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Behind Cyberwar FUD
Nicola Hahn writes "The inevitable occurred this week as The Economist broached the topic of cyberwar with a couple of articles in its July 3rd issue. The first article concludes that 'countries should agree on more modest accords, or even just informal "rules of the road" that would raise the political cost of cyber-attacks.' It also makes vague references to 'greater co-operation between governments and the private sector.' When attribution is a lost cause (and it is), international treaties are meaningless because there's no way to determine if a participant has broken them. The second recommendation is even more alarming because it's using a loaded phrase that, in the past couple of years, has been wielded by those who advocate Orwellian solutions. The other article is a morass of conflicting messages. It presumes to focus on cyberwar, yet the bulk of the material deals with cybercrime and run-of-the-mill espionage. Then there's also the standard ploy of hypothetical scenarios: depicting how we might be attacked and what the potential outcome of these attacks could be. The author concludes with the ominous warning that terrorists 'prefer the gory theatre of suicide-bombings to the anonymity of computer sabotage — for now.' What's truly disturbing is that The Economist never goes beyond a superficial analysis of the topic to examine what's driving all of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (PDF), a subject dealt with in this Lockdown 2010 white paper."
i guess you have never read it before. Economist is a private interest mouthpiece that serves whatever their financiers tell them to do, depending on what their backers need as policy at any given period. Judging from the contents of your summary, one can easily say that this time the group they are licking the boots of is RIAA.
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The Economist is a bit conservative on the side business, but as far as being their lackey - I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes they come out with things that can be interpreted as almost anti-business. They've also been doing some rather critical pieces on BP lately as an example.
Or is BP behind on their payments to the Economist?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
The internet was designed for convenience and reliability, not security.
The logical conclusion should be, "disconnect security sensitive systems from the Internet, go back to the older ways of managing those systems and design more secure networks for those systems." Oh, sorry, I forgot that convenience is actually more important than anything else, so that will never happen.
Palm trees and 8
Before you start dismissing the article without reading it, they do have a very good point that cyberattacks by governments should have consequences for those for those governments. If Russia were to blow up the HQ of a company they didn't like, everybody would up in arms about, but if they hire a bunch of script kiddies to go in an wipe the company's server farm (effectively destroying the company), it probably wouldn't even draw a comment from the State Department. That's not a good precedent to set for the future...
So called followers of Adam Smith have been reading the old boy a bit since the crash,and realised that he would have disapproved of almost everything they were supporting. The Economist hasn't really admitted that they bet their money on the bob-tailed nag - but they do seem recently to have remembered a bit that AS was opposed to cartels, and supported the free exchange of information.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
America. America is driving the cyber war nonsense and the reason is clear. the natural progression of our regularly scheduled wars that operate on ~4 year cycle is boring the american public, who are tired of
sending their kids to the meatgrinder in some third world hell-desert. American voters are also tired of high taxes required to pay for these "necessary wars" that drive GDP up, but in the long term which most americans
and politicians dont concern themselves with, bankrupt a nation.
Drones made war more popular by removing the "little johnny isnt coming home" factor from war, but their most recent theatre also made them politically despicable as they became used casually to invade sovereign states to bomb the living shit out of army bases and cars with "suspected" terrorist leaders. This set the precedent for any country with an agenda to disregard national sovereignty because, well, america does too.
cyberwar is an innocuous catchall thats managed by a US military entity (the airforce,) sufficiently complex as to avoid questioning by the general populous, and can easily be related to americans in terms of website hacks, email hacks, etc...to such an extent as to drive support and backing for cyberwars. Cyberwars, being ambiguous and beyond comprehension by joe six-pack also enjoy the luxury of being cheap, or expensive, depending on the size of the pocketbook and willingness of the nation to spend.
Cyberwar, like the war on terror, is designed as a continued investment by quite likely the very same government entrenched corporations that drove most any of the other wars we've had. it doesnt seek to protect anyone or solve anything, only create new consumer products the likes of the AR-15 and the hummer and line the pockets of the richest and most vile human beings who have ever come under the service of the people of the united states of america. And so long as we have potbellied senators from the carolinas barking cyberwar, there will always be a market for what we fear but do not understand.
Good people go to bed earlier.
For those of us in-the-know, it's painful to see people like you here on Slashdot. Due to NDA and various laws, we obviously can't go pointing out exactly how the USA truly is at risk.
Rest assured that this stuff is on the Internet, it's buggy as hell, it's misconfigured, and the passwords are as lame as you can imagine. We're already hacked into, at all levels, both government and private.
The main limitations for the attackers are a lack of obscure knowledge and their own preference for quietly stealing information. Why screw with a super-crufty undocumented railroad control system when you could be reading Hillary's email or picking up a copy of the F-35 radar software?