NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] The Boston Bombings, Knee-Jerks, Arthur C. Clarke, and CISPA
The Boston Bombings, Knee-Jerks, Arthur C. Clarke, and CISPA
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001020.html
A couple of days ago on my Google+ feed, I mentioned that this has
been one of those weeks where I've really felt that I've been
channeling Mr. Spock.
This generated an immediate comment from one of my regular followers,
who noted that it seems to him that I'm actually doing that 52 weeks a
year.
Perhaps.
But as we consider the events in Boston of the last week, it's worth
keeping in mind the incredibly bad decisions flowing mainly from
emotional responses to 9/11, that appear poised for a repeat
performance now.
I don't really need to remind you of the list, but here's just a quick
refresher of a few examples. Emotion over logic yielded us DHS and
TSA with their heavy-handed abuses, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that
have been unimaginably expensive in terms of lives and treasure with
no real positive results to be seen, the rise of targeted "video game"
killings via drones with significant deaths of innocents including
children, and generally an increase in anti-U.S. hatred that has
radicalized even some American citizens with backgrounds originally
void of terrorist leanings at all.
Now, in the wake of the Boston bombings, we're hearing familiar themes
once again.
More cameras. Drones galore. Fewer civil liberties.
You know the drill.
Politicians are incredibly sensitive creatures in their ability to
sense the public attitude of the moment, especially if it can help
them come the next election. Whether or not they act on these signals
depends on their perceived risks/benefits analysis.
Thus we see politicos ignoring the will of 90% of the U.S. population
in favor of expanded gun background checks, but we also already see
these same elected officials now scrambling to jump on the knee-jerk
technological surveillance bandwagon, even if a week ago they were
taking an essentially contrary stand.
Technological realities are generally not germane to their analytical
viewpoints.
We know a lot about domestic video surveillance now, and the
overwhelming bulk of evidence suggests that it is relatively useless
in stopping terrorist attacks (or even much ordinary crime) and is
mainly of use to track down culprits after the damage is already
done -- if then.
This proved true even in the case of the Boston bombings, the locale
of which must have represented one of the densest concentrations of
video and still photography in a single location in history. And even
there, despite what you might have heard, highly touted tech such as
facial recognition systems apparently played virtually no role at all.
The reality is that these systems are only useful under very narrowly
defined conditions, the breathless pronouncements of their vested
supporters notwithstanding.
And in addition to knee-jerk reactions, we have actual political jerks
as well.
Since the capture of the teenage bombing suspect now in hospital -- a
naturalized U.S. citizen, by the way -- we've already seen the specter
of GOP senators expressing their disdain for the U.S. justice system,
demanding that he be declared an "enemy combatant." This despite the
fact that based on what we know right now, there is no legal
justification for such a determination, and in fact the enemy
combatant system -- which could have been better run by "The Three
Stooges" -- is tied up in knots of incompetency which make the worst
problems in the conventional justice system look trivial by
comparison.
And what was unspoken by these U.S. senators was explicitly tweeted by
a New York state senator, who apparently graduated from the Air Force
Academy without understanding what the Bill of Rights is all about,
who blatantly called for "torturing the punk."
To my mind, the sensibilities expressed by these officials are far
more dangerous to our civil liberties and way of life than any
terrorists.
There are those two words again that so many politicians attempt to
ignore: civil liberties.
Understandably pushed into the background during the week was the U.S.
House of Representatives passing CISPA legislation that would enable
information sharing between government and private industry, that many
observers view as rife with the potential for civil liberties abuses.
CISPA is a complex topic. There is no denying that there are actual
"cyber" threats. Some of the major Internet firms that had been more
openly opposed to previous legislative attempts along these lines have
not been presenting formal stances one way or another on CISPA, likely
assuming (with some genuine justification from their standpoints) that
the current bill is probably the best they could hope to see in the
ongoing toxic political atmosphere, and that anything else likely to
appear would probably be even worse all around.
