Infastructure Protection and Paranoia

At 03:41 PM 10/21/1997 +0100, Sandy J. Wong wrote on Cyberia-L
>Buried in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal was a small three-paragraph article
>mentioning that the U.S. may be vulnerable to a cyberspace version of the
>Pearl Harbor attack. A futile suggestion--in my opinion--was made by the
>President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection spend $1
>billion during the next seven years on cyber-security research. that
>suggestion followed a 15-month study of the nation's critical
>infrastructures.

The story, in shorter or longer form, has been in most of the major papers.
The InfoWar crowd has been lobbying and running conferences about this one 
for a couple of years, and it sounds like they're making political progress.
The longer versions of the articles make the connection between
infrastructure risk and the need for encryption to prevent attacks, 
with various FBI spokecritters talking about how we obviously need FBI access 
to all communications to ban InfoTerrorists.

I've got mixed feelings about it; on one hand it seems like a bunch of
Defense Department wonks trying to find a way to keep their jobs now that 
the world isn't threatened by Commies any more, but on another hand,
some of them may have looked at the problem seriously and said
    "<Expletive deleted>!  Disabling the country's critical infrastructure 
    really does look pretty easy!  Fixing it is probably our job."

The new direction for the electric power industry in California
replaces the current monopolies with an Internet-technology-based 
running auction with buyers and sellers trading electricity in
half-hour chunks.  I don't think it's out on the open Internet,
unless one of the hundreds of players gets careless with computer security,
but it's certainly a vulnerability issue.   Denial of service attacks
are much harder to block than privacy cracks - how secure are the protocols?
The regulatory process will probably require revealing most of the information 
anyway; I doubt we'd end up with anonymous buyers and sellers of power :-)
(Actually, anonymity is probably fairly easy; just use corporations
instead of remailers to provide your pseudonyms.  (This message is
brought to you by Californians For A Secure Electrical Infrastructure.))

The recent San Francisco power failure appears to have been sabotage - 
somebody turned off a bunch of switches around 6am taking out 1/4 of the 
city's power for 2-3 hours; the papers don't say if it was just that one substation
(in which case they should have been able to bring it up much faster)
or whether it cascaded to a bunch of the other substations as well.
Is it just another disgruntled employee?  An organized Ecoterrorist Conspiracy?
Or a government provocation to reinforce their report's impact?
In either case I'm sure the government will take political advantage of it.
				Thanks! 		Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
[I'm currently having hardware problems with my main email; 
send Cc: billstewart@att.com if you need to reach me in a hurry.]

stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
> At 03:41 PM 10/21/1997 +0100, Sandy J. Wong wrote on Cyberia-L
> >Buried in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal was a small three-paragraph article
> >mentioning that the U.S. may be vulnerable to a cyberspace version of the
> >Pearl Harbor attack.

  Why don't you phone up NSA and tell them that you made a Xerox (TM)
copy of the InfoWar plans left overnight at the bar/lounge at the 
Holiday Inn in Albuquerque last week?
  Let me know how it turns out for you...

> The story, in shorter or longer form, has been in most of the major papers.
> The InfoWar crowd has been lobbying and running conferences about this one
> for a couple of years, and it sounds like they're making political progress.
> The longer versions of the articles make the connection between
> infrastructure risk and the need for encryption to prevent attacks,
> with various FBI spokecritters talking about how we obviously need FBI access
> to all communications to ban InfoTerrorists.

  These rocket scientists can't figure out that our infrastructures
might not need all that much defending if our dearly beloved LEA's,
overt and covert, were not sticking foreign objects in the citizen's
anus, sabotaging other countries' infrastructures and economies,
assassinating citizens and foreign citizens, etc., etc.

> I've got mixed feelings about it; on one hand it seems like a bunch of
> Defense Department wonks trying to find a way to keep their jobs now that
> the world isn't threatened by Commies any more, but on another hand,
> some of them may have looked at the problem seriously and said
>     "<Expletive deleted>!  Disabling the country's critical infrastructure
>     really does look pretty easy!  Fixing it is probably our job."

  The world is threatened by the DOD...
 
> The recent San Francisco power failure appears to have been sabotage -
> somebody turned off a bunch of switches around 6am taking out 1/4 of the
> city's power for 2-3 hours; the papers don't say if it was just that one substation
> (in which case they should have been able to bring it up much faster)
> or whether it cascaded to a bunch of the other substations as well.
> Is it just another disgruntled employee?  An organized Ecoterrorist Conspiracy?
> Or a government provocation to reinforce their report's impact?
> In either case I'm sure the government will take political advantage of it.

  Yes, the question on everyone's mind is: "Was it the act of a lone 
madman, or an act of the same federal agencies who are putting assault
rifles in the hands of law enforcement agencies at every level, in 
preparation for...

TruthMonger

>   Why don't you phone up NSA and tell them that you made a Xerox (TM)
> copy of the InfoWar plans left overnight at the bar/lounge at the 
> Holiday Inn in Albuquerque last week?

How the hell did my papers get *there*? :-)

[Before you even ask, NO, those weren't my papers]

...
>   These rocket scientists can't figure out that our infrastructures
> might not need all that much defending if our dearly beloved LEA's,
> overt and covert, were not sticking foreign objects in the citizen's
> anus, sabotaging other countries' infrastructures and economies,
> assassinating citizens and foreign citizens, etc., etc.

Well, even if the establishment weren't as screwed as it is, you'd still have a
few purely sadistic people (or people maligned by someone other than Uncle Sam
and his relatives) attacking the infrastructure...enough of them that the
infrastructures (that's one damn cool word) would still need good cryptographic
protection. 

> 
>   The world is threatened by the DOD...

Screwballs with nukes they may be, but their job is still to defend the U.S.; 
you'd think you could at least trust them to keep the power/water/phone lines
from being a target for an attack.

> 
> TruthMonger

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Randall Farmer
    rfarmer@hiwaay.net
    http://hiwaay.net/~rfarmer

Randall Farmer wrote:
> TruthMonger writed:
> >   The world is threatened by the DOD...
> 
> Screwballs with nukes they may be, but their job is still to defend the U.S.;
> you'd think you could at least trust them to keep the power/water/phone lines
> from being a target for an attack.


Far be it from me to point any fingers, but...
_
 )
 )_______
  _______) <Government agent procateurs>
 )
_)

TruthMonger

At 12:38 AM 10/28/1997 -0600, some TruthMonger tentacle wrote:
>stewarts@ix.netcom.com wrote:
>> At 03:41 PM 10/21/1997 +0100, Sandy J. Wong wrote on Cyberia-L
>> >Buried in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal was a small three-paragraph article
>> >mentioning that the U.S. may be vulnerable to a cyberspace version of the
>> >Pearl Harbor attack.
>
>  Why don't you phone up NSA and tell them that you made a Xerox (TM)
>copy of the InfoWar plans left overnight at the bar/lounge at the 
>Holiday Inn in Albuquerque last week?
>  Let me know how it turns out for you...

At this year's CFP one evening we were playing the game of
"You want to cause maximum disruption to the US infrastructure,
and you've got 100 small explosive devices.  Where do you put them?"
Much creativity was displayed and substantial amounts of testosterone reveled in,
and the overall conclusion was that we'd be in deep trouble if
anybody even vaguely competent wanted to monkeywrench the system.

After that, we played the Russell-Brand-like game of 
"Destruction is easy.  What would you do if you wanted to create
the most joy in the world instead."  That was harder :-)
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
Regular Key PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639