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Obama Wants Big Hike In Cybersecurity Research
dcblogs writes "The White House 2012 budget seeks a 35% increase to $548 million in cybersecurity research and development, including funds to help DARPA mitigate the risk of insider threats. Think WikiLeaks. Improving control system security, post Stuxnet, was also cited as priority. Overall, the budget seeks $66.1 billion for basic and applied research across all areas, an 11.6% increase. Some areas called out for special focus by the White House include robotics. The feds have already started offering grants for developing of 'co-robots,' which are 'systems that can safely co-exist in close proximity to or in physical contact with humans in the pursuit of mundane, dangerous, precise or expensive tasks.' The US also wants to focus research on nanomanufacturing, 'and the merging of self-assembly with lithography to achieve large-scale predictable placement of nanoscale components.'"
There will always be people who are mad and/or insane enough to attack us.
The key is to realize that we could defend our country just fine on half of the budget.
Note that a large portion of the money for DARPA is going to cybersecurity research with Mudge of the L0pht as the DARPA Program Manager.
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/219725/government_employs_hackers_in_brave_new_scheme.html
[2] http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/darpas-star-hacker-looks-to-wikileak-proof-the-pentagon/
[3] http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/07/internet-creators-ask-hackers-help/
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/219725/government_employs_hackers_in_brave_new_scheme.html
"...harness those within the hacking community who typically present research at black or white hat conventions but whose work flies under the radar of DARPA."
"hacker incubators" and made it clear that the DoD would not request commercial rights to any innovations discovered.
" a new type of Windows rootkit that was undetectable and almost impossible to remove." http://crowdleaks.org/hbgary-inc-working-on-secret-rootkit-project-codename-magenta/
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If it's really important, don't put it on the Internet. If routing over another physical network is too expensive, encrypt it.
There. Problem solved. All I ask is 10% of what they are planning to spend on this problem. I think that's reasonable. I'll be by the Treasury to pick up my money on Tuesday. I'll be the one in the Bugatti Veyron, which the dealers will happily front me when I explain to them what I've done.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
All that fancy stuff is useful in theory, but in reality will pale in comparison with boots on the ground, from both the practical and economic standpoint. A fully automated Big Brother security system sounds impressive, but you still have to keep it working and up to date over time, even if there aren't any exploitable bugs in it.
Techno P. T. Barnums are plentiful, and always ready to collect your money. And in this case, there's a politician looking for an easy answer born every minuite.
Cyber is the longer, more old fashioned way of saying e- or i-. We use to call it cyberwarfare, now we don't have time for that, and so we call it iWar.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Most attacks have nothing to do with being mad, Most are organized crime, doing it to make a buck. The next largest subset are simply vandal type hackers doing it to amuse themselves. Very few are politically motivated.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
The key is to realize that we could defend our country just fine on half of the budget.
Unfortunately you'll find neither major party willing to say that because they're all in the pocket of defense contractors. Like most things, third parties and independents are the answer...
Ahh, but how does a third party get elected or how do we change the positions of the big parties to fix the problem? Personally I think the answer is lobbing reform. That should be the swing issue tackled, rather than the level of government spending. Allow me to explain.
Most Americans when polled can't agree on programs where money should be cut that will significantly reduce spending. You'll have a hard time finding any significant area of spending where 50% of citizens want cuts. At the same time polls show something like 80% of Americans in favor of banning lobbying by corporations, more than 90% in favor of banning lobbying by foreign governments. There's even popular support for making it illegally for lobbyists to so much as organize fundraisers. And yet nothing is done. This is because our current elected officials pretty much universally benefit from current laws.
There is popular support to back a reform candidate, third party, or subset of a major party that focuses on the issue of government corruption, and the influence of lobbyists. People get mad about lobbying and corruption and they are right to do so. This just needs to be harnessed to get people elected on promises of doing something about it. If the tea party, for example, focused on that topic they'd be getting a lot more support from the other end of the political spectrum, of course since the tea party is largely run, promoted, and marketed by lobbyists this is unlikely. Still, a real grassroots campaign could be run.
Rather than supporting third parties and hoping they'll help, why not focus on why all congress critters are in the pockets of defense contractors in the first place. It's because the lobbyists of those defense contractors get them elected by supporting their party's coffers, organizing fundraisers, and sometimes directly running media campaigns. The public doesn't want that and making it an issue can get those people to stop relying upon those lobbyists or get them replaced by others not suckling at their teat. A solid strategy is better than throwing your vote behind a losing candidate as a protest. The focus should be on lobbying reform and let the chips fall where they may.
I don't see why this is modded flamebait. It's naive to think that, but naive =/= flamebait necessarily.
Does anyone here actually think everything the US does that annoys people with computers is necessary? I mean, former ambassador John Bolton runs around yelling on Fox that we should bomb Iran pretty much every day. If Iran were -reasonable- they'd think about putting child porn on his computer. It certainly doesn't discourage them from funding cyberwarfare against the rest of us.
I think if our government were to take a reasonable response to Wikileaks rather than trying to burn Asange at the stake, Anonymous might be ever-so-slightly less inclined to do some damage to government networks.
There will always be people attacking the US as long as there is a US, sure, but we do encourage a lot of it, and we could ruffle fewer feathers definitely.
So, you think we should make it illegal for people to pool their money and hire someone to spend fulltime keeping track of what Congress is doing and then report back to the group. Additionally, this person will take the opinions of the group and communicate them to various members of Congress, so that the members of Congress will know what those of their constituents who are members of this group think of various laws bills being considered by Congress.
Of course, that would require a Constitutional Amendment since the Constitution says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
While you can interpret it differently, everything lobbyists do can be interpreted as petitioning the Government for redress of grievances. And everything that you can do to petition the Government for redress of grievances can be interpreted as lobbying.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison