From: William Knowles (wkC4I.ORG)
Date: Wed Apr 05 2000 - 12:03:43 CDT

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/04/05/ED11338.DTL&type=tech_article

JAMES P. PINKERTON, Newsday
Wednesday, April 5, 2000
2000 San Francisco Chronicle

More than ever before, Americans are exercising their unalienable
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of capital gains. But what
happens when liberty jeopardizes life -- or the Dow Jones average? And
what happens when the government jeopardizes liberty?

On Tuesday, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., convened the Senate Judiciary
Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Government Information to
make the case for new legislation to protect the nation's
``information infrastructure.''

And so began a familiar Washington ritual: Friendly lawmaker invites
friendly bureaucrat to a hearing. Soon, a new law emerges that gives
political credit to the lawmaker and a bigger budget to the
bureaucrat. Kyl began the show with a declaration that ``denial of
service'' hacker attacks on companies such as eBay, Yahoo and CNN
should ``serve as a wake-up call about the need to protect our
critical computer networks.'' Kyl added that ``the attacks contributed
to a 258-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and halted a
string of three days of consecutive record- high closes of the
technology-laden Nasdaq Composite Index.''

To deal with this problem, Kyl and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., have
co-sponsored S. 2092, which would modify the federal government's
``trap and trace'' authority, so that law enforcers would no longer
need to obtain a search warrant in every jurisdiction through which a
cyber- attack traveled.

The first ``witness'' was FBI Director Louis Freeh. After praising Kyl
and his legislation, he reminded his audience of how much the FBI was
already doing to combat the scourge of cyber-crime. Freeh then used
the forum to outline the FBI's entire cyber-agenda, covering everyone
from virus-writers and intellectual property thieves to the ``Internet
Black Tigers,'' a group ``reportedly affiliated with the Tamil
Tigers'' of Sri Lanka. He further noted that unchecked Net-related
stock fraud costs investors $1 million an hour.

Only two more witnesses came after Freeh. One was Richard D. Pethia,
who directs a federally funded cyber-security center within the
Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. Not surprisingly, Pethia was 100 percent behind the joint
Kyl-Freeh effort. The other witness was Harris N. Miller, president of
the Information Technology Association of America, a Washington-based
trade association. Miller was supportive but ambivalent; his worry
seemed to be that high-tech trade secrets would spill into -- and then
out of -- Uncle Sam's databases.

But the real opposition to the Senate bill wasn't heard from
because it wasn't invited to testify.

One likely opponent is the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a
Washington-based cyber-liberties group. ``This is very much a process
being driven by the law-enforcement community,'' lamented Mark
Rotenberg, the group's director.

Another non-invitee was Solveig Singleton, director of information
studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.
``Law enforcement views the Fourth Amendment as the problem,'' she
said. That's the piece of the Bill of Rights that protects ``persons,
houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and
seizures'' -- with no mention of e-mail. And so now, Singleton
observed, the FBI wants to force manufacturers to ``build surveillance
into technology,'' all but eliminating the need for search warrants.

The dangers that Kyl and Freeh described are real, but so is the
danger of a government's habitually stomping on privacy rights.
History proves that basic rights are unalienable only when those who
might alienate them are watched

*-------------------------------------------------*
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
Intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
---------------------------------------------------
C4I Secure Solutions http://www.c4i.org
*-------------------------------------------------*

ISN is sponsored by SecurityFocus.com
---
To unsubscribe email LISTSERVSecurityFocus.com with a message body of
"SIGNOFF ISN".

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]