Report Release: What Internet Security Can Gain From a Public Health Approach
NEW YORK, June 4, 2012 – The Internet puts people, systems, and networks in constant contact worldwide, and it needs a global, coordinated effort to protect digital systems from online threats-just like the public health community's efforts to defend our bodies from illness.
That's the argument of a new report released by a team of experts convened by the New York-based EastWest Institute (EWI) and sponsored by Microsoft Corporation. The report examines how the model of international public health can inform efforts to track and block malware and other malicious actors.
“For years, we have talked about computers being infected by viruses,” said EWI President John Mroz. “With this breakthrough report, we have the opportunity to treat the health of the entire Internet as a shared problem needing cooperative solutions.”
Phi Beta Iota: What is so pathetic about all this is that governments have learned nothing in the quarter century since Winn Schwartau, Bill Caelli, Jim Anderson, Robert Steele, and a handful of others sounded the alarm. 25 years of dereliction of duty.
From beginning, have not felt Petraeus as D/CIA was optimal for either man or institution. I see it as politically-driven POTUS strategic move to sideline potential political opponent who, right now, should be serving as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.
CIA Director David Petraeus spoke first at an April 19 memorial dinner for agency officers killed in action. He delivered well-scripted remarks and an evocation of the agency’s heroes. Then came Leon Panetta, his predecessor at the CIA and the evening’s main honoree, who delivered a stem-winding emotional speech to fervent applause.
The freewheeling Panetta, now secretary of defense, has been a tough act to follow at the CIA, especially for a former four-star Army general who thrived in the disciplined, resource-rich world of the military. And in his first year at the agency, Petraeus’s transition has sometimes been bumpy, as the CIA’s finicky workforce struggled to adapt to its new director.
“I hear the rumblings” from mid-level CIA officers, says one senior administration official. But he says Petraeus gets high marks from the White House, which took the unusual step of naming the prominent general to the post.
Read full article. Phi Beta Iota: Reading between the lines, Patraeus has accepted being sidelined, is making changes on the margins, not within the base, and may or may not emerge from this a wiser man. The clandestine service remains unrepentant and impotent–official cover, liaison hand-outs, legal traveler debriefings in the USA–while the analytic service remains childish, scatter-brained, and largely useless. Such “triumphs” as he achieves will handed to him by selected foreign services including the Israeli's with their broad false flag menu, or be in the science & technology arena, at great cost for marginally useful innovations. Nothing of import will be done on human intelligence, open source intelligence, all-source processing, whole of government decision support, or multinational clandestine, covert, and analytic operations.
The Pentagon has concluded that the act of sabotaging U.S. computers by another country may constitute an act of war against the United States. This conclusion opens the door for the United States to respond to such cyber sabotage by using traditional military force. The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which will become public next month, is an early attempt to come to terms with a changing world in which hackers could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, electric grid, or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the fact that Stuxnet was an Israeli production (quote from the 1990's: “When the Israeli's catch a hacker, they give them a job; when the US catches a hacker they throw them in jail”), the insanity of the White House taking credit for Stuxnet becomes all the more outrageous in light of the certain sensibility of the Pentagon statement. Sadly, the brainpower at the top of the US pyramid of power seems to be both very limited and very myopic–these people cannot think holistically or strategically, or they would realize that cyberspace has no borders, and irresponsibility with respect to cyber-soundness has consequences.
The problem is they don't have much to offer, other than going along. Corporate profits need to be sustained and attending (not fixing) the Cyber world appears to be the new way of doing it. And as a side note, it is the Congressional-cyber-industrial complex……since Congree allocates the funding and reaps the lobbyist's support…
As Congress boosts spending on cybersecurity and mulls over new data safety requirements on private industry, some companies stand to get rich.
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other defense and tech companies have been lobbying Capitol Hill about the growing cyberthreats to national security and corporate America, but they also make millions of dollars each year selling a variety of cybersecurity programs, tools and solutions to government and business.
Some lawmakers say the legislative push has spawned a “cyber-industrial complex.”
“I believe these bills will encourage the development of an industry that profits from fear and whose currency is Americans’ private data,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), speaking on the Senate floor last week in opposition to pending cybersecurity legislation. “These bills create a cyber-industrial complex that has an interest in preserving the problem to which it is the solution.”
The online threats of the digital age — stolen state secrets, hacked personal computers and more — may pose serious, real and novel challenges to the federal government and private sector alike.
But the reaction to those threats has been far more old school: Companies in several different industries are aggressively playing the legislative lobbying game as part of their larger market strategy.
And it’s paying off in millions of dollars of federal contracts alone.
The Bilderbergers now post the participant list on their “official” website. In the past, moles inside the organization would release the secretive list to journalists.
Bilderberg Meetings Chantilly, Virginia, USA, 31 May-3 June 2012
Final List of Participants Including General Keith Alexander, D/NSA and D/Cyber-Command
The Pentagon is turning to the private sector, universities and even computer game companies as part of an ambitious effort to develop technologies to improve its cyberwarfare capabilities, launch effective attacks and withstand the likely retaliation.
The previously unreported effort, which its authors have dubbed Plan X, marks a new phase in the nation’s fledgling military operations in cyberspace, which have focused more on protecting the Defense Department’s own computer systems than on disrupting or destroying those of enemies.
Plan X is a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a Pentagon agency that focuses on experimental efforts and has a key role in harnessing computing power to help the military wage war more effectively.
The Internet stands at a crossroads. Built from the bottom up, powered by the people, it has become a powerful economic engine and a positive social force. But its success has generated a worrying backlash. Around the world, repressive regimes are putting in place or proposing measures that restrict free expression and affect fundamental rights. The number of governments that censor Internet content has grown to 40 today from about four in 2002. And this number is still growing, threatening to take away the Internet as you and I have known it.
Some of these steps are in reaction to the various harms that can be and are being propagated through the network. Like almost every major infrastructure, the Internet can be abused and its users harmed. We must, however, take great care that the cure for these ills does not do more harm than good. The benefits of the open and accessible Internet are nearly incalculable and their loss would wreak significant social and economic damage.
Against this background, a new front in the battle for the Internet is opening at the International Telecommunications Union, a United Nations organization that counts 193 countries as its members. It is conducting a review of the international agreements governing telecommunications and aims to expand its regulatory authority to the Internet at a summit scheduled for December in Dubai.
