Obama's Internet Kill Switch Approved

[darkwing_duck1]

Link spamming is not the same as presenting a case. Especially as none of those links disprove ANYTHING I said.

Yes they do. You attempted to deny/minimize the existence and importance of cyberwarfare. The links I provided (which is NOT spamming) demonstrate that you are wrong. Cyberwarfare is very real, very dangerous, and we need a vigorous cyberwarfare programme in both defensive and offensive modes. The "kill switch" could concievably save massive amounts of time, money and data by allowing the government to halt a cyber offensive cold by denying the enemy the battlefield for a period of time.

I'm again unsure that you even read anything because you say "Cyberwar is real." I never said it wasn't, it's just a buzzword for IT attacks from foreign soil, which is no more or less dangerous than attacks from anyone else.

Again, the articles I linked to say otherwise. Cyberwarfare is sophisticated, government-sponsored COORDINATED cyber agression.

Also, in that massive pile of garbage you threw at me rather than write a real response with one or two citations,

Why do I need to retype what others have already typed? Argumentum ad homiem on your part, against me and against the sources linked.

you still haven't found proof of the assertion that an aircraft carrier can be hacked and shut down remotely.

If you will re-read my earlier posts, I was skeptical about that one, but I won't rule out the possibility. We don't know how it is/was they would try to do it. Who is to say what is and is not possible.

I could come up with a method in a few minutes (not the actual coding, but the route by which it could be done.

The ONLY relevant article is the one on the electricity grid, but the US grid is a 3rd world-grade cluster#### with problems far beyond vulnerable computers.

Which does not in the least diminish the threat of cyber attack.

So rather than more link spamming, go back and prove your first point, rather than shifting the debate around in an attempt to skirt the responsibility of actually proving anything you've said up to this point.

More ad homienm and a refusal to accept the evidence I have posted that DOES refute your denial of the importance of cyberwarfare.

This is my obvious point also. You can't hack a computer that has no internet connection. The security risk there is a physical one. Wasn't that how that huge bank security gaffe happened a few years back - stolen or lost laptops, not through hacking.
It's still important to take seriously, but no, they're not going to disable the Navy with a computer hack from China.

And you have access to all the classified data on US military computers and communications that tells you this...

 

[STR]

If you will re-read my earlier posts, I was skeptical about that one, but I won't rule out the possibility. We don't know how it is/was they would try to do it. Who is to say what is and is not possible.

You don't rule it out because you don't know what you're talking about. You link spam because the wsj.com domain suggests an air of expertise, when in fact there is never any proof the author of the article has any better idea than you do about the topic at hand. A cursory bio lookup of some of your authors are people that majored in Asian Studies, Journalism, and English. Only one, aside from Northrop Grumman, had experience in information technology (do YOU know which one?). Therefore, they, like you, can be fed utter tripe by people with actual knowledge to further their agenda, whatever it may be. I could go on, but I think I have a quote that is puts it far better than I could.

It seems to me that the number of people who post comments...is...usually much larger than the number of people whose education -- formal or not -- allows them to understand the article well, let alone make meaningful comments.

This is, I think, but one manifestation of many people's tendency to express themselves in many more situations than when they have something to express. Turned into habit, this leads to confusions...which are IMO a natural outcome of situations in which people who barely passed their high school math and physics tests develop their own opinions (or parrot those of their peers) about topics like dynamic systems. Moreover, put this together with the openness of an online "debate" -- which lures people into feeling welcome to discussions where they're utterly out of their depth yet don't realize it -- and another interesting specimen appears: the person who's opinionated without really having an opinion.

By Andrei Juan
http://arstechnica.com/science/news...limate-models.ars?comments=1#comment-20598017

So do tell me, using your own experience and knowledge of the topic (This means no plagiarizing the WSJ), how is "cyberwarfare" more dangerous than something like Conficker, which by all accounts was developed privately like almost all malware. I will give you two hints. 1) It doesn't have to infect a government computer to affect it. 2) Having actual human hackers at the other end of the line is not inherently better than an adaptive program.

If you can make a convincing case, I will debate this topic further with you. If you cannot state your reasoning sufficiently, you can argue with yourself, because I'm not being paid to teach people here. Actually, send me payment via paypal, and I'll teach you whatever you want to know. I'll start with examining the JSF further and a few of the more salient points of the Northrop report. Tell, you what, I'll give you a freebie: the reason why I know what general policy is for treating classified workstations is that the policy itself isn't classified.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

If STR's statements about the requirements with computers with classified data having to be disconnected from the net and so on, then the issue with information being stolen comes down to

• The procedures not being rigidly followed
• Turncoats in the know deliberately stealing information and giving it to the enemy

The solutions are

• To more rigidly follow the procedures
• Keeping track of people in the know (reasonably speaking) as to stop them.

