noteworthy wrote:
This Chertoff quote is either amusing or disturbing, depending on your perspective:

"There is a lot of thought being given to: How do you organize this in a way that protects an incredibly valuable asset in the United States but does it in a way that doesn’t alarm reasonable people, and I underline reasonable people, in terms of civil liberties?"

Presumably, the ACLU was being "unreasonable" when they asked that a few checks and balances be added to the Patriot Act, but on the other hand, the Administration was being perfectly "reasonable" when they concluded that the FISA doesn't apply to them and they should just ignore it outright. One wonders why they even bother to mention Civil Liberties. If there is some constraint upon executive power that these people accept beyond term limits and the continued operation of elections, I have absolutely no idea what it is.

Having said that, I certainly don't see a Civil Liberties problem with the government monitoring traffic sent to the government. The government certainly ought to be able to read things that people send it. Perhaps there might be some workplace privacy concerns for government employees in all of this but even that is a bit of a stretch.

But, then I didn't raise the Civil Liberties concerns. They did, and in an intentially condescending way. Perhaps they raise Civil Liberties specifically as a means of scoring retorical points against their enemy in a context that no one is seriously concerned about.

In other words, their choice of wording is childish and partisan.

Now, if they wish to extend this monitoring to include the greater Internet, then perhaps I do have a problem. But there is no need. The ISPs ought to be doing that, and not the Government. The Government need not control the IPS systems that protect American consumers. They need only provide tax incentives such that those IPS systems are finally deployed, as they should have been years ago.

How can you even propose to monitor the open Internet? The human resources involved would be outrageous, no?

No. All of these Internet access points are already monitored. This is mostly a centralization of control, along with deployment of additional systems. The $6 billion here likely saves money elsewhere.

The first IPS paper you quoted was 10 years old, btw. Interesting in its time, certainly, but its not as if modern systems are vulnerable to those attacks. The matter of evasion is a general problem that will continue to produce techniques and counter techniques, but I've got 1.3 billion dollars that says IPS is not an utter waste of time, as you seem to imply.

RE: WSJ | Bush Looks to Beef Up Protection Against Cyberattacks