Freedom to Tinker

The White House’s “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” initially slated for release on Wednesday, has been delayed, the Washington Post reports. This comes on the heels of the removal of some of the report’s proposals, and a leak of the draft proposal.

It looks like the report will end up as an eloquent expression of good intentions, coupled with few if any effective action items. Once the decision was made that the report would be changed to make all of the stakeholders happy, this result became inevitable. There are just too many agendas in play to reach any kind of consensus on this issue.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. The government can improve the security of its own systems, but there is little it can do to make ordinary non-government computing more secure. Our main problem is that the market doesn’t reward vendors for investing the large amounts of time and money necessary to build highly secure systems. There isn’t much the government can do to change that.

ABC News reports on their own hiring of “hackers” to disrupt the Huntington Beach, CA police department. (Start reading at the “Testing the system” heading.)

They tried to trick an officer into leaving his post to investigate a false “emergency.” They tried to infect the Chief’s computer with a virus. (Fortunately, neither of these attacks ended up working; but it wasn’t for lack of trying.)

What was ABC News thinking? Trying to disrupt a working police department, which the citizens were relying upon to cope with any real emergencies that developed, was an amazingly irresponsible thing to do.

The article implies, but does not directly say, that the police department consented to this test, but was kept in the dark about which day it would occur. If so, then the police department needs their heads examined just as badly as ABC News does.

I’m all in favor of testing critical systems, but not by mounting surprise attacks on the systems that ordinary citizens’ lives depend upon.

[Link credit: disLEXia]