Broadband 2.0

I’ve remained pretty quiet about the whole Snowden NSA leaker issues as virtually everything he reviled has been an “Open Secret” for years, let’s review:

2007 the Chinese inserted malware into the silicon of disk drives, cell phones, and SCATA controllers; I don’t expect they were the only ones to develop a method of bypassing security on these devices

Personally I’m not much of a believer in the effectiveness of building walls; the Great Wall of China, the Berlin Wall, and now the US Mexican wall; or even the effectiveness of Airport security.  We must become more diligent as a society and not rely on some abstract agency to protect our interests from criminals and extremists.

So let’s take a look at some of the things our own government and others have done in the public eye;

• Malware found on new hard drives
• Malware found in US Power plants
• Stuxnet developed to cause harm to centrifuges

Now let’s consider how ordinary people have reacted to extremism for example the “Shoe Bomber” and Flight 77 proving that as a people we respond with selflessness and courage in the face of such terror.

It is time to bring down the walls and partner with neighboring nations to fight cybercrime not to build the equivalent of cyber weapons against each other; this only creates vulnerabilities of our core infrastructure to the real extremists, every chipset that has been engineered for compromise, every piece of malware designed to hack or monitor information, passwords, code, etc. is simply not the way a civilization should behave.

The Snowden leak should bring together Nations to work collectively and not to hack and or record our every move which sounds too much like Nazi Germany or George Orwell’s book 1984, I for one don’t feel like my actions are subject to some arbitrary examination – I mean let’s face it today if you live in Florida and use a computer you are an outlaw (the statute was signed into law by Tea Party favorite Governor Rick Scott from behind closed doors he was quoted as saying “this is the right thing to do for our state”) so if a government official feels like it there is most likely no one that can’t be charged with something.

Let’s face it War – of any type – just isn’t productive.  I for one would rather spend our energy on eliminating the underlying need for war and not to develop a surveillance nation.