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Will It Take a 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' To Break Congressional Deadlock?
Hugh Pickens writes "For years lawmakers had heard warnings about holes in corporate and government systems that imperil U.S. economic and national security. Now Ward Carroll writes that in the face of what most experts label as a potential 'Cyber Pearl Harbor' threat, Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51–47 against the legislation. This drew a quick response from the staff of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta: 'The U.S. defense strategy calls for greater investments in cybersecurity measures, and we will continue to explore ways to defend the nation against cyber threats,' says DoD spokesman George Little. 'If the Congress neglects to address this security problem urgently, the consequences could be devastating.' Many Senate Republicans took their cues from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businesses that framed the debate not as a matter of national security, but rather as a battle between free enterprise and an overreaching government. They wanted to let companies determine whether it would be more cost effective — absent liability laws around cyber attacks — to invest in the hardware, software, and manpower required to effectively prevent cyber attacks, or to simply weather attacks and fix what breaks afterwards. 'Until someone can argue both the national security and the economic parts of it, you're going to have these dividing forces,' says Melissa Hathaway, a White House cyber official in the Bush and Obama administrations. 'Most likely, big industry is going to win because at the end of the day our economy is still in trouble.'"
Yes, when cyborgs attack Pearl Harbor, congress will probably do something about it.
A "cyber-Pearl Harbor" would break congressional deadlock in only one sense: You'd get the online equivalent of the Patriot Act. Politicians only seem to be able to agree on conceding civil liberties for the fake perception of security.
While the internet had its roots in DARPA, the reality is that the "public infrastructure" is privately owned. Critical government systems should not be on it. Critical privately owned and operated services (power, telecom, etc.) should be hardened to the extent that the provider desires or the contracts that they signed with various municipalities require.
I've worked contract gigs with the armed services and I have a lot of respect for the technical skills they have, but that's irrelevant. Companies and businesses should be able to make their own decisions and benefit from their good decision making or suffer from their poor decision making. Anywhere that government intersects with private industry, it's on the government to make sure their contracts properly spell out their requirements. End of story.
The problem with legislating "security" is that you end up with "compliance" instead. The companies get a checklist and fill it in with the cheapest "solutions" possible that will allow them to check off each item.
It's a start. Right now, most companies have no idea how to handle anything other than "run anti-virus software" on as many machines as can be conveniently handled.
It isn't deadlock every time a bill is voted down. Sometimes it's just a bad bill and SHOULD be voted down.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The Pentagon wants its Internet back, and Central Planning works -- just look at how efficiently it drained the Aral Sea. I think a nice Star topology could work very well for the great tubes.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
I guess we didn't learn anything from when 9-11 happened and we created the TSA, a group of intrusive busybodies at best and molestors at worst.
Or organized all federal law enforcement under the DHS without actually thinking about how it would coordinate things so we have another layer of government that is busy trying to justify their existence by going after random stuff. I hear they do copyright enforcement now?
I suppose we are set to see a Cybersecurity Agency with powers to monitor everything and permaban people from the internet based on anonymous accusations like the no-flight lists? What's the worst that could happen?
It's the Lagislature.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Really. What is next? Legislation for locked doors?
Hate to break it to ya, AC, but...
http://www.allbusiness.com/glossaries/attractive-nuisance/4949344-1.html
Yea, some places are that fucked up.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
" absent liability laws around cyber attacks "
Not only do they not want to have security they don't want to be held liable when someone gets all the users personal information.
Don't want that law? Fine.
You get fined $100,000 or 1% of your revenue(which ever is lower) for each breach, and you must pay each user whose information was compromise 10,000 dollars.
You bet you ASS corporate security would tighten up, and corporation would put pressure on MS to improve their security.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
'Most likely, big industry is going to win because at the end of the day our economy is still in trouble.'
Is "our economy is still in trouble" the new "we are at WAR with terror"? Mr Pickens is accurate and timely but this line just feels a little too canned. Are we going to have to spend the next 5 to 7 years hearing "butbutbut RECESSION!" any time something hard to swallow makes a headline?
Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51-47 against the legislation
So, I am not an expert on politics, but in the current congress, there 51 democratic senators, 47 republican senators, and 2 independents (both of whom caucus with the democrats). By my count, if every single senate republican voted against this, that still only comes to 47 votes. That means that the other 4 would have had to break ranks with the democratic party. So, just who is at fault here?
Just saying.
