‘The Internet Should be Adapted to Allow for Oversight by the National Security Agency’
August 1st, 2012Via: MIT Technology Review:
The U.S. Internet’s infrastructure needs to be redesigned to allow the NSA to know instantly when overseas hackers might be attacking public or private infrastructure and computer networks, the agency’s leader, General Keith Alexander, said today.
Alexander spoke at the annual Def Con computer hacking conference in Las Vegas. It was a symbolic appearance that he said was motivated by a need to interest the hacker community in helping to make the Internet more secure.
Alexander, who is also commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, described the Internet as “at great risk from exploitation, disruption, and destruction.”
…
The NSA is already running a trial with 17 U.S. defense companies intended to demonstrate technology that could be deployed to change that. Under the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) Cyber Pilot, Lockheed Martin and other companies set up their computer security systems to automatically alert the agency when the alarm is tripped. They automatically pass a summary of what was detected and the IP address associated with the event to the NSA over the Internet. “All you need to pass is the fact of a signature and IP address in real time, and we can take it from there,” said Alexander.
It was a symbolic appearance that he said was motivated by a need to interest the hacker community in helping to make the Internet more secure. …from being hacked?
whatever.
so who’s to say a veritable flash mob of DDoS attacks still wouldn’t overwhelm such a checkpoint? or is that the very thing what they desire consultation for? or stress-testing, i suppose…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Orbit_Ion_Cannon
reading along though, i came to this:
Alexander also suggested rolling back the decentralization of computer networks by saying that “thin client” computing should be considered by large organizations. Long out of fashion, the thin client approach gives individual users relatively simple computers that access computing resources that are controlled centrally. That could help large organizations such as the U.S. Department of Defense, which currently has some 15,000 separately configured and operated sections of its network, said Alexander, offering too many potential areas of attack.
…which brought to my mind the topic of the ‘war on general computation’, which i first heard presented by Cory Doctorow (below) but i could swear Eben Moglen also had out a youtube video on the subject although i couldn’t find it.
Cory Doctorow
28c3: The coming war on general computation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
and lastly, there’s this succinct rebuttal of the whole smelly NSA proposition, by the EFF, with their 5 key points:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/why-nsa-cant-be-trusted-run-us-cybersecurity-programs
1. An executive order generally prohibits NSA from conducting intelligence on Americans’ domestic activities
2. NSA has a dark history of violating Americans’ constitutional rights
3. NSA has continued its warrantless wiretapping scandal
4. NSA recently admitted to violating the Constitution.
5. NSA keeps much of what it does classified and secret
addendum:
…i found this related item after continuing to search the site:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428649/hey-hackers-defense-is-sexy-too/?mod=related
A new prize on offer to hackers last week was also an attempt to inspire a renewed interest in defense. In contrast to the usual “bug bounties” some companies offer hackers who discover software flaws, Microsoft gave a $200,000 BlueHat Prize for new defense techniques capable of thwarting entire classes of attack.
re: my mention of Eben Moglen,
for what it’s worth, i believe this may be what i was thinking of:
http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/archive/ug592-hour2mix.mp3
In our second hour we hear a 2009 presentation by Eben Moglen to DebConf10, How We Can Be the Silver Lining of the Cloud. He notes that the enthusiasm as regards ‘cloud computing’ should not be allowed to obscure the basic fact that they it requires individuals hand over custody of their data to commercial organizations. As an alternative he describes his plan of Freedom Boxes which implement in hardware a system to encrypt traffic between friends, guaranteeing privacy, strengthening resistance against botnets and control by centralized authorities.