"Cyberwar" As a Carrot For Those Selling the Stick

New submitter sackbut writes with a story at Wired about the often-discussed concept of "cyberwarfare," and the worst-case scenarios that are sometimes presented as possible outcomes of concerted malicious hacking. According to Wired, which calls these scenarios "the new yellowcake," "[E]vidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress' passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldn't lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex." Writes sackbut: "Perhaps good for programmers, but not so good for rights."

Comments

21st century--The era of perpetual war

[elrous0]

Does the phrase "Wartime President" or "Wartime Government" still have any meaning when you're never again NOT at war?

Re:21st century--The era of perpetual war

[forkfail]

You should know that Eurasia is our friends, and that we've always been at war with Eastasia. Or do you need a reminder?

Re:21st century--The era of perpetual war

[dreemernj]

I don't care about what wars we're fighting. I'm just enjoying my 20 grammes of chocolate.

Re:21st century--The era of perpetual war

[plopez]

Orwell tried to warn us. See also his work on the use of language and using it as an agent of control (Chomsky says basically the same thing).

Re:21st century--The era of perpetual war

[GameboyRMH]

Your pornography ration has been cut to 20MB per week.

Re:21st century--The era of perpetual war

[Anthony Mouse]

Orwell tried to warn us. See also his work on the use of language and using it as an agent of control (Chomsky says basically the same thing).

Orwell got a lot of things right, but his arguments about use of language were pretty wrong. You can't actually create Newspeak. If you start calling copyright infringement piracy, people start to think that pirates are cool and piracy means sticking it to The Man. If you decide that calling it piracy is no longer cutting it and start calling it theft, people will soon start making references to Robin Hood instead of Captain Jack Sparrow. (You must admit that the pigopolists bear a closer resemblance to the Sheriff of Nottingham than they do to the British Navy.)

Chomsky has it more right, but despite being a linguist his points aren't as much about language as information: The issue is that selection bias allows you to tell part of the truth, and then defy anyone to prove that your biased selection is empirically false rather than merely intentionally incomplete, leaving the general public with the impression that the things the media says are irrefutable because no one is allowed any opportunity to refute them. In other words, the problem is not that powerful people choose what you are allowed to say or even how you are allowed to say it, it is that the content of your message determines how large of an audience you are allowed to reach.

Now selling anti-cyber attack amulets!

[Kenja]

Guarantied to prevent cyber and leopard attacks.

Re:Now selling anti-cyber attack amulets!

[Maximum Prophet]

The problem is that right after you don't buy into the hype (and expensive products), some less-than-cluefull employee will give out his/her password over the phone, or download and run some malicious attachment.

Please note that the expensive solution being sold won't work any better than your leopard amulet, but you might be able to keep your job if you bought the "Industry Leading Solution", because, hey, how could you have done better than that?

Re:Now selling anti-cyber attack amulets!

[Anthony Mouse]

The problem is that right after you don't buy into the hype (and expensive products), some less-than-cluefull employee will give out his/her password over the phone, or download and run some malicious attachment.

That is not really the problem. The problem is that too many congress critters subscribe to the Legislator's Fallacy: "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do this." If not for that, the existence of dim witted federal staffers could be resolved by firing them (or not hiring them in the first place) rather than spending a trillion dollars a year fighting an imagined enemy.

One of the things people have the hardest time accepting is that sometimes Bad Things Happen and the cost of preventing them exceeds the cost of allowing them to happen. In other cases the problem is a legitimate problem but the solution offered is totally irrational because the better solution requires goring the wrong constituency's ox, and with the rational solution taken off the table for political reasons, people are unhappy that the problem is not being solved and demand the outrageous and ineffective solution.

Of course, in this case it isn't really any of those things: This is just garden variety corruption. If you want to divert a trillion tax dollars into your own pocket then you need to pretend you're providing something of value to the general public. Saving them from imaginary cyber attacks (or whatever) is as good an excuse as any -- and hey, if there are no cyber attacks, it must mean they're doing their job. And if there are cyber attacks, it must mean they need more tax money.

Y2K

[stevegee58]

Whip everyone into a frenzy about a scary, ethereal threat.
Sell products that play into the new fears.
Profit!

Not good for rights or taxpayers

[plopez]

A waste of money. We have have no money for education, the elderly, the infirm, veterans, community development, R&D, or infrastructure. But we have plenty of money to sink into DHS, DoD, the secret police, the weapons industry, and the intelligence black hole.