And when I say keeping track of people in the know, I mean ONLY keeping track of people in the know, not keeping track of everybody (So it turns out the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program was one of at least two choices the Government could have went with in order to catch the bad-guys. They did have in place a proposal that would have better caught the bad guys without having to violate the privacy of massive numbers of American citizens.)


This policy of hyping the cyber-threat is not about keeping our networks safe from enemy attack, it's about fear mongering to justify increasing power.

As I see it, it's basically an excuse to give the intelligence agencies (NSA) and the military (Cyber-Command) more latitude to operate domestically in a capacity that's far beyond what would be considered Constitutionally acceptable (Hence the use of fear-mongering, which is a highly effective, historically-proven way to get people to part with rights and freedoms that they would not have normally given up).


CuttingEdge100

 

[Robert Maxwell]

As I see it, it's basically an excuse to give the intelligence agencies (NSA) and the military (Cyber-Command) more latitude to operate domestically in a capacity that's far beyond what would be considered Constitutionally acceptable (Hence the use of fear-mongering, which is a highly effective, historically-proven way to get people to part with rights and freedoms that they would not have normally given up).

There we go. That's exactly what this "cyberwarfare" business is about. Defense- and intelligence-oriented agencies want to expand their powers, as all such organizations are inclined to do. Most people just don't know enough to stand up and ask, "is this really necessary?" Good security policies will solve half this problem, and proper vetting of government employees would solve the rest. Some people would still slip through the cracks but the risk of a major security breach would go way down.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Robert Maxwell,

There we go. That's exactly what this "cyberwarfare" business is about. Defense- and intelligence-oriented agencies want to expand their powers, as all such organizations are inclined to do.

Of course, this is all about power.

Most people just don't know enough to stand up and ask, "is this really necessary?"

They either do not know enough to ask, do not care enough to ask, or are afraid to ask for one reason or another (appearing unpatriotic, appearing soft on so-called "serious threats", etc)

Good security policies will solve half this problem, and proper vetting of government employees would solve the rest.

By in large, this is of course the best correct solution if the actual reason was for computer and network security.

Some people would still slip through the cracks but the risk of a major security breach would go way down.

Correct, I don't think it's really all that realistic to demand absolute safety. You simply demand a very high standard of safety and run with that.


CuttingEdge100

 

[hyzmarca]

There is this absurd notion that someone could wage "cyberwarfare" against us

Why is that absurd?

I'll give you a few reasons, as I understand most people don't know a lot about how the Internet works:

1. There is no critical government infrastructure on the Internet. It would make no sense for there to be, either--it would be a massively stupid thing to do. Government data is kept on private networks.

2. The Internet is too vast and decentralized for even a determined enemy to cripple it through technological means. The only effective way to attack our network infrastructure is to physically disable it. That is not cyberwarfare, obviously.

All this "cyberwarfare" nonsense is propagated by old guys who don't understand the Internet and how it works. They are convinced it's a form of territory that must be defended from enemies. The single most important form of security is physical security. Worrying about attacks coming from cyberspace is simply asinine and a massive waste of government resources.

If it's true that this law is meant to curtail some of the executive's broad telecom powers then I am all for it. I just wish people would stop talking about "cyberwarfare" at all, because it just doesn't exist.

There is practically no such thing as a truly private network anymore. The vast majority of networks, even government networks, have an internet connection somewhere. That connection may be under multiple layers of security, but its still a vulnerability.

There are a few theoretical cyberwarefare attacks that would be crippling. Stock exchanges, power grids, and air traffic control computers are prime targets.

Getting a trojan on a major stock exchange would be difficult. But if accomplished a single terrorist could tank the global economy to the point that dirt would be more valuable pound for pound than most currencies.

Getting a trojan into power control systems would also be extremely difficult, but is by no means impossible. This would allow a terrorist to potentially shut down the power for a good portion of a continent.

Getting a trojan into an air traffic control computer is also extremely difficult. But its not nearly impossible and has been done in the past (by Americans against Serbians in Kosovo during the conflict there). A person who understands the inner workings of these systems can make an air traffic controler see anything, and potentially crash planes (or hide the movements of bombers, as the Americans did in the aforementioned incident).
While it would be even more difficult to infect multiple airports, it only takes one to create quite a panic.

