the fire departments often can't save everyone from a fire, (B) the Spanish Inquisition burned a lot of people alive. Etc.

But to get back on topic: Similar to the losses to pirates, ok, I can swallow. Similar to the government paying off pireates, no, just now. It'll be similar when the government tries to pay off cyber-crooks or something.

Basically (A) is a case of maybe the government not doing enough, while (B) is a case of the government actively doing the wrong (and arguably bloody stupid thing.) Other than as a melodramatic hyperbole, they're not the same thing at all.

And if we're to go even deeper into it, it gets even more lame than that. The barbary piracy resulted in not just a _hell_ of a loss of money (the tribute demanded alone was 1/10 of the federal government's yearly income), and a rather serious disruption of trade, but also loss of lives, and a bunch of people taken into slavery. One of the explicit conditions at the end of the Second Barbary war was that they stop the practice of taking Christian slaves.

It takes a really disturbed mind to see, basically, "yeah, well, I'm not getting as much interest as I could on my bank account" as similar to someone else being taken into slavery.