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Posted on 02/16/2010 9:13:11 PM PST by Jet Jaguar
Scene: The White House Situation Room.
Event: A massive cyber attack has turned the cellphones and computers of tens of millions of Americans into weapons to shut down the Internet. A cascading series of events then knocks out power for most of the East Coast amid hurricanes and a heat wave.
Is the assault on cellphones an armed attack? In a crisis, what power does the government have to order phone and Internet carriers to allow monitoring of their networks? What level of privacy can Americans expect?
A war game, sponsored by a nonprofit group and attended by former top-ranking national security officials, laid bare Tuesday that the U.S. government lacks answers to such key questions.
Half an hour into an emergency meeting of a mock National Security Council, the attorney general declared: "We don't have the authority in this nation as a government to quarantine people's cellphones."
The White House cyber coordinator was "shocked" and asserted: "If we don't have the authority, the attorney general ought to find it."
The Bipartisan Policy Center, which focuses on issues such as health care, energy and cybersecurity, staged the war game to demonstrate to a complacent public the plausibility of an attack that could in many ways be as crippling as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes. Organizers said they wanted to prod Congress and the Obama administration to act.
"We were trying to tee up specific issues that would be digestible so they would become the building blocks of a broader, more comprehensive cyber strategy," said Michael V. Hayden, former CIA director and the principal creator of the "Cyber ShockWave" simulation.
During the war game, held over four hours at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, three wide-screen monitors fl...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Chinese have long known this, hence why they repeatedly cyber hack and attack us.....
The law lags laughably behind technology. With aces like Frank Lautenberg representing a big chunk of the total information technology experience in the Senate - you can see why.
Lots of dimensions to this.
BS, I know the guys. This is yet again another reporter that cannot a bag from his butt.
“A well regulated network, being necessary to the txting of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear cellphones, shall not be infringed.
“The law lags laughably behind technology. With aces like Frank Lautenberg representing a big chunk of the total information technology experience in the Senate - you can see why.”
This will always be the case where technological solutions are “provided” by managers. Policy doesn’t quite cover the problem. Additionally, there are too many folks with unprotected home computers (in a broadband world). Granted there are always exploits to beat many commercial protection products, but the more protected computers (time to defeat), the harder it is to mount a distributed attack.
maybe a big off switch is the answer...preferrably not in the hands of the government.
we’re hampered by the Microsoft anchor...
I was with you right up ‘til you said ‘ hurricanes and a heat wave.’ Will the envirowackos please leave the room!
Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, pressed the issue of individual privacy. In a crisis, she said, "Americans need to know that they should not expect to have their cellphone and other communications to be private -- not if the government is going to have to take aggressive action to tamp down the threat."
Hey Jaimie I have three words for you.
And so you don't tax your brain here's a hint: Two are 'Go' & 'yourself'.
Even during WWII that fascist FDR(1) didn't have every phone tapped or letter sent via US Mail opened. Nor was every Radio confiscated, including two way Ham Radios. And as I was told, WWII was a pretty big 'crisis'. (fricken moron)
(1) FDR had many people 'disappear'. One was a person (code translator) who worked at the US Embassy in London before 12-7-41. He was going to go to Republicans in the US Senate with his info. FDR would have been impeached for collusion with Churchill.
I disagree, with Microsoft we have the perfect weapon available to defend and attack simultaneously.
Windows Update!
They don't have the legal means to do it, but anyone who thinks they won't when the mood strikes, is out of his mind.
Somewhere on the net, there is a copy of all of the text messages sent the morning of 9/11/01 that came out of the investigations of that day.
How much better do you think their vacuuming is today?
One thing that's funny about this is that during actual disasters, (Katrina comes to mind), it's not the government who has comms in the disaster area. It's the Hams.
Of course we were a more compliant society back then. I couldn't say that I would abide by a Ham Radio shutdown due to some crisis today. Indeed, I am prepared to operate under stealth if necessary.
Other than that, what do we have to talk about?
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