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Saturday, November 29, 2008

When you establish an anti-science environment, this is what happens
Posted by Jill | 6:20 AM
If you have a president who barely knows what "the Google" is; if you are governed by people who believe science is a bad thing because it might disprove Biblical teachings; if you're going to outsource all your information systems jobs, then IT is going to become far less attractive as a career choice and you are going to be susceptible to cyberattacks like this:
Senior military leaders took the exceptional step of briefing President Bush this week on a severe and widespread electronic attack on Defense Department computers that may have originated in Russia -- an incursion that posed unusual concern among commanders and raised potential implications for national security.

Defense officials would not describe the extent of damage inflicted on military networks. But they said that the attack struck hard at networks within U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and affected computers in combat zones. The attack also penetrated at least one highly protected classified network.

Military computers are regularly beset by outside hackers, computer viruses and worms. But defense officials said the most recent attack involved an intrusive piece of malicious software, or "malware," apparently designed specifically to target military networks.

"This one was significant; this one got our attention," said one defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing internal assessments.

Although officials are withholding many details, the attack underscores the increasing danger and potential significance of computer warfare, which defense experts say could one day be used by combatants to undermine even a militarily superior adversary.

Bush was briefed on the threat by Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen also briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Military electronics experts have not pinpointed the source or motive of the attack and could not say whether the destructive program was created by an individual hacker or whether the Russian government may have had some involvement. Defense experts may never be able to answer such questions, officials said.

The defense official said the military also had not learned whether the software's designers may have been specifically targeting computers used by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.


It's interesting that briefing the president about such a cyberattack is regarded as "an exceptional step." It further underscores George W. Bush's growing irrelevance, and the entire episode underscores the fact that this country's Captain Smith has abandoned ship in the first lifeboat with his buddies the Saudi royal family and top corporate executives from the financial industry, leaving the hundreds of millions of passengers on Titanic America to drown on their own.

But the larger picture is just how unprepared the military is to deal with such cyberattacks. Whether the military reflects the Administration's willful ignorance about technology, or if it is a recruiting problem remains to be seen. But after seeing jobs requiring a computer science degree outsourced by the millions to low-wage countries, after watching law firms teach companies how to post fake ads for jobs for which no one person could possibly be qualified so that they can justify outsourcing, after watching their forebears pushed out of the IT job market starting at age 35, it's easy to understand why computer science undergraduate enrollment has dropped by half since 2000.

Some of this is attributable to the dot-com crash, but that doesn't explain an entire generation of millennials saying "No thanks" to the industry that brought them their laptops and computer games. It's hard to justify spending four years and six figures getting an education for a career in which whatever programming languages you know, they aren't the one the employer wants (and he doesn't realize that you can learn the syntax in a matter of weeks), where you are regarded as replaceable by someone in the Phillippines who can be paid 1/10 of what you're being paid, and where you are pushed out as being too old by the time you're 35.

Perhaps this flight away from computer science will change now that we will have a president whose very election was aided by the geeks who ran his internet operation. But until then, the computing infrastructure is vulnerable, because the so-called leaders who rely on it don't even know how to turn the damn things on.

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Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Maybe it's time to revive the notion of "competence"
Posted by Jill | 6:52 AM
Remember 1988, when Michael Dukakis was ridiculed for talking about "competence"? Maybe that notion wasn't so ridiculous after all. When you look at Iraq, spiralling debt, and everything else the Bush Administration has touched, competence looks pretty damn appealing. But even if you support bankrupting the country in perpetuity to finance the Iraq War, you've got to be a bit perturbed about a government that wants ever more of your information at the same time as it can't handle what it has:

Three or four FBI laptop computers are lost or stolen each month and many times the agency doesn't know whether information on the machines is sensitive or classified, the Justice Department's inspector general said in a report Monday.

Inspector General Glenn Fine said the FBI is reducing thefts and disappearances of weapons and laptop computers, but the bureau acknowledged in a statement Monday that "more needs to be done."


Gee, ya think?


The Boston field office reported a stolen laptop containing software for creating identification badges. The laboratory division at Quantico, Va., said a stolen laptop had names, addresses and phone numbers of FBI personnel.

"Perhaps most troubling, the FBI could not determine in many cases whether the lost or stolen laptop computers contained sensitive or classified information," the report said. "Such information may include case information, personal identifying information or classified information on FBI operations."

Of the 160 laptops lost or stolen over a 44-month period, 10 contained sensitive or classified information. The bureau did not have records on whether 51 others had such data.


Meanwhile, the Veterans Affairs Department of the Support Our Troops Adminstration -- you know, the one that cut funds for veterans' health care and sends them to war with inadequate equipment -- is as cavalier about their information as it is about their lives:


The Department of Veterans Affairs began notifying 1.8 million veterans and doctors Monday that their personal and business information could be on a portable hard drive that has been missing from an Alabama hospital for nearly three weeks.

The hard drive may have contained Social Security numbers and other personal information from about 535,000 individuals and billing information on 1.3 million doctors nationwide, the VA said. That's more than 37 times more people than authorities initially believed were affected.

An employee at the VA medical center in Birmingham reported the external hard drive missing on Jan. 22. The drive was used to back up information on the employee's office computer. It may have contained data from research projects, the department said.

U.S. Rep. Artur Davis (news, bio, voting record) questioned why it took the agency so long to begin sending out notification letters.

"I certainly understand that the VA wanted to get a handle on the facts. But it became very apparent very early on that they had a breach of security," said Davis, a Democrat from Birmingham.

Veterans Affairs officials said they were moving as quickly as they could. "We are providing information as we learn it from an investigation," said spokesman Matt Burns in Washington.

The VA first publicly revealed the equipment was missing 11 days after it was reported, saying then that personal information on as many as 48,000 veterans may have been stolen.

The VA said Monday it doesn't have any reason to believe anyone has misused data from the hard drive, which is also at the center of a criminal investigation. The agency offered a year of free credit monitoring to anyone whose information is compromised.

Davis said the department told him that the missing storage unit included the Social Security numbers and names of about 10,000 people, plus another 525,000 Social Security numbers. The information on doctors includes names and Medicare billing codes, he said.


Free credit monitoring. Well, that's damn nice of them. How about taking care of the fucking data correctly in the first place?

This is what happens when you have a government that is completely technologically illiterate. You can export an entire database now to a flat file that you can take out of a facility on a flash drive that fits in your pocket. These drives are easily lost. I ought to know, I've lost four of them. But all four were mine, none of them contained sensitive information, unless you call chapters from my unfinished novel "sensitive", and all four are probably in my house under a piece of furniture somewhere.

It's one thing if this happens once, because unless you're prepared to search employees on their way out of the building, you're not going to be able to 100% guarantee that no sensitive information leaves the building. However, I'd be interested in knowing how many people who have lost such information and placed the entire financial lives of those whose information they've lost at risk have faced consequences.

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