I went to the Educause Security Professionals Conference last week. I have been going to this conference for many years and always take home something useful. This year, James Bamford, best known as an expert on the NSA, gave the keynote address. His talk was about how America has lost control of this secret and powerful agency.
On May 5th, the New York Times published an article about how a bill in France advanced giving spy agencies vast power. I am wondering how long it will take before other countries pass similar legislation.
On May 9, the U.S. government came out with a statement about China’s use of a cyber tool called the Great Cannon to launch a denial of service attack against pages on GitHub offering tools to get around the Great Firewall.
On May 11, there was an alert that ISIS hackers were planning a “Message to America” attack, using Twitter.
Maybe I’m just getting old, but the world seems to be moving along a troublesome path. More and more we are seeing our privacy being whittled away by government agencies, our social media being taken over by political activists, and our way of life being threatened by cyber terrorists.
Mr. Bamford pointed out that the Stuxnet worm was the first weaponized virus used to attack devices in the physical world. While this may be the first use of pure code to target and destroy physical devices, I would consider the use of unmanned drones a graphic use of computer technology to target and destroy objects in the physical world.
I find it interesting and rather scary that during my lifetime, computers went from being the tool that mankind was going to use to improve our lives and free us from the drudgery of everyday life to a world where computers are becoming something that we need to worry about.
I really liked The Jetsons, but I find the Terminator film franchise very disturbing. While neither of these two visions of the future are totally realistic (though I would love to have a flying car some mornings), I worry that we are moving closer to the dark side.
In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart tried to define what is obscene, and ended up saying, “I’ll know it when I see it.” I just hope that we, as a society, don’t end up in a war because we didn’t know it when we started it.