US/UK Will Stage 'Cyber-Attack War Games' As Pressure Against Encryption Mounts 77
An anonymous reader writes: British prime minister David Cameron is currently visiting Washington to discuss the future of cyber-security in Britain and North America. The leaders have announced that their respective intelligence agencies will mount ongoing cyber-attack "war games" starting this summer in an effort to strengthen the West's tarnished reputation following the Sony hacking scandal. Somewhat relatedly, a recently-leaked Edward Snowden document show the NSA giving dire warnings in 2009 of the threat posed by the lack of encrypted communications on the internet.
Any bets? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who feels like a little speculation: Will the offensive teams be fairly picked(from people with suitable skills) and actually try, resulting a a resounding bloodbath, or will the 'exercise' be largely a whitewash?
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White wash? They want a blood bath, then they can beef up security laws - to protect us from the terrorists.
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The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H. L. Mencken
They are priming the pump.
Um... (Score:2, Insightful)
Encryption is one of the first defences against "cyber-attacks".
It's like banning locks on doors to deal with the problem of burglaries.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately the US is likely to tell Cameron to fuck off, since it would be unconstitutional to ban encryption and after the economic damage that the NSA did they won't allow the UK to force service providers to back-door their apps.
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Fortunately the US is likely to tell Cameron to fuck off, since it would be unconstitutional to ban encryption and after the economic damage that the NSA did they won't allow the UK to force service providers to back-door their apps.
Have you forgotten? Up to and including the Clinton years, encryption was classified as a "munition" and was very much controlled by the US Government.
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Have you forgotten? Up to and including the Clinton years, encryption was classified as a "munition" and was very much controlled by the US Government.
Only in the sense that the rest of the world had to OCR the printed source code if they wanted to use it legally.
Homegrown Initiative (Score:3)
Fortunately the US is likely to tell Cameron to fuck off, since it would be unconstitutional to ban encryption...
Just like it is unconstitutional to torture prisoners etc. etc.? I expect that you are right in that they will deny his request but the reason will be because it is the request of a foreign power. I also expect that many US politicians will think that it sounds like an excellent idea and after a suitable period so that they can claim it is their own idea there will be an American lead initiative to do the same thing. Why would they listen to some idiotic right wing UK politician when they have plenty of th
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Well - if you don't have a lock then the door won't be broken when you come home.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
Euh locks on doors don't stop burglars. They stop kids from doing petty vandalism. Burglars can easily pick your door locks, or will simply break a window to enter.
Door locks are the equivalent of FTP server banner messages telling people "access is restricted to those authorized".
What prevents burglaries in civilized countries is the social contract, and the fact that most people have a common moral and ethical sense that tells them it's wrong. The idea that you're better off working for a decent salary and that you should respect the property of others so they'll respect you is a basic logic that holds true in many places (less so nowadays in some countries where the working poor are worse every day).
The reason it doesn't work on the Internet is because this contract falls apart because of distance and the anonymizing nature of the Internet. Not just the fact that bad guys can be pseudonymous, but because to them you're not a person, you're an IP address. It de-humanizes contact and makes it easier to justify bad behavior.
Add to it the fact that there may be a small portion of people in a city or neighborhood who are lacking enough in morality to do burglaries, but in the whole world there's a lot more of them. And although they can't all break into your house, they can all break into your computer...
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In the UK at least, door locks have an important function. They turn entering your house from traspass (NOT a criminal offense) into breaking and entering (a criminal offense).
In the USA they invoke a requirement to get a warrant for LEO to enter the house.
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In the UK at least, door locks have an important function. They turn entering your house from traspass (NOT a criminal offense) into breaking and entering (a criminal offense).
In the USA they invoke a requirement to get a warrant for LEO to enter the house.
They do the first thing in the case of the USA, too. It doesn't matter how crappy the lock is. A fence around your property with a locked gate does the second thing, too, although in that case they can and will still come to the door for 911 calls, reports of domestic violence, etc etc. But they can come right in your house for that stuff whether you have a lock or not, no warrant is necessary. They can also enter a domicile without a warrant if they claim to be "in hot pursuit". I believe that only require
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Wow. I mean double wow. Is this that new common core system I keep hearing about? Common core 'free form' word art. or somesuch?
Mr. Sadler, you have written a string of I guess 15 or 20 sentences together, loosely directed at the topics of crime, substance abuse, mental illness, sexuality, hiring practices and such.
Your initial assertion, that burgalaries and caused primarily by "substance abuse or mental illnesses" is made, then you don't even attempt to support this in any way, while rambling on - in a
Re: Um... (Score:2)
What prevents burglaries in the USA is more along the lines of cheap goods for the masses and stiff penalties for all involved in dealing with stolen goods.
Car stereos stopped being stolen once auto makers started putting in good systems to begin with. Yes it stil happens but not nearly as often.
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What prevents burglaries in civilized countries is the social contract, and the fact that most people have a common moral and ethical sense that tells them it's wrong.
Imaginary social contracts, and imaginary moral/ethical sense don't stop burglaries. Consequences do.
