Obama's Portrait of Cyberwar Isn't Complete Hyperbole 240
pigrabbitbear writes "It's hard to imagine what cyberwarfare actually looks like. Is it like regular warfare, where two sides armed with arsenals of deadly weapons open fire on each other and hope for total destruction? What do they fire instead of bullets? Packets of information? Do people die? Or is it not violent at all — just a bunch of geeks in uniforms playing tricks on each other with sneaky code? Barack Obama would like to clear up this question, thank you very much. In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal the president voiced his support for the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 now being considered by the Senate with the help of a truly frightening hypothetical: 'Across the country trains had derailed, including one carrying industrial chemicals that exploded into a toxic cloud,' Obama wrote, describing a nightmare scenario of a cyber attack. 'Water treatment plants in several states had shut down, contaminating drinking water and causing Americans to fall ill.' All because of hackers!"
Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cleans up (Score:5, Insightful)
Complete, as in 100% Complete? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's only 99.8% hyperbole. Someone has calculated the half-life of the current set of "crises", and decided that we need another urgent problem to address.
Bankers are worse than hackers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bankers have already pulled off a caper far worse than the unlikely scenario described here. Obama can direct his justice department to hold these bankers responsible under laws that already exist. How serious can he be about protecting America when he refuses to prosecute criminals who have damaged our national security so thoroughly?
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Obama does a good job of facilitating thinking..."
And I can't say that. At all. I'd be lying.
This is nothing but fear-mongering to sucker people into increasing the power of the federal gov't. "Oh but it won't be used in that way"... since when has that EVER been true?
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, look what a disaster that Y2K thing turned out to be.
How much effort went into preventing it?
I wrote a memo in the early 90s telling management that they should develop a policy of fixing YY code any time a program came up for a bug fix.
Of course they didn't listen. Thank all the gods, I was gone before the panic set in.
Re:Complete, as in 100% Complete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh for crying out loud. Stuxnet managed to damage equipment and all but shut down a nuclear weapons research program, and that was attacking secured PCs that were on a closed network. Do you have any idea how poor security is at your communities local infrastructure? If a single virus, by all accounts written by no more than a half dozen people over the course of a year, can do significant damage to a secured computer network, why is it ridiculous to imagine that a foreign nation could shut down water treatment plants at dozens of places in the US? Please explain, what exactly is the difference between programming a centrifuge to spin at a rate outside it's safety margin and programming a rail switching station to reroute trains randomly?
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep, lets ignore the millions of dollars spent on prevention and just focus on the fact that nothing bad happened. That's like if they upgraded the levies 2 months before Katrina and then flooding didn't happen and everyone said "what a waste of money those levies were!".
Re:So it is complete hyperbole, then (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not likely that anything will be done to harden the US infrastructure without legislation. The necessary work requires money to be spent and neither public nor private organizations will do that unless there is some sort of legal requirement that they do so.
People who think the president was "over the top" have little imagination - I'm quite certain there are some very bright people in various countries working to create a series of Stuxnet type products to attack the infrastructure of Western nations. Be in no doubt, no nation has a monopoly on brains or computer technology. Access to details of of Western infrastructure is either openly available or have already been stolen. Figuring out the weak spots and how to attack them probably isn't that hard.
However, it's not obvious exactly how to solve the problem. It's not obvious that the current cybersecurity bill will help. The sad fact is that it's been written by lawyers and politicians who have no idea about the technological challenges and how to resolve them, so they are doing what they know - add bureaucracy. Until computer scientists and engineers are taking the lead nothing worthwhile will be done.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you were scratching yourself at that time, but I spent many hours fixing applications because of the Y2K bug. If it wasn't for the effort of thousands of geeks all around the world, instead of a few systems failing here and there we could have had a huge problem worldwide.
What are you doing in a nerds website? Comments like yours usually come from laypeople who have no idea what had to be done because of Y2K.
If the world's IT systems have had a meltdown, every body would be blaming the geeks for not having done anything. Because the geeks made a great job, guess what, nothing happened. Then people blamed the geeks for having been alarmist, instead of thanking them.
