Politics

GNU Terrorists

This is a political operation. Whether or not the source is available has nothing to do with making a computer usable by The Enemy.

Now, only a year after the release of SE Linux, the NSA has dropped its support for any future cyber security products based on the open source method. NSA officials say their cyber security enhancements made for SE Linux have not only benefited the NSA, but because of the terms of the GPL have also strengthened the security architecture of computers used by malicious cyber terrorists around the world.

"We didn’t fully understand the consequences of releasing software under the GPL," said Dick Schafer, deputy director of the NSA. "We received a lot of loud complaints regarding our efforts with SE Linux."
— WorldTech Tribune

It may be hard for the three-letter acronyms to admit, but whether or not the source is available and may help the terrorists is irrelevant. See Bruce Schneier for elaboration, or Ray Ozzie, or even the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group: the FBI captured passwords using a keystroke logger. Instead, this decision by the NSA harms us law-abiding citizens.

2:18:00 PM # Google It!
categories: Politics, Security

My Own Personal Infrastructure for Discovery

Jonathan Peterson commented on Eric Norlin's post on ComputerWorld's article on the Information Sharing and Homeland Security Conference at the same time David Fletcher's posts on national technology R&D and data-sharing for homeland security flew over my aggregated transom.

Of interest: Terascale Infrastructure for Discovery and other High End Computing Capabilities

From ComputerWorld:

"Take AOL, Yahoo and MSN and link them to a bunch of classified data, and that's Intelink," said [John] Brantley, [director of the Intelink management office,] calling the intranet the "basis for how people share information" in the intelligence community. And while he acknowledged that searching Intelink can be like shooting craps, Brantley maintains that despite the intranet's size, analysts shoot craps "with loaded dice."

I've long wondered why it's so much trouble to find out what the government knows about you.

1:51:11 PM # Google It!
categories: Law, Politics, Security