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Reading David Cameron's speech from a few days ago, it drives home just how stunningly ignorant of technology the majority of politicians are. How would one even limit encryption? Ban mathematicians and programmers? The British government, in particular, is being run by possibly one of the stupidest people to ever be in charge of a modern democracy.
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Easy - ban all usage of encryption except for approved algorithms where one party has a valid encryption license. Amazon still gets to do secure online ordering (well, secure enough. NSA back doors notwithstanding), but should you dare to send an encrypted email... well that's ten years behind bars, per offense. No evidence of any other crime needed.
Where's the problem? Do you really think enough people know or care about encryption that you'd get a popular uprising over such a law?
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And what exactly would stop me, for instance, from using "non-approved" encryption for, say, my VPN end points?
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Mostly the burly guys in uniform that show up at your door soon after the NSA dragnet detects an unlicensed encrypted communication channel in use. Because why would they give you a license to establish a VPN? What are you trying to hide?
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"When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the m
Keeping up with US, Bush and Obama. American Idle (Score:2)
The Brits needed to keep up with the US. The Americans, being too preoccupied with American Idol and Honey Boo Boo to get a clue about the issues, elected Bush Jr and Obama. Not to be outdone by the Americans, the UK went one stupider with Cameron.
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No, encrytion does not secure the contents it merely makes them useless, so do not be fooled. There is nothing in the world than can stop encrypted data from being encrypted and thus made useless to the original encrypted. It is no real security solution, it is merely a scrambler into uselessness through obscurity, that obscurity being the lack of the password to decrypt the data and make it useful again. The more they want that information the more the holder of the password is at risk. So parallel networ
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Would Quebec be enough? Please, take it.
Alternate idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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But a transparent operation would be amazing on so many fronts.
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You assume that the cyber war games are about preparedness. In reality, these events are about creating headlines that can be used to justify more intrusion into people's private lives.
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Any logical use of resources would be an improvement. War games can make sense, but only when focused on real world threats to things Government is actually supposed to protect. If they are trying to "strengthen the West's tarnished reputation following the Sony hacking scandal" that isn't the right approach. Private industry generally has to provide it's own security and there is nothing about attacks on Sony that couldn't hit any company any time from any source for any reason. Government could do well to
Fuck Cameron (Score:3)
Scotland should have seceded with the UK willing to have such a daft demagogue in charge. Now he's trying to turn the UK and the rest of the world into even more of a surveillance nightmare than the street cameras London already has.
He can piss up a rope and then hang himself from it.
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So... (Score:2)
Gov warnings of lack of encryption (Score:3, Insightful)
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http://www.spiegel.de/internat... [spiegel.de]
Read that. All of it. And then come back and tell me what their mission statement is.
Those who grab for power can't be trusted with it (Score:3)
Mr Cameron has previously said in relation to cyber attacks that there should be no "means of communication" which "we cannot read".
It sounds like Mr Cameron wants microphones in every person's residence.
People who feel with absolute certainty that someone else is always the problem will always try to grab more power for themselves, and because of that, they can't be trusted with the ability to grab power, even though their current goals in using that power are ostensibly laudatory. They can't be trusted with power, because they will never consider any part of any of their own goals as being suspect. Citizens don't benefit when people who can't cope with compromising and feeling frustrated have a career in politics or public service.
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A curious game. The only way to win is for the governments to collude behind the scenes in order to distract their populations with a state of perpetual war.
You'd almost think there was an election due... (Score:2)
Actually, there is an election due in the UK. All of this feckless noise is electioneering, to try to sway the opinions of the Great Unclued out there.
The nitty-gritty detail is the usual sordidly mucky mess of politics everywhere. You may wish to skip this part and move on to calling me silly names if politics bores you.
Britain is a member of the European Union, but is not a member of the EU currency union (the Euro). The EU is institutionally corrupt, to the extent that its own tame poodle of an auditor w
Why is cameron allowed to speak any more? (Score:1)
How can he lead a nation if he doesnt understand that the corporations OWN obama, there is no vector that he can use to "pressure" them. Maybe cameron thinks that if they have enough of a market share they can persuade the big boys to play nice.
its amusing that they also dont seem to understand that the algorithms for good encryption have been published and people can just encrypt their message inside their decryptable message and layer up the encription just like Tor works...
encryption is like pandoras box
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You can however ban it's usage except in communications with properly licensed organizations. That lets banks and businesses continue to engage in secure online transactions, but dare to send an encrypted email, and that's five years in the hole without appeal. Sure, you can't tell the difference between a terrorist and a guy who doesn't want anyone to discover his donkey-porn addiction, but so long as they're all rotting in the gulag, who cares?
The future of cyber-security? (Score:1)
'Inside the “wiper” malware that brought Sony Pictures to its knees [arstechnica.com] Analysis of code shows it used knowledge of Sony's Windows network to spread and wreak havoc.'
Hack the planet (Score:2)
In the real world any serious attack would have been conduced in stealth far in advance with damage triggered at a time of the attackers choosing.
In the fantasy world military brass operate repelling a "cyber attack" means sitting in front of a oversized console while "god" yells Rabbit.. flu shot? Someone talk to me.