Cybersecurity and Piracy on the High Seas 116
Schneier points out an interesting article comparing modern cybersecurity to piracy on the high seas in the early 1800s. The article extends the comparison into projected action based on historical context. "Similarly, in many ways, current U.S. policy on the security of electronic commerce is similar to Adams' appeasement approach to the Barbary pirates. The U.S. government's inability to dictate a consistent cyber commerce protection policy is creating a financial burden on the U.S. private sector to maintain a status quo, when those resources could be used to mount a more-effective Internet-focused defense. In the case of financial fraud on the Internet, the costs associated with fraudulent transactions are currently borne by private companies, which then have to pass those costs on to their customers. This basically creates a system in which the financial institutions are paying a type of 'tribute' to the cyber criminals, just as Adams did to the Barbary pirates."
You can't have it both ways (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm of the opinion that the government should be there to hold private industry liable for any breaches of personal data that leads to fraud. If someone steals my credit information and makes purchases with them, the credit card company should be on the hook for not verifying the identity of the person who made the purchase. The merchant should be on the hook for not verifying the identity of the purchaser. The whole system needs to be changed. Instead of giving out free credit, they need to only give credit to those who ask for it. Turn it from a push to a pull system and validate the hell out of the puller.
On an only semi-related tangant, I'm waiting for the explosion in fraudulant health care claims. The health care cards themselves are simple pieces of paper. It is easy to get a picture idea with your picture and someone else's name on it. With the cost of health care skyrocketting in this country it is only a matter of time before people start getting health services under someone else's name. And I already know what is going to happen... the person whose name got abused is going to be liable for it, not the health providers who okayed the procedure in the first place.
So what? Piracy is not This. (Score:3, Interesting)
Software "piracy", entertainment "piracy", phishing ... the author is obviously conflating these things under the banner of IP and suggesting that there's an economic argument similar to one raised when the US was a free republic. The differences are glaring and obvious:
Dude, WTF are YOU talking about? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did the street price of booze go up or down during Prohibition? I'm betting up.
Re:WTF is this guy talking about? (Score:4, Interesting)
And whoever decided to call tenager who were thinking of copying music pirates, sould realise 2 thing:
1) You cant copy a bar of gold only take it, so the analogy is as fundamentally flawed as all those Wifi analogies!
2) Pirates are cool
Infact who ever made pirates of the carabian really shot themselves in the foot with regards to piracy "Come watch our film, because pirates are cool. NOOO! dont copy it pirates are bad!"
BooHoo, poor banks and credit companies (Score:1, Interesting)
This is a case of banks and credit companies not wanting to change their approach because it's cost prohibitive and puts their business model at risk (hmm, where else are we seeing this right now?). Welcome to an interconnected world, there's a price to pay, maybe you shouldn't have sat on your @$$ all this time and actually kept up with the times.
The thought of the government being responsible to protect bank and creditor's interest scares me.
Let the law enforcement and the military deal with the child pornographers, the kidnappers, and the terrorists. Let the government pass legislation that obliges credit card companies to disclose data on fraud including the cost and the root factors. Maybe they'll see that I'm right!
Arrrrrr matey!
Re:Oddly enough... (Score:4, Interesting)
There's just not enough time in most school history classes to teach the kids something meaningful about all of the very major wars (Revolution, Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam) that even some of the medium-sized wars (French and Indian, 1812, Korea) get short shrift. It's not a coincidence that Korea is called the "forgotten war." It'd be great if every high school kid had as much curiosity and interest about history as you clearly do, but it's just not the case. One survey, admittedly not very scientific, found that 57% of high school students didn't know that the Civil War was in the last half of the 19th century [cbsnews.com].
That's pretty bad. I'd much rather fix that than worry about teaching them about Barbary pirates. Maybe the right solution is more edu-tainment programming; it seems that your lesson to be taken from the Barbaray pirates is not dates and places, but more of a zeitgeist about the forces that were acting on the US in the early days. Some of that can be captured in a good period piece--think Pirates of the Caribbean, except not entirely fictionalized.
Similarly, it looks some somebody has already made silly videos about " protecting web booty" [reputation...erblog.com] to riff on the pirate/cybersecurity theme.
Re:Oddly enough... (Score:3, Interesting)
My wife has been reading a 1930s high school U.S. history textbook, and has been fascinated by the descriptions of interpersonal relationships between various politicians at different stages in the country's history. The period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War in a modern text usually merits a page or two about Andrew Jackson, then the build-up to the war in terms of slavery and economic strife. The period between the Civil War and World War I often gets the same treatment.
How much about some of those wars truly matters? Who besides a history scholar cares the name of the British general in the Revolutionary War? Why cover WWI at all? Just leave that to a Western Civilization history class, which would certainly devote more time to its causes. Maybe mention it in terms of the mass-production revolution, and use it to lead into the subsequent economic boom, and leave it at that.
Talk more about the things that shaped the government, politics, and disagreements that our country still faces today, and you'll have students leaving the classes with a better understanding of the country they live in now. Memorizing dates and names from war to war leaves almost everyone forgetting everything, and never learning anything.
(Oh, and I loved my U.S. history class way back when, got a 5 on the AP test, and have done research on the Civil War. Please don't attack my credibility or say I just hate the wars or just hate history; comment on the merits of my proposal.)
Re:Oddly enough... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, hard to say. First, whether the Vietnam War was "frivilous" is a matter of opinion. It's cast as such. As I see it, the US did have legitimate concerns about the so-called "domino effect", namely that if communism (as practiced by the USSR and China at the time) could establish itself in Vietnam, then neighboring countries would be destabilized as well. A better approach would have been to enable Vietnam to be sufficiently independent of China, like Yugoslavia was from the USSR. That probably would have worked since Vietnam was already playing a bit the USSR against China. Then the US could have had some leverage down the road to make Vietnam a more democratic country and inclined to support US interests in the region.
If one looks at the actually conduct of the war, you can see how it was going to be impossible to win definitively by the US. North Vietnam was hardened by the long struggle against France while South Vietnam was created on the spur of the moment and never really worked. At some points, South Vietnam's military and political leaders seemed more interested in profit (say by selling heroin to US troops, for example) than fighting. The US and South Vietnam couldn't invade North Vietnam directly. Nor could they effectively hit the supply lines for guerilla efforts in South Vietnam, again because so much of it was on someone else's territory. Strategically and tactically, it was a major failure for the US and a disaster for South Vietnam.
I think the primary result from the US's point of view was the discrediting of the US government. This was solidified by the resignation of both President Nixon and Vice President Agnew due to scandal. Further, I think it contributed to a lot of the social changes of the era (though many of the bigger changes predate the Vietnam War, like racial desegregation and increasing immigration). Militarily it has ended casual use of the draft, the US version of forced conscription, and helped steer the US towards its current army structure. A couple of innovations (from the US point of view) were improvements in combined arms (for example helicopter-supported infantry or close air support), targeting ordinance (the so-called "smart bomb", wire-guided missiles, etc), and the use of special forces. A lot of the tactics and technology used in places like Iraq were developed in the wake of Vietnam.