Defense Department Wants More Control over the Internet

[xchrom]

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/39816/?p1=A2

The U.S. Department of Defense may have funded the research that led to the Internet, but freewheeling innovation created the patchwork of privately owned technology that makes up the Internet today. Now the U.S. government is trying to wrest back some control, as it adjusts to an era when cyberattacks on U.S. corporations and government agencies are common.

At the RSA computer security conference yesterday, representatives of the White House, U.S. Department of Defense, and National Security Agency said that safeguarding U.S. interests required them to take a more active role in governing what has been a purely commercial, civilian resource. But some experts are concerned that the growing influence of defense and military organizations on the operation and future development of the Internet will compromise the freedom that has made it a success.

The DoD is being compelled to remove half a trillion from its budget in the next decade, but spending on cyber defense will increase, said deputy secretary of defense Ashton Carter in a keynote at the conference. "Ships, planes, ground forces, lots of other things are on the cutting room floor, not cyber," he said. "The investments are at the level of several billion, [and] we are continuing to increase our investments."

Comments made by colleagues of Carter later in the day made it clear that this cash will not just be used to strengthen government systems. The NSA and DoD intend to shape the way private companies build and use Internet infrastructure, and have corporations help them respond more actively to detect and clean up after an attack does take place.

[RC]

1. They have it all wrong.

They need less control of the Internet and we need more control of the Deference Department.

[xchrom]

2. +1

[Newest Reality]

3. The compulsive

and self-justified need to control situations, events and people can be very addictive and self-perpetuating.

The process, in the case of the military might have some initial seeds of defense and protection from potential aggression or harm, but we are seeing the notion of expanding and relentless control becoming expanded, extended and more aggressive as it continues unabated.

At what point do we look into the nature of this sort of behavior floating in conceptual warships above the results we experience? When do we ask ourselves what the underlying functions of institutionalized control are and what they imply?

Some people notice that the distortion of exaggeration and manipulation involved in the aggressive control of others is a form of madness in which that state of mind actually creates and reinforces results that substantiate control itself. In other words, control is the problem that control offers itself as the solution to.

As we observe the morphing of this widely accepted proposition of safety and security (neither of which any one of us can assume to fully ever have) as a motivation or inducement to accept a relentless drive to control us, we can see the implications of what total control inflicts upon the nature of life and reality.

Can we, or should we, control the controllers, or does the double-bind we encounter in that proposition as a possible solution bring us to a threshold of insight concerning the matter of power and control in general?