Republicans, pick one: win at any cost or support Democracy and rule of law?

Our way of life and form of government require the sternest possible punishment for those who would attack either. Republicans need to support America, and not just winning.

The charges that have been leveled against Trump are political but not in the sense that Republicans claim. Our way of life requires that those who attain high office be severely punished when they attack our American system of democracy and justice, as Trump and his lackeys did.

Some people might say, “Well, these are just Democratic prosecutors going after a Republican they don’t like.” Let’s look at the accusations:

  • In New York, Trump stands accused of felony bank fraud for having falsified records in his attempt to cover up his affair with a porn star. He is accused of doing this to win not just any election, but a presidential election.
  • In Washington, Trump and others stand accused attempting to fraudulantly thwart the peaceful and legal transfer of power, and the prosecutors have produced overwhelming evidence, including Trump’s own words.
  • In Atlanta, Trump and others stand accused of fraudulently attempting to “find” over 11,000 votes, once again in an attempt to overturn an election.

In short, Trump attempted to steal an election. It is undeniable.

Trump’s own tactics have been to accuse others of exactly the crimes he has knowingly committed. Thus we hear the rhetoric of “Stop the Steal”, when he himself attempted to do the stealing, as the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates. The idea that Trump started his own social network called “Truth” demonstrates the depths of his depravity. He and truth rarely have met, and only ever to his disadvantage, as these indictments and the facts behind them demonstrate.

Trump had many co-conspirators, many of whom remain unindicted, such as the so-called “news” organizations like Fox News, who had to settle with Dominion voting for the lies they perpetuated; NewsMax, whose day is coming; and Republican office holders who disgraced themselves by violating their oaths to protect the Constitution. Many of those people have yet to be held accountable by their constituents. That in itself reflects the depths of trouble in which American democracy finds itself.

I note that not all Republicans are in disgrace. Former Governor Chris Christie stands out as the most vocal and consistent of Trump’s critics. But judging by the polls, Christie is in a small minority.

So, Republican citizens: the day of reckoning is here. Is the object simply to have your guy remain in power, no matter the lies and cheating? Will you put country before winning and before worship of this grifter and once again make America a beacon of democracy? That is what will make America great again.

It’s that simple.

Poll: Sanders or Clinton?

Who would you rather have as the next president?

Like many other Democrats I am looking at the two main candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders and Former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and I am very close to making a decision on who to support.  I am very interested in hearing what friends have to say about who they think wold make the better president.

Who would make the better president?

  • Senator Sanders (76%, 13 Votes)
  • Hilary Clinton (24%, 4 Votes)

Total Voters: 17

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The poll is closed, but feel free to leave a comment.

 

Should the ITU Handle Cybersecurity or Cybercrime?

Cybercrime and cybersecurity are two very important topics that are largely being lost in the noise around the American elections, the Arab Spring, or the European banking crisis.  Nevertheless, there is an attempt by the ITU and some governments to take a more active role in this space.

Roughly defined, cybercrime is a crime that occurs or is facilitated by computers.  Cybersecurity is the actions taken to protect against cybercrime.  This includes protection of devices so that they don’t get broken into, and remediation.

Cybercrime itself is a complex issue.  It relates to many things, including fraud, data theft, privacy theft, and just about any criminal endeavor that happened before the term “cyber” ever came to be.  There’s a great paper by a laundry list of Who’s Who in the economics of cybersecurity that proposes methods of estimating actual losses, breaking down crime into various categories.  Statistics in this space are remarkably fluid- that is, there are poor standards for data collection.

As it turns out, there is a treaty on cybercrime, conveniently called The Convention on Cybercrime, developed in the Council of Europe.  Nearly all of Europe, as well as the U.S. and a number of other countries have ratified this treaty, and there other signatories.  Research from the University of Singapore has already shown that either accession to the treaty or even becoming congruent with it will reduce a country’s cybercrime rate.  While the causalities are not clearly explained in that paper, one part is obvious: the first part of the treaty is what amounts to a best practices document for governments, on how they should develop legislation.

The treaty itself is fairly involved and took many years to get as many signatures as it did.  It has to deal with diverse societies who have differing constitutional views on freedom of speech and expression, as well as on due process.

The Secretary General of the ITU and his staff, as well as a few governments, have been under the impression that the ITU could do a better job than what was done by the Council of Europe.  There is little chance of this happening, and in all likelihood, they would make matters worse, if for no other reason (and there are other reasons) that anyone who already signed the Convention would have to reconcile differences between that and whatever would be created by the ITU.

There are other reasons the ITU cannot do better, not least of which is that they lack the technical expertise to actively engage in cybersecurity.  Part of the problem is that most Internet standards are not ITU standards, but come from elsewhere.  While the ITU has any number of standards involving fiber optics management, and good codec support, the computer you’re reading this blog on uses mostly the work of others.  Another reason is that the state of the art in both cybercrime and cybersecurity is rapidly moving, beyond the ITU’s capability to adapt.  Here’s just one example: contrary to what people had thought, the battle ground for cybercrime has not really moved to mobile devices.  As we’ve previously discussed, this has a lot to do with the update mechanisms and business models in play, but the most notable one being that applications on the iPhone in particular are both reviewed by Apple and signed.  The only iPhone you hear about being vulnerable is the one that has been cracked by the owner, and that doesn’t account for a whole lot.

