NSA Tasked With 'Policing' Government Networks 93
Novus Ordo Seclorum writes "The NSA has a new assignment. No longer merely responsible for signals intelligence, the NSA now has the task of defending against cyber attacks on government and private networks. 'The plan calls for the NSA to work with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to monitor such networks to prevent unauthorized intrusion, according to those with knowledge of what is known internally as the 'Cyber Initiative.' Details of the project are highly classified. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, a former NSA chief, is coordinating the initiative. It will be run by the Department of Homeland Security, which has primary responsibility for protecting domestic infrastructure, including the Internet, current and former officials said. At the outset, up to 2,000 people -- from the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA and other agencies -- could be assigned to the initiative, said a senior intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.'"
Bound to make the next issue of the 360is quartery (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Bound to make the next issue of the 360is quart (Score:3, Insightful)
Government Networks (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Government Networks (Score:5, Funny)
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Seriously, most of the things you now think of as common computer security were either invented at or with funding from, the NSA.
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This new program is tasking the NSA to also guard important public networks.
My suspicion is that this is providing funding and regulations for a task the NSA was already falling into doing. There have been some rumors going around about the NSA dropping support for SELinux because th
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Let me translate from Washington-ese for you:
"we now have 2000 poeple to make sure all government windows servers are patched".
If they even do that much I'll be impressed.
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You won't be impressed, though. You probably will not find out what it is they end up doing. This is the NSA, after all.
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But there are a lot of things where you need access to the outside world, one way or another. (Think about trying to work nowadays without access to Google.) Going the other direction, there are applications for government systems that need to be public: think about, for example, Social Security stuff. But if the Social Security networks were hacked,
All I'm saying is.. (Score:1)
After all, you know the saying, "Those who do not learn from the history presented in movies, are bound to repeat it."
DHS,FBI,NSA... (Score:4, Insightful)
not to mention the litteny of local and state police departments.
Depends on what you mean (Score:5, Informative)
The reason to have these separate is in part because it is very different kind of jobs, but also to try and prevent abuses. In theory (though we've seen that it isn't obeyed) the CIA and NSA don't do domestic operations. They are for spying on foreign powers, not US citizens. By maintaining an organizational divide it helps keep abuses down.
The DHS is a good idea at the high levels in an amazingly fucked up and retarded implementation. The idea is that the NSA and CIA often know things that the FBI doesn't, and vice versa. This is not to mention other intelligence agencies and so on. So often, everyone has a piece of the picture, but nobody can see the whole thing. This was the case with the time leading up to 9/11. Various groups knew pieces, but nothing solid. So the idea is DHS helps get the information collected and formed in to a solid picture. They get facts from all groups, NSA, CIA, FBI, customs, state and local cops and so on, and to then be able to coordinate action.
In reality they are a big waste of time and money that does nothing useful.
But really we want intelligence and police to be separate and we also want the police broken down in terms of power. Having one big federal police force would be problematic. At least with local policing voters can, in theory, hold their police more accountable. They have a say in how local issues are handled. Also, laws differ from state to state. What is true in one state is not true in all of them. Law enforcement needs to be segmented to take that in to account.
As a comparison look to Europe. There you are talking about an area of similar size and population (similar as in the same basic level, not as in equality). While there are European wide things like Interpol, each nation has it's own police, and often subdivisions below that. Also those police forces are usually separate from intelligence forces.
The US really isn't different in that regard, it is just a very large nation. A great many nations are smaller than a number of US states.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Doesn't mean they weren't a wee bit distressed.
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That's the problem with doing intelligence stuff --- not much glory. Not much publicity. Hard to let people know about successes, and too often your failures get exposed in leaks that are part of internal bureaucratic battles.
The interested student might usefully consider this in relation to, eg, Valerie Plame.
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Kinda like the average network administrator.
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CIA ends up in the unenviable position, in general, that only their failures get publicity, just as only admin problems get trouble tickets.
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Except of course when the ATF (Treasury Department), Secret Service(DHS), DEA (Justice Department), etc, etc, etc is the federal police department.
***What that means is the CIA is all about getting information from people, be it by attempting to place spys or turning other agents or whatever***
Not really. That's part of their job, but mostly they are supposed to integrate public information (e.g what they read in foreign newspapers a
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They all need one wiretap. Re:DHS,FBI,NSA... (Score:2)
DHS is going to "monitor" your local government network. Bin Laden is a bogeyman, the goal is Total Information Awareness. They already have taps on domestic phone and internet, now they will get their taps into local networks. This is just another turn of the collection and enlargement of federal power. No real information security will be gained as they add yet another channel to leak information.
"on government and private networks. " (Score:2)
Does this mean that DHS and the NSA will 'police' my private network?...Cool!!
But I have to ask, does it run on Linux...natively?
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Depends (Score:2)
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Thanks for the link, I have been batting around the idea of trying SELinux for a while after chatting with my little brother. He does network security and forensics for the State Dept. and we were talking about SELinux and he got me intrigued. Guess I should check it out finally.
