Predictions on the future of the net - via Booz-Allen (Catastrophic event, more govt involvment)
STATEMENT OF VICE ADMIRAL MICHAEL McCONNELL,
USN (RETIRED), EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT,
NATIONAL SECURITY BUSINESS, BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON
As an intelligence officer, I'm often asked to make
predictions. I want to make three predictions for you:
The first is, we will not mitigate this risk. We'll talk
about it, we'll wave our arms, we'll have a bill, but we will
not mitigate this risk. And as a consequence of not mitigating
the risk, we're going to have a catastrophic event. In our
wonderful democracy, it usually takes a forcing function to
move us to action. And it is my belief, having followed this
from the early 1990s, it's going to take that catastrophic
event.
Now, my second prediction is, the Government's role is
going to dramatically change. It is going to be a very active
role in the future of telecommunications in this country and,
in fact, in global telecommunications.
My third prediction is, we're going to morph the Internet
from something that's referred to, generally, as ``dot-com'' to
something I would call ``dot-secure.'' It will be a new way of
communicating. Because when transactions move billions of
dollars, or when transactions route trains up and down the East
Coast or control electric power or touch our lives in the way
they do at such a significant level, the basic attributes of
security must be endorsed. And the first attribute of security
is not a scrambled text to protect a secret. The first
attribute is authentication; who's doing this transaction. If
it's a $10-billion transaction, don't you need to know for sure
who's conducting the transaction? The second attribute is data
integrity. You didn't move that decimal. The third is
nonrepudiation.
...
So, we're not going to do what we need to do. We're going
to have a catastrophic event. The Government's role is going to
change dramatically, and then we're going to go to a new
infrastructure.
...
I'll finish with just an example. Nuclear weapons are easy
to imagine, because there's the mushroom cloud and the
shockwave. When nuclear weapons happened, this Nation took
action to put the government in charge. There was a joint
committee of Congress to oversee it and fund it, and the law
said only the government could own things that were nuclear.
Now, that's mitigated over time. That committee was determined
to be unconstitutional, and we created the Department of
Energy, and it has gone on. We've got commercial nuclear energy
and so on. So, we learned over time to adjust to that.
If you take telecommunications and the Internet, it's
almost entirely in the private sector, and it's going in the
other direction. But, it has become so important and so
potentially significant, in my view, it rivals nuclear weapons,
in terms of potential damage to the country.
So, the government was hands-off to start. And if you look
at the evolution of the 50-year cycles, whether it was building
canals or textile machinery or railroads or automobiles, that
cycle repeated, where the government had a greater role when it
affected more people. And we're reaching that point now. So,
either we have a forcing function through a catastrophic event
or, hopefully, your bill will be law and we can have the
forcing function to deal with this in the way we must deal with
it. We must develop a deterrence policy, and we're probably
going to have to figure out how we engage in preemption, where
those that wish us harm cannot be deterred.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111shrg57888/html/CHRG-111shrg57888.htm
= new reply since forum marked as read
Yours would be monumental.....