One WCIT proposal that refers to spam as a threat demonstrates how far off some governments are on the subject.  Spam itself has never really been much of a threat, but more of an annoyance.  80-90% of it is never delivered to the end user, and most Evil Doers have moved on to more sophisticated approaches, such as spear phishing.  Worse, the ITU-T’s study group 17 had to take years simply to come up with a definition of spam, when it really was a problem.

This is not to say that the ITU shouldn’t have a role to play with cybersecurity.  The ITU has extraordinarily access to governments of developing countries, and can work with them to improve their cybersecurity posture, through training and outreach.  In fact they do some of this in their Development or ITU-D Sector.  One thing that the D sector has done recently has been to put developing governments in touch with FIRST, the organization that coordinates discussion among Computer Incident Response Teams or CIRTs.  But the ITU should give up any idea that it can play more of a role than outreach and capacity building, all of which should be done in consultation with actual experts.

Hello Insecurity, Goodbye Privacy. Thank you, President Obama

Some people say that Internet Security is an oxymoron, because we hear so much about the different ways in which hackers and criminals break into our data, steal our identities, and even use information to commit “real world” crimes like burglary, when it becomes clear that someone’s gone on vacation.  Well now the Obama Administration along with the FBI and NSA are proposing to make things worse, according to an article in today’s New York Times.

According to the Times, the government is going to propose requiring that developers give up on one of the key principals of securing information– use of end to end encryption, the argument being that law enforcement does not have the visibility to information they once had, say, in the Nixon era, where the NSA acted as a vacuum cleaner and had access to anything.

As our friend Professor Steve Bellovin points out, weakening security of the Internet for law enforcement also weakens it for benefit of criminals.  Not a month ago, for instance, David Barksdale was fired from Google for violating the privacy of teenagers.  He could do that because communications between them were not encrypted end-to-end.  (Yes, Google did the right thing by firing the slime).

This isn’t the first time that the government has wanted the keys to all the castles, since the invention of public key cryptography.  Some of us remember the Clipper chip and a government-mandated key escrow system that the Clinton Administration wanted to mandate in the name of law enforcement.  A wise friend of mine said, and this applies equally now, “No matter how many people stand between me and the escrow, there exists a value of money for me to buy them off.”  The same would be true here, only it would be worse, because in this case, the government seems not to be proposing a uniform technical mechanism.

What’s worse– this mandate will impact only law abiding citizens and not criminals, as the criminals will encrypt data anyway on top of whatever service they use.

What you can do: call your congressman now, and find out where she or he stands.  If they’re in favor of such intrusive policy, vote them out.

Wrap-up of this year’s WEIS

This year’s Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS2010) enlightened us about Identity, privacy, and the insecurity of the financial payment system, just to name a few presentaitons.

Every year I attend a conference called the Workshop on Economics of Information Security (WEIS), and every year I learn quite a bit from the experience.  This year was no exception.  The conference represents an interdisciplinary approach to Cybersecurity that includes economists, government researchers, industry, and of course computer scientists.  Run by friend and luminary Bruce Schneier, Professor Ross Anderson from Cambridge University, and this year with chairs Drs. Tyler Moore and Allan Friedman, the conference includes an eclectic mix of work on topics such as the cyber-insurance (usually including papers from field leader Professor Rainer Böhme, soon of University of Münster), privacy protection, user behavior, and understanding of the underground economy, this year’s conference had a number of interesting pieces of work.  Here are a few samples:

  • Guns, Privacy, and Crime, by Allesandro Acquisti (CMU) and Catherine Tucker (MIT), provides an insight into how addresses of gun permit applicants posted on a Tennessee website does not really impact their security one way or another, contrary to arguments made by politicians.
  • Is the Internet for Porn? An Insight Into the Online Adult Industry – Gilbert Wondracek, Thorsten Holz, Christian Platzer, Engin Kirda and Christopher Kruegel provides a detailed explanation of the technology used to support the Internet Porn industry, in which it claims provides over $3,000 a second in revenue.
  • The password thicket: technical and market failures in human authentication on the web – Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch (Cambridge) talks about just how poorly many websites manage all of those passwords we reuse.
  • A panel on the credit card payment system, together with a presentation that demonstrated that even credit cards with chips and pins are not secure.  One of the key messages from the presentation was that open standards are critically important to security.
  • On the Security Economics of Electricity Metering – Ross Anderson and Shailendra Fuloria (Cambridge) discussed the various actors in the Smart Grid, their motivations, and some recommendations on the regulatory front.

The papers are mostly available at the web site, as are the presentations.  This stuff is important.  It informs industry as to what behaviors are both rewarding and provide for the social good, as well as where we see gaps or need of improvement in our public policies, especially where technology is well ahead of policy makers’ thinking.