One agency? (Score:2)
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Sure it will be efficient; just use an RFC 3514 Network IDS.
ohh yeah (Score:2)
Well, if it's highly classified, then we can ount on the fact that it's money well spent
(/sarcasm)
As long as the scope is minimal... (Score:2)
Sigh. I wish for better days.
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NSA hardened Linux... (Score:3, Informative)
Let's hope they start deploying it more widely...
Re:NSA hardened Linux... (Score:4, Insightful)
SELinux is not a distribution, it's a security module in the kernel. These days it's part of the standard kernel.org tree, and some distributions (such as Fedora/RHEL) enable it by default.
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Or, better yet, you can get Solaris 10, add in Trusted Extensions, and get all the power of SELinux and a multilevel X server, with Common Criteria and FIPS certifications.
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In Solaris10/TX, you can set it up so you don't have a root account at all; there's a much more complicated, and much more capable, permissions system. There's still a limit to how much trust you can put in it.
MULTICS was evaluated to Orange Book A1 at one point; that meant you could have even more trust in it. You
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Who'd'a thunk it?
Setec Astronomy (Score:2, Funny)
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See, you're confusing NSA and CIA again.
Which is worse? (Score:1)
- The UK's overt population surveillance through CCTV monitoring,
- or the US's covert population surveillance through electronic eavsdropping.
So take your pick, pixels or all other forms of bits!
(Wait, I think I just answered my own question)
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America's got nothing on us, don't worry, I'm leaving my school ASAP, insisting they delete all the information and if they don't provide me with satisfactory use they have I'll sue them.
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Think about this for a moment please! Am I really overlooking another possible reason?
Hrmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems that this has happened before in history -- where you give one (or more) "secret police" power over everyone with no true checks and balances. From my understanding (which admittedly may be very flawed), the Department of Homeland Security answers exclusively to the executive branch, and now it also seems to control a (fairly large) group of intelligence officers. Do the words "consolidation of power" mean anything? No?
W
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Because you're an idiot?
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Ok, maybe not retarded, but deffinitely brainwashed past the point of logical thought when it comes to anything government related. You've now got an automated twitch-reflex. I'll bet every time a cop walks by, you throw yourself on the ground and scream "DON'T TASE ME, BRO!".
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Ha ha (Score:1)
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How this Will Be Implemented (Score:3, Funny)
Coming soon to a network near you - NortonNSA!
Is this really news? (Score:2, Informative)
Not a chance (Score:2)
It will actually turn out be yet another way of snooping in on citizens without needing to get judicial permission first. I'm sure the RIAA will get involved too so the whole thing will be mostly twisted into blocking or reporting on copyrighted media sharing etc.
And, as ever, all conducted under the guise of anti-terrorism.
At least they're using their tech to better use (Score:2)
On second thought... (Score:2)
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I fear however with this administration that information gathered may find its way into some metadatabase where ID'ing people is standard.
Fears about this administration means you haven't studied US history too much.
As Thomas Jefferson said, "It is the natural progress of things for Government to grow, and Liberty to yield"
Guess what? Republicans will sell your freedoms up the river "to keep you safe". Democrats will sell your freedoms up the river "to help the disadvantaged". Liber
This might actually work. (Score:5, Insightful)
This actually makes some sense. NSA has two main divisions - Signals Intelligence, which collects information, and Information Assurance, which tries to protect US information. Traditionally, these were the codebreaking and codemaking sides of the agency.
It's a boost for NSA Secure Linux. The real intent of NSA Secure Linux, by the way, was not to plug holes in Linux. It was to get something that enforced mandatory security out into the community, so that that applications would be converted to run under stricter rules. For example, a browser should be running as several components, some of which are secure but dumb and some of which are insecure but untrusted. Few application developers picked up on this. That part didn't get enough community attention.
NSA takes a quite different view of computer security than the "security industry". They're less concerned about annoying high volume attacks, and more concerned about quiet, focused attacks aimed at specific targets. They're also very interested in who's behind the attack, and will devote collection resources to finding out more about the attackers.
This last may give some attackers something to worry about.
In other news from 1952, Eisenhower Elected (Score:2)
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Wrong (Score:1)
No it hasn't.
From TFA:
In a major shift, the National Security Agency is drawing up plans for a new domestic assignment: helping protect government and private communications networks... [emphasis added]
This is such a "major shift" that (once again, from TFA):
The NSA's new domestic role would require a revision of the agency's charter, the senior intelligence official said.
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So let me see if I've got this right... (Score:2)
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besides, NRO [nro.gov] is more secretive and it's still known by name.
Send them after the zombie networks (Score:2)
Those networks are easily capable of DDOSing important government servers and whole networks. Furthermore, when they're not busy flooding Estonia off the net, they're used to spam the world pushing illegal copies of 0ff1ce and Acr0bat (probably to fund terrorist training camps in Nigeria), phishing scams (probably also to fund terrorists) or exposing children to porno ads. Why not have the NSA track down the ringleaders and then have the CIA make them quietly disappear?
That would do at the very least as m
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