Posted on 06/07/2010 9:29:58 PM PDT by oc-flyfish
This is pretty scary stuff. The Federal government is ready to seize control of private company networks in order to "protect" us in the event of a hacker attack.
Yeah, when you’re spreading that much power around, somebody is bound to notice (and triangulate).
My F-I-L was a ham at the time. Of course, they drafted him and put him in the Signal Corps . . . !
Good one! :)
Oh no, you have found me out!/s/
Yes. Now. Before they take control of the tinfoil supply.
Should the United States be prepared to fight on all battlefields?
I knew that.
Naaaahhh, once they develop the methods to shut down a city's entire water (or power) supply with a few keystrokes, we'll all be much safer.
I mean our "betters" would never do it, and no one else will ever be able to steal the keys...
Tokyo Rosie O'Donnell...
Only if you are using it legally.
On the other hand, if some regular company has a network here, it’s been 0wn3d by the Chinese, and it’s being used to launch an attack against our military networks, our government sure as hell needs a legal means to tell that company to pull the plug NOW.
In “cyber warfare” this is the equivalent of the Chinese dropping an artillery piece in the company’s parking lot and starting firing. The government would be allowed to immediately intervene to stop that, so why not the above scenario?
We sound like the leftists who oppose the AZ law. Sure the AZ law does not allow profiling, but it opens the door to those evil police to abuse their power and profile (I paraphrase Alan Combs).
We need this, what everyone is afraid of, is the man who is running the country and the potential for him to abuse power. We need to neuter him in November. Of course, I mean that figuratively for the Secret Service, FBI or NSA types monitor FR. Damn now my paranoia is showing.
Very good point.
In fact, some might say that having a license is akin to flagging your presence. Like a firearms license, if confiscation were the goal, they'd know where to start looking.
Billions of riders, each carrying an IP packet.
Someone actually wrote a paper about using pigeons for that. They have high latency, but with advantages like a built-in collision avoidance system and not being restricted to line-of-sight transmission. See RFC 1149 ("IP over Avian Carriers") of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Even worse, somebody actually implemented it, successfully sending an ICMP echo ("ping") request.
Not doing TCP/IP itself, but even better a pigeon won a transmission race vs. an ISP using DSL once, moving 4 GB of data 40 miles. The bird won using a 4 GB SD card.
. . . and ALL that that entails.
All us law-abiding folks will definitely have some trouble re-establishing what is law and what isn't when it comes to an attack on liberty, freedom, and our lives. Yes, it'll be difficult recognizing that we are the only people obeying the law . . . to our own peril.
It is vital to know that when gummint breaks the law, they have suspended the rule of law and folks should act accordingly. How many times has gummint broke the laws? I cannot count. But we as a people subjected to those laws have failed to act in a timely and appropriate manner.
No sweat, shipmate.
You’re only paranoid if you really BELIEVE everybody’s out to get you.
Anyway, this old Airdale Chief has your six.
For example, imagine that you use Google Groups for general discussion, Google Mail for direct communication and Google Documents for specific papers. All your data is on Google's servers, you have no locally saved copies (usually.) Now Google is offline, or your account is disabled (all of that happened several times already.) You are in trouble, isolated from your contacts and robbed of all your documents and messages.
An opposite example is FreeNet. This is an experimental network that is designed for storage of documents on multiple computers (like p2p.) No single computer holds everything, and nobody knows where the data is actually stored - the network is designed to ferret the data out, but it won't tell you where it found it. So an attacker has no easy way to disrupt the network.
Travis, this sounds like the kind of network some of your characters might need sometime. Analogous to what you were looking for for phones. This is something that would take a few people to set up and would only be useful if quite a few were using it, so it would only be a feasible story element in a scenario when a substantial number of people were leery of the government to that degree. But your books all have that covered. ;-)
Ok, I just read and understood this passage. I guess I'm a geek? :^)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.