In my view, and the view of many others, cyber threats -- while they
obviously do exist -- have been vastly overstated by homeland security
and military entities, and of course by their affiliated contractor
minions in what we might call the "cyberwar-industrial complex" (or my
preferred term, the "cyberscare-industrial complex").
Their purpose is clear enough. Sow FUD - Fear, Uncertainty, and
Doubt, in a blatant attempt to accumulate vast resources (both in
terms of power and funding) to their own both ostensibly offensive and
defensive "cyber" regimes, that will enhance their own organizations,
not to mention their post-military employment and financial
opportunities.
Cyberfear is perfect for these goals. It's almost impossible to prove
that a "cyber attack" (whatever that actually means) came from any
particular source, or to defend against such accusations. This makes
blaming your current "designated enemy" politically expedient indeed.
There are real world consequences to this approach. Already, we've
seen high ranking defense officials claiming that "cyberwar" is more
dangerous than conventional terrorism. They impress politicians with
carefully rigged demos of imaginary cyber-based infrastructure
attacks, and demand ever more money for their "cyber armies."
Until bad publicity got in their way, they were even disgracefully
planning to give medals to "cyber troops" (and also to remote drone
operators, by the way), who faced absolutely no personal risks
compared to our brave troops actually fighting in the trenches.
This is all basically part of a concerted effort to elevate military
cyberops to the same level as conventional war -- made all the more
explicit by arguments about when a conventional retaliation is
justified in response to a cyber attack. And remember, as we just
discussed, proving where a cyber attack actually comes from is highly
problematic. How handy.
Yet if we pull back a bit and look at the broader picture, we find
that the disingenuous nature of these official pronouncements is even
more extreme.
The disgraceful fact is that we see officials attempting to equate
people being unable to access online banking for a few hours to the
situation engendered by a terrorist carrying a suitcase nuke into the
heart of a major city.
We see enormously overblown concerns about Internet-based
infrastructure attacks, when the reality is that one guy in the desert
with conventional explosives could take down a high tension power line
and be enormously disruptive, or cut off water to millions by simply
blowing away a chunk of a major aqueduct. And so on.
But there's no political "sexiness" -- no major funding or power grab
opportunities -- in trying to defend against low tech attacks that can
be extremely effective, but nearly impossible to prevent.
Remember, officials shut down the entire Boston area, invoking what
could arguably be called a de facto martial law condition, to search
for a single teenaged suspect armed only with conventional guns
(thanks NRA!) and homemade explosives of a sort that anyone could
produce in a few hours after gathering components at the local
Walmart.
Which brings us back to CISPA.
At least prior to last week, word from the White House was that
President Obama's advisers would urge that he veto CISPA if it reached
his desk (after consolidation with any parallel Senate legislation)
without significant pro-privacy changes.
That is, this was the word we had prior to the incredibly low tech but
still quite effective attacks in Boston, conducted by a pair of
youthful brothers who apparently didn't even have an effective escape
plan in mind, and despite thousands of video cameras in the immediate
vicinity.
Given all that we've reviewed above, I would not be at all surprised
to see the president backtrack and now be viewed as being much more
accepting of CISPA, bowing to the political pressure that will be
actively attempting to conflate even the amateurish attack in
Boston -- based on hardware from a hardware store, not from a computer
store -- with the exaggerated and self-serving FUD of the cyberscare
community. I personally still hope that President Obama holds firm to
his originally reported stance in this regard.
More than sixty years ago, Arthur C. Clarke published a short science
fiction story called "Superiority" -- that we should very much keep in
mind today.
It tells the saga of an interstellar war, where the technologically
far superior side, by virtue of diverting so much of its attention and
resources to high-tech systems that never really performed as promised
by their proponents, were ultimately overwhelmed by their
technologically inferior adversaries using comparatively low-tech
weapons.
As we consider the aftermath of Boston, and the potential effects of
CISPA, it would be unfortunate indeed -- and yes,
"highly illogical" -- if we fell into the same trap as the
losing side in Clarke's story, all the more so if our civil liberties
become collateral damage in the process.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
- Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
- Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
_______________________________________________
nnsquad mailing list
http://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad