potential hazards of Protect-America act

Sean Donelan sean at donelan.com
Thu Jan 31 01:31:24 UTC 2008


Although I agree with almost every part of the paper, I disagree
with the paper.

I think the threats, risks and recommendations in the paper apply 
regardless of the country or local ordinances. If you eliminate all
the parts of the paper discussing the Protect America Act, it doesn't
change the technical parts of the paper very much.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/01/27/ST2008012702568.html>

Keeping public networks secure is an interesting problem for every network
operator world-wide.  By its nature, no public network can really be 
highly secure.  If your vendor claims it is, grab your wallet and run. 
Its probably a waste of resources to attempt to build the network to 
protect the user against everything or even a lot of threats.  Yet the 
public network relies on user trust in its operation.

I think it would be interesting to watch a debate between a intelligence 
tech and a repair tech about whose tools need to be more robust and 
reliable.  I suspect they would both be very vocal about their needs.
The public network handled the Y2K rollover, you can't say the same thing 
about some of the intelligence systems :-)

So if you are a network operator, what can you do technically (since this 
is not a law list)?

I think the paper suffers a bit from "CSI" or "24" dazzle, everyone 
expects a DNA printout in the last 2 minutes of the show will find the bad 
guy, Intelligence Support tradeshows are filled with overpriced pieces of 
gear.  Its usually the simple stuff that gets you.  Most networks are 
filled with so many diagnostic features, buying a second set of gear is 
usually for administrative not functional reasons.




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