Digital Blackwater??

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http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/ ... lackwater/

Basicly in response to corperation hackings, they are talking about privitizing cyber defense like a digital blackwater

my question is how will this impact net neutrality?? I am all for keeping the internet as as form of free speech...will this be like the cyber patriot act??
Tell me what you think.

Jojo

I think they'd run amok. They wouldn't respect people's privacy, they would be extremely expensive, and what criteria would they use for security screening. Would they get suspicious if a disproportionate amount of people of middle eastern or Chinese ancestry started showing up for interviews? Mercenaries are best used in foreign countries. Considering it's not really practical to conduct cyber warfare in foreign countries (and establish oversight to make sure it's enforced), it's just more trouble than it's worth. I think cloak and dagger methods would work better. If members of hacker groups started turning up dead, and if 6 months to a year from now it gets revealed that rendition teams bagged others, I think most of the cyber attacks against the US government taking place outside of China would stop.

Speaking for myself, I've started to believe that letting hackers just run amok on the internet is just as much a threat to the public and not just to the large corporations that abuse their power. I'm all in favor of Wikileaks, but I'm opposed to Anonymous and Lulsec. The reason for that is because Wikileaks has stated that it is about social justice, and for the most part tries to live up to that code by not going after people whose only crimes might be not adhering to our social norms or following an ideology that most people don't agree with. Anonymous on the other hand, is not concerned with social justice or any ideology for that matter, and they have been known to target people for the most trivial reasons (as in the case of McKay Hatch and his No Cussing Club), or for no reason at all other than to cause some random person grief. Another key difference between Wikileaks and Anonymous is accountability. Although Wikileaks does not reveal its sources' identities, its leader and its staff are subject to being held accountable for their actions if they do something wrong. Anonymous' members hide behind anonymity specifically so that they cannot be held accountable. A lot of the time, Anonymous seems more like the modern day equivalent to a witch hunt. I know for some people the idea of having a law enforcement entity police the internet might seem unthinkable, but having mob rule over the internet could be just as bad if not worse.

With that being said, I don't think a private company should be put in charge, because what we have seen with private security/private military companies is that they are not held accountable for their actions because the government will protect them. A legitimate, government-run law enforcement service could be held accountable.

Well they have to privatize it, that's the problem. The people you can recruit into the likes of the FBI, CIA, TSA, armed services, etc. are behind the power curve from the beginning, they will always be behind the bleeding edge.

But as we've seen with mantech and other faceless corporations, they exist for the sole purpose of separating the fed from their money.

Hacking was never a threat to anyone. visa getting ddos'd is not a threat to your safety. sony getting 100 million users credit card info stolen is not a threat to you either, cancel your card, don't use them again, let the market decide.
hacking into natural gas systems and causing an explosion that kills 10 persons is a threat.
In the latter example, i feel there is reasonable cause to legislate security. but that in itself is a risky venture because it sets a minimum bar that will never be exceeded.
on the topic of hacking the power grid, same thing. but there's bigger issuses that no one wants to discuss, like over-reliance on gps.

On the topic of government sponsored hacking, before stuxnet there were only a few people that were hacking into smart meters just for fun. they didn't have any security back in 2008 and they still don't, now everyone and their brother is hacking into the smart grid.and its a political issue because POTUS figured out he can scare people with it. Yet one more way for the government to get its fingers into another cookie jar. the NSA already has every email sent since 1999 stored on tape, but that hasn't stopped any crimes, neither will 10,000 cameras per square mile.

your privacy was gone 10 years ago, its just that now google and others have invented the algorithms needed to process all of the data collected.

on what he said during that video, concerning the creation of a digital black water.. that does not concern me.

what concerns me is how he says "private enterpirses did a lot more than what we think private enterprise should be doing in physical space"

How soon will the military be privatized?

ruveyn