Last week, the Office of Personnel Management revealed it had been hacked. The White House and FBI are wanting backdoors in encryption. The world of politics not only wants us to be spied upon, but less secure and then complains about being hacked.
The “fun” of a bill such as CISA is how vague they wind up being. It attempts to cast a huge net without much forethought of how that net can be abused. In the case of CISA, it can create less privacy. Researchers already do what they can to share vulnerabilities that they find, and still get ignore by the companies that have them. OPM hadn’t kept up on a basic security program, such as patching, multifactor authentication and auditing.
Wait, there is more. the FBI and White House are now complaining about encryption. you know the idea of securing communication and data so it is unreadable without the proper key? They want backdoors put into it. Now how is that going to help us? It doesn’t. In fact, I would guess that if a backdoor was put into encryption standards, it would take less than 48 hours for the hackers out there to find it and start exploiting it for their own ends.
Truth be told, politicians want to look like they are doing something about a variety of things without thinking of consequences. The authors of the Patriot Act have said over the years that it is not being used how they envisioned. We have laws on the table that criminalize behavior that is trivial (remember what Aaron Swartz was arrested for), and those laws give unproportional sentence guidelines. We have laws and reforms that have been presented that could make security researchers criminals. None of this really protects us. None of it makes logical sense. A criminal is not going to follow the law. Hackers in other countries are not subject to laws here in the U.S. Making research basically illegal at worst, or a gray area at best just opens up more holes for the criminals to use.
Unfortunately this is the case in this day and age. People don’t think things through. Politicians even more so, as they listen to lobbyists and staff members, without asking help from the real experts. We want a more secure society, and one that embraces privacy? We have to pressure our politicians from local to federal to listen to us and to think things through. Best intentions often go awry. they have to think of the worst use for the wording of laws they pass.