http://www.wired.com/2015/02/americas-cyber-espionage-project-isnt-defense-waging-war
By Kevin Poulsen
Threat Level
Wired.com
02.18.15
“What we really need is a Manhattan Project for cybersecurity.” It’s a
sentiment that swells up every few years in the wake of some huge computer
intrusion—most recently the Sony and Anthem hacks. The invocation of the
legendary program that spawned the atomic bomb is telling. The Manhattan
Project is America’s go-to shorthand for our deep conviction that if we
gather the smartest scientists together and give them billions of dollars
and a sense of urgency, we can achieve what otherwise would be impossible.
A Google search on “cyber Manhattan Project” brings up results from as far
back as 1997—it’s second only to “electronic Pearl Harbor” in
computer-themed World War II allusions. In a much-circulated post on
Medium last month, futurist Marc Goodman sets out what such a project
would accomplish. “This Manhattan Project would help generate the
associated tools we need to protect ourselves, including more robust,
secure, and privacy-enhanced operating systems,” Goodman writes. “Through
its research, it would also design and produce software and hardware that
were self-healing and vastly more resistant to attack and resilient to
failure than anything available today.”
These arguments have so far not swayed a sitting American president. Sure,
President Obama mentioned cybersecurity at the State of the Union, but his
proposal not only doesn’t boost security research and development, it
potentially criminalizes it. At the White House’s cybersecurity summit
last week, Obama told Silicon Valley bigwigs that he understood the
hacking problem well—“We all know what we need to do. We have to build
stronger defenses and disrupt more attacks”—but his prescription this time
was a tepid executive order aimed at improving information sharing between
the government and industry. Those hoping for something more Rooseveltian
must have been disappointed.
On Monday, we finally learned the truth of it. America already has a
computer security Manhattan Project. We’ve had it since at least 2001.
Like the original, it has been highly classified, spawned huge
technological advances in secret, and drawn some of the best minds in the
country. We didn’t recognize it before because the project is not aimed at
defense, as advocates hoped. Instead, like the original, America’s cyber
Manhattan Project is purely offensive.
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