Zero Day - The New Number One Threat To Data Security

Has anyone paid attention to the news lately? I remember the old days, when e-commerce was first hitting the web. I was working diligently with the FBI and Pentagon to develop ways to profile and track down the individual hacker and groups that were attacking site after site, breaching both individual privacy, and national security, interrupting e-commerce and destroying consumer confidence in online transactions, along with putting matters of national interest at risk.

Those days are now long gone. No longer do I read about this hacker or that hacker, of massive breaches of consumer data, or of lack of consumer confidence in e-transactions. Do you know what I DO read about? The US Government.

Installing secret rooms into cornerstone switching stations, splicing backbone fiber lines, monitoring internet traffic and telephone communications on a massive scale, data mining both public and private records on each and every one of us.

The most significant threat to information security is no longer the hacker or cyber terrorist my friends, it's the government.

Big Brother has not only been born, he has grown up and fully matured into the number one threat to our privacy, and data security.

Trade secrets, personal communications and correspondents, all are already being monitored in real-time and standard methods of infrastructure security such as item level encryption and network wide VPN are no match. NOTHING you do to protect yourself matters, and no action taking place over digital communications is truly secure or private.

The number one thing that system administrators need to do in this day and age, to truly secure their systems, is to get rid of the number one threat to each of our individual data infrastructures, the US Bush Administration and the Republican Controlled House and Senate.

Confidence of those using information systems world wide is being threatened by them, and I suggest if powers are not put in place that respect the fundamental right to privacy, we are going to see a massive and rapid reversal of what has been achieved in the ways that we communicate as a global village.

I hear US Senators like Trent Lott talking like hackers of days gone by, "If you have nothing to hide, what do you have to worry about?". Another way of saying "Information should be free". Indeed we as a global population do have things that we want to remain secret. Not to facilitate criminal intent, or to prevent public scrutiny, but simply because we as individuals and as a society at times naturally wish to guard the thoughts and expressions that we value most.

Not only is the US Government seeking "total information awareness" of all that we say and do in the evolving digital realm, they also seek to censor communications that they deem inappropriate. The Republican controlled US Government has been proposing and enacting legislation that contains language like "indecency" and "obscenity", in effect criminalizing thoughts and ideas that they feel "inappropriate" for society.

Along with big brother monitoring individual communications that take place world-wide, he seeks to imprison those that are communicating concepts that he arbitrarily deems unfit based on vague religious principals.

In their zest to protect our inter-network communications, the US Government has become the very beast that it originally sought to vanquish.