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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 12 2012 @ 06:06 PM EDT |
I would say that rather than "make our cybersociety less of a target"
we should make it less of a single point of failure. It will never NOT be a
target; the best we could do is reduce the annoyance in an extended DoS of
Facebook or Google, or a new Flash/IE zero-day exploit. (Frankly, if that's all
it takes to destroy your society, your society is pathetic.)
But this part of the discussion is just handwaving, and ignores the real
question, which is this: is Panetta being an alarmist and trying to stir up the
electorate (this is a Presidential election year, and he's a member of the Obama
administration, so he very much does have a horse in this race), or is there
really a legitimate threat that "cyberterrorists" will destroy
"the Internet"? Any guesses? (Here's a fact that might help: "the
Internet" isn't Google or Facebook anyway, and it's also not a specific
thing, located in a specific well-known place that you can drop bombs on or
crash airplanes into.)
Panetta is not doing his credibility any favors by using the moldy old
propaganda term "digital Pearl Harbor" either.* Lots of people have
been trying, for a very long time (since years before Groklaw went online), to
get the US and other gummints to pass laws and regulations dramatically limiting
civil rights online, almost always to avoid some unnamed but presumably imminent
"digital Pearl Harbor". (One used to be able to read some of the
history of this on Dan Rosenberg's wonderfully thoughtful "Virus
Myths" website, but unfortunately it seems to have turned into a
registration-obscured link farm.) The fearmongering has only gotten easier to do
since 2001.
* What would a "digital Pearl Harbor" even be? Some nominal bad guys
blowing up Rackspace or Network Solutions or cutting an undersea telecom cable?
Please think about this seriously; it's one of the worst IT policy analogies in
existence, yet it continues to be abused by damagogues like Panetta.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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