Privacy threat or good idea?

This is taken from eweek magazine. I'm giving you the first section of the article, plus a link to it in it's entireity. I must confess, I tend to find this a bit disturbing and am interested in seeing if my feelings on this matter are shared.....

Bush to Call for Fed NOC
By Caron Carlson and Dennis Fisher

The Bush administration has plans to create a centralized facility for collecting and examining security-related e-mail and data traffic and will push private network operators to expand their data-gathering initiatives, according to an unreleased draft of the plan.

The proposed cyber-security Network Operations Center is included in a draft of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, which was developed by the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and is due for release Sept. 18.

The call for expanded data collection and analysis results from administration concerns that efforts to secure cyberspace are hampered by the lack of a single data-collection point to detect cyber-security incidents and issue warnings, according to a draft of the plan, which was obtained by eWeek.

Critics, however, worry that such a system would be expensive, difficult to manage and allow government agencies to expand their surveillance powers.

Other recommendations include requiring corporations to disclose their IT security practices, establishing a test bed for multivendor patches, creating a certification program for security personnel and mandating certifications for all federal IT purchases. (See chart for other proposals.)

According to the draft, the government's "forward-looking analysis" capabilities are considered sparse because of a shortage of information. The proposed center would improve capabilities for predicting cyber-security incidents as well as responding to hacker or terrorist threats.

Howard Schmidt, vice chairman of the CIPB, said the center would consolidate threat data from the country's collection end points, such as the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center, the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, the Department of Energy and commercial networks.

Private companies would also be encouraged to increase the amount of data collected and share it with the government. "Major companies generally report this information internally," Schmidt told eWeek. "We're looking for that to come back to a central location."

According to the draft strategy, the public/private initiative would involve the major ISPs, hardware and software vendors, and IT security companies, in addition to law enforcement agencies.

Some said they believe the government's interdepartmental rivalries and information-sharing rules will hamstring any attempt at centralized collection and analysis. "There are such high barriers in government to being able to disseminate information and react to threats, I don't think it will have much impact," said William Harrod, director of investigative response at TruSecure Corp., in Herndon, Va., and a former FBI computer forensics specialist. "They'll have different information coming in from different analysts, and they'll have to weed through it."


To view the entire article visit http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,484669,00.asp


Does this trouble anyone else besides me?

Does our government really believe that US citizens are going to take these sort of Nazi tactics lying down? I really don't take too much to heart on matters that are spawned by an illegally elected official, he will get his soon enough, sooner or later he is going to make one too many facist suggestions and will be impeached, or at the very least will fade away after the next election...or do you think he can have another election fixed in his favor?

Oops, I bet this will be read by one of his staff members, oh well, let the chips fall where they will. Let it be known that I did not vote for him or his daddy.

This worries me because whenever you get a centralised hub of information, the inherent danger is that all this information is in a single place, and whoever has full access to that system wields enormous power... imagine a username and password to this system in the wrong hands.

Greetz

That's unbelievable. It is the same route as the german government has planed to take (view my thread about it). The governments on this planet try to let their security get thighter and take total control over anybody that could be considered dagerous. They seem to start a new initiative that leads to Orwell's "1984" (if anybody has read it - great book). The thought that we might be observed all the time and are not able to legally hold our privacy as private as it should be worries me.
They don't let any possibilities left for us so we have to make steps further anonymity inside the net. Completly anonymous.

See the M$-Posts about WinXP Corporate - They are notified every time you go online. See the posts about M$ WinME where it says that WinME sends error-reports automatically without asking the user (at least WinXP does this...). In these error-reports sensitive data could be included because parts of the memory could "possibly" be sent besides the description of the error occuring in Windows.


I believe they DO spy on us (but they can't do anything because of privacy laws). Just imagine what would happen when one day the privacy law would be set out of force. (sorry for the poor english, I'm german).

I can't believe some of these proposals lately.What is the point in this idea.People will find a way around this big security info network,and use it to everyone's disadvantage.It would be nice if our government officials actually used computers instead of having their secretarys do all the work,then thay might have some idea of how and why things work the way they do.If this goes through,it's going to be the innocent people just reading a few tuts on hacking that will end up going to jail.The real"cyber terrorists" will remain at large doing their thing.That's how it's always worked.(Look at the great things the ban on assault rifle's did,the gangsters on the streets still have plenty of them.It's the law abiding citizens that get hurt by these kind of dumb organizations and laws)

I'd rather have a whole bunch of systems which vary in their security than one major target system with high security, because it would get a disproportionate number of attack attempts. Companies disclosing total security policies? I can see it now:

"Yes, and we always leave the default password at 'Company' and let the user change it."

And once that information is out in the wild...