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.
I know
Just would like to help overcome the apathy and inertia and whatever else is preventing local FREEPERS from being more reachable by each other.
birdbrain
No, it's Karn. He's the one who sued over the book. Katz didn't have anything to do with that.
by WINSTON on MAY 31, 2010
With little fanfare, the U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) has officially begun operation this week. The entity is a collection of personnel from the National Security Agency (NSA), Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force and policy makers (read that politicians). The stated purpose is to protect the vital interests of the United States in relation to the Internet. The entity is not just defensive in nature but can also engage in preemptive “strikes” intended to disrupt threats. Because this was an internal reorganization within the Department of Defense, the creation of CYBERCOM did not require congressional approval.
Even though the primary purpose of CYBERCOM is to protect government and military networks, there is incredible pressure to extend that “protection” to civilian and business networks as well. In fact, the second highest official at the Pentagon, William Lynn III - Deputy Secretary of Defense, recently announced that the Department of Defense might start a protective program for civilian networks. Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated the same thing in June 2009.
Policies are being finalized that will allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to request help from CYBERCOM to protect government and civilians networks. Unfortunately there isn’t any clarity on what the criteria would be to initiate a request for help. An official at CYBERCOM stated: “From our perspective the threshold is really easy: it’s when we get a request from DHS,” the official noted. “What’s their threshold? I couldn’t tell you what their threshold is.”
On the surface this may sound benign, but it is actually quite insidious. The NSA is completing work on threat monitoring systems called EINSTEIN 2 and EINSTEIN 3. According to declassified documents, the stated purposes of these two systems are as follows:
DHS (Department of Homeland Security) is deploying, as part of its EINSTEIN 2 activities, signature-based sensors capable of inspecting Internet traffic entering Federal systems for unauthorized accesses and malicious content. The EINSTEIN 2 capability enables analysis of network flow information to identify potential malicious activity while conducting automatic full packet inspection of traffic entering or exiting U.S. Government networks for malicious activity using signature-based intrusion detection technology…. EINSTEIN 2 is capable of alerting US-CERT in real time to the presence of malicious or potentially harmful activity in federal network traffic and provides correlation and visualization of the derived data….
The EINSTEIN 3 system will also support enhanced information sharing by US-CERT with Federal Departments and Agencies by giving DHS the ability to automate alerting of detected network intrusion attempts and, when deemed necessary by DHS, to send alerts that do not contain the content of communications to the National Security Agency (NSA) so that DHS efforts may be supported by NSA exercising its lawfully authorized missions.
Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn stated that private companies who operate critical infrastructure (electrical grid, telecommunication networks, Internet service providers, the banking and financial industry, etc) should install EINSTEIN monitoring agents or else they will face the “wild, wild west of the Internet”. He went on to state that failing to protect these critical infrastrutures ”could lead to physical damage and economic disruption on a massive scale.”
In other words:
Words matter and the usage of them need to be analyzed in order to determine what someone is saying (or not saying) to fully assess a situation:
Lynn stated: ““I think it’s gonna have to be voluntary,” he added. “People could opt into protection – or choose to stay out. Individual users may well choose to stay out. But in terms of protecting the nation’s security, it’s not the individual users [that matter most]. I mean, they have to worry about their individual [data], their credit rating, and all that. But it’s the vulnerability of certain critical infrastructure – power, transportation, finance. This starts to give you an angle at doing that.”
Essentially, Lynn is stating that individual citizens can opt out of EINSTEIN but critical entities will not have a choice.
In summary, we have a new government entity created without congressional approval whose purpose is to monitor (read that spy on) all Internet traffic in the United States, and to take unspecified preemptive strikes when something happens that the agency deems is not acceptable…
Obviously privacy organizations are deeply troubled by CYBERCOM’s ability to monitor the content of all internet communication. No information has been presented to date on the privacy implications of EINSTEIN 3 and limited information has been provided on an early 2008 versions of EINSTEIN 2.
Fortunately, we have many recent examples worldwide that we can examine to see how governments use these protective powers to defend their citizens in cyberspace:
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety” – Benjamin Franklin
Good point. Sorry to be joining the discussion late - what is LDS? (Latter Day Saints?!) Occurs to me it might be wise to try and organize our local fellow FReepers so we have actual contact info. from any who don't mind sharing it...
Of course! Amazing, isn't it? Who would've thought it! : D
Well, that appears to be what they want us to think. They know there are SMART people in this country. They just don't trust them.
We could communicate by YOUTUBE - sites that go up for a while and down quickly. Popular screen names could be used - so freepers could search easily... If we come up with enough ideas they won't know which one is working - or if all of them are working... Tea Party groups can also be communication centers...
Sleep well, I don’t see much of a problem here. Something like this was long overdue to be consolidated from several agencies (mostly NSA) into one strat-group umbrella, in light of multiple well known attempted cyber-attacks from China, Korea, Russia, Baltic Republics, Caribbeans etc.
Yeah, those other governmental entities in other parts of the world ... they are the ones who are going to crash our Internet and make it impossible to use it for what we've been doing thus far.
If we have to, we can "disconnect" the country from these other attacking sources, in other countries, and isolate ourselves, while still doing business, until the problem is taken care of.
If it's an attack originating inside this country (to avoid the move of isolating everyone in the country from an "outside" attack), then a segment of the network can be isolated from everything else, until the problem is solved.
Either we do that, or else we leave our country wide-open for all sorts of outside attacks and no way to effectively respond.
good idea... Also - for safety freeper groups should be grouped by sign-up year - very few trolls in the early years... or older members can be the inner ring group... we connect to the next level down...
Ah, OK. I’m not familiar with specific suit, although aware of the general issue between the government and encryption community and the government over export restrictions. I had read quite a bit about it at one point. I might have read about this case, and if I looked into it, it would jog my memory.
FR was off for 8 hours?
I was refreshing here when the screen went blank and then, when I refreshed again I got the more familiar screen that tells me it’s down.
Wonder what happened...
Our white knight hackers better keep a low profile...
Thanks for the ping. Is the world getting scarier or is it just me?
As someone who joined in 2008 (but lurked for a good while during Bush years) would I be in the next level down?
I understand if I am. I would rather be out of the inner circle than risk letting in Obamabots.
Alpha Tango Bravo 7A42-43e2-9207-7DF3FBA70927
In my first novel (2003) a computer network guy posted the names and particulars of all of the federal agents in several states on a dispersed system somewhat analogous to gnutella and other music programs. I’m not sure what’s possible today.
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