McCain Asks For Committee On Wikileaks, Anonymous

Trailrunner7 writes "In the face of continued attacks on federal agencies and contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and IRC Federal that do highly sensitive security work for the U.S. government, Sen. John McCain has asked Senate leaders to appoint a select committee to look into the attacks and data leaks that have plagued Washington throughout 2011. In a letter to Democrat leader Harry Reid and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, McCain (R-Ariz.) said that a temporary Senate committee is necessary in order to get a handle on all of the disparate cybersecurity legislation proposals and to address the threat posed by groups such as Anonymous, LulzSec and Wikileaks."

Comments

Difference being?

[betterunixthanunix]

In America, you have a choice between the party that works for one set of corporations, or the party that works for another set of corporations.

Re:Difference being?

[Nadaka]

The set of corporate masters are not mutually exclusive, they overlap more than they do not.

Re:Difference being?

[guspasho]

Democrats may (as a group) be more conservative than european progressives, but that doesn't change that democrats are the progressive influence in American politics.

Hardly.

        Economic stimulus - that failed to do more than keep the economy from catastrophic collapse, and did nothing to actually improve the economy
        Universal healthcare - that forced every citizen to become captives of the private insurance market
        Financial reform(including consumer protection) - HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! (that means I think you're joking because that's so transparently wrong)
        Unemployment insurance extensions - yeah, minor
        US Auto industry bailout - and don't forget banking industry bailouts! Now how exactly is it progressive to bail out the biggest, most powerful companies and fail to bail out any one else, particularly the millions of victims of the massive fraud perpetuated by the banks?

Now we have a "progressive" party that's offering to gut Medicare and Social Security, two of the most critical and important parts of the social safety net - and fix a budget problem that's caused by securities fraud, while the fraudsters are lavishly enriching themselves even further with bailout money!

Sorry, but you're wrong. There may be a few progressives among the Democrats, but they have no power to enact any kind of progressive policy, and as Obama should have taught us, could simply be outright lying. Democrats stopped being progressive when they sold their souls to the corporatists. Now it's just two conservative parties battling for the attention of the big bucks and completely lying to the rest of us.

Re:Ted Stevens will get to the bottom of this!

[Wyatt Earp]

Ted Stevens is dead.

Horrible summary

[Dachannien]

The summary is 10% facts and 90% moronic rambling by the submitter. If you actually read the letter, you'll see that McCain was specifically referring to insider threats such as the Bradley Manning case. He doesn't mention Anonymous or LulzSec at all.

Re:False Flag Working!

[Translation Error]

Except he's not talking about going after the evil terrorists. He's talking about coming up with plans to protect key systems from cyber attack

We must act now and quickly develop and pass comprehensive legislation to protect our electric grid, air traffic control system, water supply, financial networks and defense systems and much more from a cyber attack.

and prevent leaks at the source.

developing adequate safeguards to detect and defeat any insider threat of disclosure of classified documents such as we experienced with the Wikileaks fiasco

Re:False Flag Working!

[devjoe]

Just to clarify... He is taking the steps to investigate the vulnerabilities, and take precautions against further intrusion. This is not to be confused with "let's go catch these boogeymen."

This just seems like a reasonable reaction (for once), unless I am mis-reading here. I did not RTFA.

Well, the article is not really much more informative than the summary on this matter, but both of them suggest that at least part of the focus is on improving security at these sensitive sites rather than going after whichever baddies this week hacked into a government contractor's network and divulged sensitive info they found there. And that is indeed the right focus; it is obvious that the knowledge necessary to break into these sites is in the wild and capturing one group of attackers is going to do little to secure the information stored on other, as-yet-unhacked networks. The problem is that inadequate methods have been used to secure the information in the first place. So I have to agree with you.

Furthermore, what is pointed out in the article is that there are multiple Congressional committees claiming at least partial jurisdiction over the issue and suggesting cybersecurity legislation. McCain proposes a single committee to clearly govern this area and thus to consolidate this legislation in one place to avoid conflicting bills coming from different groups. I can't say whether this will actually succeed in doing something useful -- it really depends on whether they get knowledgeable people on the committee -- but it has a better chance than the current approach. In theory, the knowledgeable people, even if they aren't on the committee or even in Congress, should know to address this group; hopefully the committee gets populated with Congressmen who are able to distinguish the ideas of value from those of everybody else who wants to restrict computers or the Internet in whatsoever way.

The US WAS crawling with communists

[Anonymous Coward]

The United States WAS crawling with communists. The Venona intercepts generated leads. Of course, it was classified, so most did not get access to that information.