However, a kill switch would be useless in all those situations. By the time anyone noticed what was happening it would be too late and in the off chance it wasn't it would be far easier and safer to shut those systems down locally.

These attacks also require intimate knowledge of the systems being attacked and a great deal of luck.

 

[STR]

Getting a trojan on a major stock exchange would be difficult. But if accomplished a single terrorist could tank the global economy to the point that dirt would be more valuable pound for pound than most currencies.

For an example of how a sucessful attack would proceed against a major exchange, I'd point to the 5 minute Dow panic of a few months back. Once the exchanges realized there was a problem they 1) stopped trading 2) cancelled trades.

Market exchanges are probably the least efficent use of intrusion resources. For one, all the information is backed up on multiple locations, so you would have to infilitrate all of them to really make a difference. For another, most securities are sold on more than one exchange, so if one exchange went under that STILL wouldn't make the involved securities worthless. You'd just look up the last price on another exchange and resume trading at around that price once the market reopens. Third, for reasons that go beyond the scope of this topic, market trades don't close instantly. Yes, you agree to buy shares at their exact price as of Time XXYYZZ, but the actual exchange of money and resources isn't for at least 3 days later. Finally, just because the NYSE is shut down for a day or two, doesn't mean the world stops spinning. You don't have to go through the exchange to buy a security anymore than you have to go to the store to buy a book, you can always directly buy it from your friend that's done with it.

 

[Itisnotlogical]

I was afraid something like this would happen. Once Obama has God-like emergency powers, not just over the Internet, he's going to constantly be declaring emergencies so he always has his "emergency" powers. Cue funny pic:

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Itisnotlogical,

Wow, that is quite a resemblance!

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I was afraid something like this would happen. Once Obama has God-like emergency powers, not just over the Internet, he's going to constantly be declaring emergencies so he always has his "emergency" powers. Cue funny pic:

Well, I hope you're joking about the emergency powers thing.

 

[Scout101]

Lieberman is enough of a jerk as it is, imagine if he had Sith powers at his disposal

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Scout101

Yeah, tell me about it.

 

[Marc]

Lieberman is enough of a jerk as it is, imagine if he had Sith powers at his disposal

he'd end up screwing himself up?

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Marc,

More like screwing the rest of us...

 

[TheBrew]

Marc,

More like screwing the rest of us...

I hear that he is defenseless on Saturdays.

 

[Itisnotlogical]

The pic I included undermined the point I was trying to make. Obama's seizing power, and in the process doesn't care much what the American people think about it. Point in case, the health care bill. He couldn't win a fair fight, thus, reconciliation, which is b.s. in any situation.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

It's Not Logical,

The pic I included undermined the point I was trying to make.

I actually assumed you were completely serious actually. It was just kind of funny how much Emperor Palpatine looked like Senator Lieberman

Obama's seizing power, and in the process doesn't care much what the American people think about it.

Of course. People who want absolute power do not care about their people; they care how their people affect them immensely of course (hence the excessive use of surveillance)

Point in case, the health care bill. He couldn't win a fair fight, thus, reconciliation, which is b.s. in any situation.

And while there are no death-panels or anything; a lot of people will not be able to keep their doctors as promised as this healthcare program is phased in.


CuttingEdge100

 

[Squiggy]

The pic I included undermined the point I was trying to make. Obama's seizing power, and in the process doesn't care much what the American people think about it. Point in case, the health care bill. He couldn't win a fair fight, thus, reconciliation, which is b.s. in any situation.

Yet totally legal and used many times in the past for a number of things.

And, in case you haven't gotten the memo...Obama is not Congress.

 

[STR]

POST REMOVED: I realized the comment I was responding to was far too asinine to deserve any kind of response. There is no point debating mindless emotion. There is no point in talking to a talking point. I refuse to treat a person that swallows and regurgitates that kind of tripe as a peer.

 

[Marc]

The pic I included undermined the point I was trying to make. Obama's seizing power, and in the process doesn't care much what the American people think about it. Point in case, the health care bill. He couldn't win a fair fight, thus, reconciliation, which is b.s. in any situation.

except you're totally wrong.

Obama isn't seizing power and if you actually read up on the issue you'd know that it.

a) the powers have been held by the U.S presidents prior to the Obama and what is happening is simply a consolidation and codification (as already pointed out in this thread
b) Republican senator Kit Bond is pushing a bill that will do grant the same power you're claiming Obama is siezing the power do and given it to the DoE rather than Bush's creation the DHS which he says is over stretched.
c) The other bill came out of committee with Dem, Ind and Rep support.


http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-v...-bond-says-dhs-shouldnt-oversee-cybersecurity