Slashdot Mirror
Singapore To Cut Off Public Servants From the Internet (theguardian.com)
Singapore is planning to cut off web access for public servants as a defence against potential cyber attack, Reuters reports. The local government's move has already been criticized by many, who say that it marks a retreat for a technologically advanced city-state that has trademarked the term "smart nation". From an article on The Guardian: Some security experts say the policy, due to be in place by May, risks damaging productivity among civil servants and those working at more than four dozen statutory boards, and cutting them off from the people they serve. It may only raise slightly the defensive walls against cyber attack, they say. Ben Desjardins, director of security solutions at network security firm Radware, called it "one of the more extreme measures I can recall by a large public organisation to combat cyber security risks." Stephen Dane, a Hong Kong-based managing director at networking company Cisco Systems, said it was "a most unusual situation" and Ramki Thurimella, chair of the computer science department at the University of Denver, called it both "unprecedented" and "a little excessive".
"[...] risks damaging productivity among civil servants". Someone doesn't understand how much time civil servants can waste on the internet.
Singapore got on the office and gov networking aspect investing in IT early and fully. eg Land Data Hub project. :)
Other nations sold or opened their networks allowing for some easy, deep and amazing finds with human and computer networks.
Australia had its gov, shared mil networks totally mapped out over decades by a few other nations. A mix of human access and classic computer work showed huge gaps in most nations efforts to secure their own mil and gov networks from low level insiders wondering around and long term covert outside computer access efforts.
With the news about what the NSA, GCHQ can do now and what Singapore saw under the Chai Keng GCHQ/RAF days the only smart way out is to say no open networks. Singapore has some insight into what the US and UK did to the Indonesia mil and gov telco systems over the decades (late 1940's~70's).
Having seen what the NSA, GCHQ can do and what could be done to vast wide open networks in nations like Australia, removing the "net" is the only way to be sure
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This was reported in Slashdot on June 8. I seem to recall it was a defensive measure that it had to do with strategic alliances between Singapore and the west, combined with the proximity to China. I'm 100% behind it, although I can't imagine how it will work in the today's world.. From June 8:
/. on Singapore. Its a dozen or so down, including links.
An anonymous reader writes:
Government workers in Singapore will return to a 1990s-level of net connectivity from May of 2017, as the domestic government has decided to block internet access on all of its 100,000 office computers. The decision has been made in the interests of national security, although the Draconian policy will still permit workers to forward work mails to private email addresses as necessary. Workers' own devices will be allowed to connect to the internet normally by special terminals being provided in early trials, while intra-departmental connectivity will presumably be maintained via VPN tunneling. The move comes in the direct wake of a visit to Singapore from the U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter late last week, promoting stronger security ties with Singapore in the face of the rise of China in the region.
BBC News has more details.
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If my government decided to put all of its employees on a separate, air-gapped network for doing government business, that would seem like a step in the right direction to me.
One thing I'd like to understand - why would government computers of any country need connection outside their own intranet? Not including servers for public services, such as a DMV, but what exactly would government employees need that's outside the network - work related? Not including things like maintaining their FaceBook or Twitter pages. I would think that everything should be self contained within the government
I once made a list of the usual sites that distracted me from work, and black-holed them in my hosts file. At first I was amazed at how often I would reflexively attempt to visit one of those sites before remembering my self-imposed blockade.
Interestingly, I don't think it made much of a difference in my overall productivity. I find that creative output comes in waves... I have days of pure concentration and peak output, followed by lulls where I occupy myself with busywork. The blockade really only impacted the lulls, since I didn't do much browsing during productivity peaks anyway. If my productivity during the lulls improved, the gain too small to be significant, and it came with the cost of increased annoyance.
After a few months, I got rid of the blockade.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
As requested -- it's not a good idea because many would not be very happy working in such an environment.
Really? Sally is irritated she can't check Facebook during the work day so let's expose our intranet to hacking?