Ho boy. This guy’s either a shameless liar, or just that dumb. I tend to think it’s the former, but congress critters are probably dumb enough to believe him:
Computer hackers are on the bleeding edge of the class war, and they’re finally cutting deep enough that the leader of the National Security Agency (NSA) is making an active push for some major congressional action.
That’s why NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, told the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute on Monday that the costs associated with responding to computer hacking represents “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
Of course, deregulation, mortgage derivatives, theft by Libor, Bush tax cuts, etc. – just a drop in the bucket! Yeah, cybercrimes are the real economic problem!
“Symantec placed the costs of [intellectual property] theft to United States companies at $250 billion a year, global cyber crime at $114 billion annually — $388 billion when you factor in downtime — and McAfee estimates that $1 trillion was spent globally on remediation,” he said. “That’s our future disappearing in front of us.”
His talk was meant to support passage of a bill to firm up the nation’s cyber defenses. And while he wasn’t specifically supporting any piece of legislation, he seemed to indicate support for some of the more invasive measures within the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).
That bill, approved by the House but still pending in the Senate, would put the NSA in charge of cyber security for the whole nation, permitting companies like AT&T, Google and Comacst to share private user data with the agency under the auspice of protecting Americans from foreign threats.
Critics of the bill, like Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), have suggested that it will create a “cyber-industrial complex” that feeds on Americans’ closely held details. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), normally ideologically opposed to anything Wyden would be interested in, agreed, saying that CISPA will let corporations “act as government spies.”
“We don’t do that,” Alexander said, responding to agency whistleblowers and journalistswho say the NSA is keeping a massive store of Americans’ electronic communications. “We need the American people to know that is not true,” he insisted.
Uh huh. Because y’all have been so protective of our rights up til now.
(h/t Ron K.)
There are a couple of distinctly different issues here and it is just flat wrong to conflate them. Control and censorship of the internet is one issue. Capitalist profits gained from the internet is another. Hackers are a separate issue all togather. Gen. Alexander is making the Capitalists argument. (Which are generally simplistic and use the shotgun approach.) Wyden and Paul are making the anti-Capitalist argument. (It’s doubtful that either of these guys is aware of that fact.) Free markets, like the internet, only work for Capitalists if they can control access, content and cost. If anybody can post and view any content that they’d like for “free” the game is up for the Capitalists. How we deal with hackers should be the focus of the NSA. Not how to deal with users.
After Stuxnet, exactly *who* are we supposed to be scared of?
Methinks he doth prostest too much.
protest, even.