That's a big problem with us, geeks. When you do a great job, nobody notices it because things go smooth. If you fuck up, everybody notices you.
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I fully believe if Bush hadn't started this dive into moral failure the Dems wouldn't have done it on their own, if only because the GOP would have, rightly, decried the invasions of privacy. But because of 'terrerism' somehow it was ok...
Bush's fault for starting it, Dems and Obama's for continuing.
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:2, Insightful)
>>>If Bush and the GOP think that Dems are government solution crazy....why in the hell did they start the massive gov't surveillance programs in the first place.
Exactly.
I'm happy to say I never voted for Warmonger Bush.
Nor Obama the insurance megacorps' best friend.
Or Romney the corporate prostitute AND warmonger.
(We just keep getting one lousy president after another.)
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cyber "war" is just applied mathematics. Get it right, and you're untouchable. Its impact is unreliable and the expenditure is out of all proportion to its impact. Give me what was spent on Stuxnet and I could do far more damage to infrastructure than that ever did.
Re:Bankers are worse than hackers. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not simply the President, it's Congress as well.
Also, you can't blame Congress for the lack of prosecution of bankers. Obama controlls the justice department. RICO is already law, and more than sufficient to prosecute banking executives for their fraudulent business practices. Congress has no say in the matter.
Somehow his justice department has time to prosecute people who legally dispense medical marijuana to sick people, but when it comes to wide spread perjury for profit, his justice department pressures state AGs to settle?
Can any Obama supporter tell me why we are supposed to be OK with this? How can any decent human being be OK with this?
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:5, Insightful)
How so? Obama came into office on "hope" & "change", and he just helped consolidate the police state Bush kicked off even more. Oh, and he went from torture to "kill lists", and he payed banks for being too greedy for their own good. He didn't change a fucking thing, he just lubed it up for you, all nice and sophisticated and bullshit-y.
No, all he (well, his handlers) did was pulling one on you, and you just sit there and celebrate it with empty phrases like "he facilitated thinking". For fucks sake? What does that even mean? Your BRAIN would facilitate thinking, IF you had one.
I'm pretty sure they simply implemented the same policies that are chugging along all the time, anyway, and this time with the diction of Tuvok instead of dumb smirks.
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, you could say they merely applied a different CSS file to the exact same fucking HTML.
OH LOOK, IT'S A NEW WEBSITE I NEVER SAW BEFORE!
Gah...
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me what was spent on Stuxnet and I could do far more damage to infrastructure than that ever did.
Woh there, cowboy... put your gun back in its holster. The reason for the expense is that Stuxnet was a subtle, precise strike. The main advantage of which is that it didn't give Iran a clear Casus Belli against Israel. No kidding it would have been cheaper and far less complicated to just drop some bombs on Iran's centrifuges... but that could have led to pretty brutal regional conflict. Why use a baseball bat when you can use a scalpel?
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't say that I agree with his content, but Obama does get Joe SixPack to realize that power plants and trains switches can be inadvertently connected to the internet (and to wonder what else it connected.) Hyperbole it is, but it's useful for the non-specialist.
yeah, but it's not because Americans has too much freedom on the internet. It's because goverment contractors are incopetent with basic security.
That's the 100% false hyperbole that The Man is shoving down your troat.
He is not saying the truth, it would be "hi citzens, we screwed up wasting all your tax dollars on systems a 5yr old could misuse and then we added insult to the injury by connecting them online. now we are going to prosecute all the bad contracts we made and fix it with secure applications"
instead he is saying "the internet is dangerous, we will collect information from everyone everywhere and will violate all your privacy, because the internet is dangerous"
How the hell can i use my mod points on the article? it's clearly flamebait.
Re:Obama does of good job of faciliting thinking.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is completely backward. Infosec is actually applied anthropology. Humans will get the math wrong. They will get the design, the implementation, the policies, the procedures, the operation wrong. Security is about assuming mistakes will be made and overlapping protections to the extent that the impact of those inevitable fuck-ups is minimized.