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CISPA May Be “Dead” But User Privacy is Not Protected From Gov Spying
The Truth Behind The News
Susanne Posel
Occupy Corporatism
April 26, 2013
The Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has been stalled in the Senate after being approved in the House of Representatives.
According to senators and staff members, there are additional bills being drafted that will protect cybersecurity while allowing digital information to be shared by federal agencies and private sector corporations; including internet service providers.
Should a “threat” present itself, the current incarnation of CISPA will allow corporations such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft to hand over personal user information.
According to an anonymous member of the US Senate Committee on Commerce: “We’re not taking [CISPA] up. Staff and senators are divvying up the issues and the key provisions everyone agrees would need to be handled if we’re going to strengthen cybersecurity. They’ll be drafting separate bills.”
Despite what appears to be a victory, going back to 2011, Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III spoke at the Center for Strategic Decision Research’s 28th International Workshop on Global Security wherein he outlined the Defense Industrial Base Cyber Pilot (DIBCP).
The DIBCP aligns the Department of Defense (DoD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and “participating defense companies or internet providers” to make sure that the US government’s digital infrastructure is protected and each federal agency can communicate with private sector corporations.
Lynn said: “Our defense industrial base is critical to our military effectiveness. Their networks hold valuable information about our weapons systems and their capabilities. The theft of design data and engineering information from within these networks greatly undermines the technological edge we hold over potential adversaries.”
General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and newly appointed head of the US Military Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), asserted to the House Armed Services Committee in March that the CYBERCOM was not created for defensive purposes.
CYBERCOM was created by the DoD to combine “military missions” and “cyberspace operations . . . [to] conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations.”
The DoD cyber-soldiers are trained in “managing information, securing information, and ensuring our ability to operate.” Because of hacktivist attacks, the advantage must be had by the US Military.
Alexander has carved out 40 cyber teams to be implemented by 2015, categorized into two classes: 1) for offensive operations, 2) to facilitate continuous monitoring and surveillance. With the assistance of private internet service providers (ISPs), incoming “traffic to the US” can be observed and categorized “in the milliseconds that electronic messages move” to avert “dangerous attacks”.
The DoD has their own cyber-squadrons with the capability “of operating on their own, with a range of operational intelligence skill sets, as well as a mix of military and civilian personnel.
Alexander explained that the DoD would use these teams “to defend the nation if it were attacked in cyberspace.”
Another development to trace and continuously survey the American public has come from the Pentagon under DARPA projects to develop a real-time “Twitter” feed of all conversations, emails and all other digital communications.
These speech-to-text programs will analyze with crowdsourcing technologies to record and store all conversations. This endeavor is called Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text (EARS) and is the brainchild of Matt Lease, computer scientist at the University of Texas.
DARPA has granted Lease with $300,000 for two years to develop the project entitled, “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech” which will record and store everyday conversations for retrieval at a later date.
These conversations could be stored a servers owned by individuals or corporations. They could be syphoned from every day devices used by the majority of the American public; such as smartphones, cameras and other audio recorders. By using crowdsourcing and voice analysis software, those recorded could be identified and strategically tracked as the day goes on and they keep engaging in conversation with others.
EARS could prove quite useful for the Obama administration with regard to digital surveillance that could be justified by the latest on slot of cyber-attacks.
2013-04-26 08:00:21
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