NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Sa... - The Diigo Meta page

• 04 Jun 09
  

  TransTracker

  cyberwar

  • The nation’s top spy, Michael McConnell, thinks the threat of cyberarmageddon! is so great that the U.S. government should have unfettered and warrantless access to U.S. citizens’ Google search histories, private e-mails and file transfers, in order to spot the cyberterrorists in our midst.

    
    

    That’s according to a sprawling 18-page story on the Director of
    
    National Intelligence by Lawrence Wright in the January 21 edition of the New Yorker. (The story is not online).

    
    

    In the piece, McConnell returns, in flamboyant style, to his exaggerating ways, hyping threats and statistics to further his bureaucratic aims. For example, McConnell regurgitates the hoary myth that computer crime costs America $100 billion a year. THREAT LEVEL traced down the source of that fake-factoid in September to a former privacy officer for the state of Colorado.

  • Presumably using unsupported stats like that, in May 2007 McConnell convinced President Bush that a massive cyber-attack on a single U.S. bank would be worse for the economy than than the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, the article reports. In response, the NSA developed a mind-boggling, but still incomplete, plan to eavesdrop on the internet in order to protect it.

    
    

    In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. "Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation," he said. Giorgio warned me, "We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’"

    
    

    
    

    It says something ominous about McConnell’s priorities if he believes a DDOS attack on Bank of America, or even a computer intrusion that wiped out its database (and magically purged its backup tapes), would be worse than an attack that killed 3,000 Americans.

    
    

    Still, it’s hardly a surprising plan — given that McConnell was one of the main backers of the Clipper Chip, the government’s failed, early 1990’s proposal to put a backdoor in every encryption product.

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