The US has not passed a proper federal budget since NINETEEN-FUCKING-NINETY-SEVEN. We sit on the edge of a "fiscal cliff" not because the government can't work together today to undo the one functionally useful compromise they made last year, but rather, because they haven't managet to work together in decades.
Yes, eventually a foreign enemy will take advantage of our weak stance on cybersecurity. Yes, it will take a "Pearl Harbor" moment to make anyone recognize the problem (to which they'll respond by enacting tougher copyright laws, of course). But cybersecurity falls so far down the list of real problems we face as a country that, even as an IT professional, I honestly can't get all that worked up about it.
When we have our house in order; when we have a balanced budget; when we stop fighting our grandfathers' wars; when we stop worrying about legislating in time with the "news cycle"; when we have a stable economy and don't wonder what our tax rates next year will look like; when the losers in Washington start acting in the public interest instead of demanding we buy chastity belts for all our generals - Then perhaps we can worry about beefing up our national network security.
Until then - Quit bailing with teaspoons and grab a godamned bucket!
Yes, it will take a cyber Pearl Harbor. Congress is reactive, not proactive. Otherwise, they'd be called "Progress".
So just be happy that they're doing nothing now. Because after cyber Pearl Harbor, we're in for all kinds of pain. The internet kill switch will happen. They'll destroy that which they don't understand.
On the plus side, we'll finally be forced to implement the distributed p2p mesh network to get around it. Go set up your openmesh now... while it's still publicly available ;-)
Yeah. When it doesn't need to be "false flag".
Collateral damage to your own industrial infrastructure is enough to make the risk of escalating "cyber warfare" a lose-lose proposition.
Cyber Weapon Friendly Fire: Chevron Stuxnet Fallout
In the end, this will be used as the basis to kill your free Internet, that with all its warts and pitfalls, is far more valuable than the heavily-policed alternatives.
That sub-genius Richard Clarke has been squawking this kind of lame bullshit since Clinton was not having-sex-with-that-woman. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There's no "basic assumption", it's just the only real good way we know how to do these things. The industry, as a rule, is only interested in information security if they are forced to. In my experience, 99% of organisation won't lift a finger about security without a legal threat, ideally backed by a big fine in case of non-compliance. We are far, far away from any hope of seeing the industry self-regulate over something like this.
Republicans have stalled the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 with a Senate vote of 51–47 against the legislation.
Last I heard, the democrats had a majority (and the tie-break vote) in the senate. Why blame this on the republicans?
Many Senate Republicans took their cues from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and businesses that framed the debate not as a matter of national security, but rather as a battle between free enterprise and an overreaching government. They wanted to let companies determine whether it would be more cost effective — absent liability laws around cyber attacks — to invest in the hardware, software, and manpower required to effectively prevent cyber attacks, or to simply weather attacks and fix what breaks afterwards.
Not that I advocate waiting can cleaning up the mess later, I fear that all we would be doing is creating a safe harbor for companies by the proposed approach (basically I did the government recommendations, still got hacked, no problem). It would be much better to clarify what companies would be liable for and how much. I think better tradeoffs could be made rather than with a proscriptive government approach. See Section 706 of the bill: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/s2105/text .
Even if this doesn't pass, for federal infrastructure and infrastructure deemed important to national security, Obama can unilateral impose most of these things as an Executive order for government entities and contractors.
As written the bill attempts to force IT that causes the interruption of life-sustaining services, catastrophic economic damage (vs just severe degradation of national security or national security capabilities) which is a much wider scope. You might argue as written, this bill is so vague that could be construed to apply to Amazon, or Google, or even a small airline or bus or telephone company that has the only service for an isolated area. Also as with many bills, it comes with its share of government overhead (appropriations for national education and awareness programs, recruiting for various government agencies, etc)...
I guess it's still divided government, and very few people want to write a good bill, but just try to force their bill and blame the other side for not being able to pass them... Sigh...
I'm involved with teaching cybersecurity for DHS. Our network, that we use to develop cybersecurity classes, is about as secure as the "lock" on a bathroom stall. But we sure are in compliance with a lot of regulations! A coworker and I were just discussing the fact that agency "security" regulations prevent us from making things secure. Example "anything hashed must be hashed with MD5". MD5 is broken, so we were going to use SHA-256, but regulations don't allow SHA-256. The other end refuses to use MD5 since it's broken, so we have to send the data in clear. With no"security" regulation it would be SHA-256 hashed. To comply with the "security" rules, we have to send it in the clear, out in the open. Such is government regulation.