Category Archives: Security
Just Say No to Cyber
Bloomberg Businessweek sat down a couple months ago with five security experts including Robert Rodriguez, chairman of the Security Innovation Network and senior adviser to the Chertoff Group. The five were asked questions like “Is it important to determine who’s responsible for security? Is it the seller of the computer, the way that a seller of an automobile is responsible for a level of safety? What’s the alternative?”
An answer from Rodriguez, which built on an answer from Brvenik, recently was brought to my attention.
[SourceFire VP] Brvenik: We can make it harder, we can make it more expensive for the adversary, but they still have entry points. In order to truly solve this problem, we have to educate everybody from the start. Elementary schools should be teaching children before they’re ever online about the risks of it, and safe behaviors and how to identify bad things.
Rodriguez: I totally agree with you. Education, increasing awareness, and starting with a national ad campaign, almost like Nancy Reagan did with “Just Say No to Drugs.†It sounded silly to people in the beginning, but it was highly impactful.
While I am all for user education, I can hardly believe someone would cite Nancy Reagan’s program as “highly impactful.” I assume he means that in a positive way. I’ve always considered Reagan’s slogan a complete and abject failure due to the emphasis on an inflexible and unthinking response to a complex problem. We might as well tell people to just say no to anything “cyber” because it can cause harm.
Perhaps Michael Hecht, a Penn State professor of crime, law, and justice, put it best:
Critiqued by some for reducing a complex issue to a catch phrase, Reagan’s campaign is generally considered to have been unsuccessful, and the phrase “just say no” has become a pop-culture joke.
Hecht makes an interesting point about the slogans that work best and why:
…it is clear from a large body of research that students are more receptive when their peers are involved with delivering the message.
The nuance on these political issues is probably important. While I am for user education I am against a “Just Say No” program. Here’s another example: while I am for passenger screening I am against the Chertoff Group lobbying to sell their own product a millimeter wave scanner into airports.
I guess I would have given Bloomberg’s question a different response. I would agree with Brvenik and Rodriguez on user education but also would have disagreed with them. I would have emphasized don’t blame the victim (different from Brvenik), don’t be top-down and inflexible in reasoning (different from Rodriguez) and I would have said a reasonable level of liability should be put on manufacturers (more direct answer to the question).
This Day in History: 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis
Two days before October 16th, 1962 an american spy plane taking photos of Cuba recorded the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles. This not only revealed a clear danger but also gaps in American intelligence operations. The missiles posed an immediate threat.
President Kennedy first saw the sobering photos on this day, 50 years ago, which started a series of events that brought the country to the brink of nuclear war. Over the next eight days the US moved towards launching its own missiles, as re-told by veterans of the incident.
“We are very near going to war, you will launch your missile to DEFCON 2,” Johnson, 77, [ballistic-missile analyst technician for the 578th Strategic Missile Squadron supported by Dyess Air Force Base] recalled the sound of the alert and then the message to raise the Atlas F-series missile 185-feet to a launchpad and wait for the Defense Condition 1 (DEFCON 1) alert to push the button and send the weapon into a nuclear holocaust.
Kennedy gave a strong stance publicly during the crisis but as we know today he actually resolved the crisis peacefully through compromise; the President led a series of intense and secret diplomatic meetings with the Soviets, the United Nations and other countries. A direct phone line was installed that enabled Kennedy and Khrushchev to talk; through November they worked out how both sides would reduce their arsenal and quit the forward positions.
Foreign Policy refers to the crisis as “The Myth That Screwed Up 50 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy”
American leaders don’t like to compromise, and a lingering misunderstanding of those 13 days in October 1962 has a lot to do with it.
In fact, the crisis concluded not with Moscow’s unconditional diplomatic whimper, but with mutual concessions.
[…]
For too long, U.S. foreign-policy debates have lionized threats and confrontation and minimized realistic compromise. And yes, to be sure, compromise is not always the answer, and sometimes it’s precisely the wrong answer. But policymakers and politicians have to be able to examine it openly and without fear, and measure it against alternatives. Compromises do fail, and presidents can then ratchet up threats or even use force. But they need to remember that the ever steely-eyed JFK found a compromise solution to the Cuban missile crisis — and the compromise worked.
Yellow Rain and the Hmong Tragedy
RadioLab did an investigation of the “Yellow Rain” controversy involving Hmong people in Laos along the Thai border after the US pulled troops out of Vietnam in 1975 — when the “Laws of Humanity had been terminated”.
In brief, the show covers how samples collected from the area were sent to an American lab, which found artificial concentrations of T2. Since the “rain” was said to be dropped from the air, and sophistication was implied, a link to the Soviets was believed. President Reagan decided in the 1980s to restart chemical weapon development and build up an arsenal in America as a response to these findings.
The show then reports that the case was reopened by scientists who came to a completely different conclusion — a link to pollen and bees. Scientists looking at samples eventually said the improbability of “gathering pollen predigested by honeybees” undermined the argument for chemical warfare. Instead a new theory was developed that showed a link to a natural process and the original theory was challenged due to probable contamination of the lab that did the analysis.
While the style and method of the story are hotly debated now and generating a response from the RadioLab show, what remains as certainties are Reagan’s reaction to a threat, restart of the manufacture of chemical weapons in America (based on faulty discovery of T2) and documentation of genocide of the Hmong.