Forget PRISM: Global Cyber Chiefs Say They Need to Pry Even Further

[steve2470]

http://world.time.com/2013/06/13/forget-prism-global-cyber-chiefs-say-they-need-to-pry-even-further/?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true

The exposure of the PRISM data-collection program might not fall squarely under the heading of the 3rd Annual International Cyber Security Conference, which concluded Wednesday at Tel Aviv University. The secret data-collection program, by which U.S. intelligence agencies routinely vacuum up huge amounts of private communications from internet users, stands outside the realm of safeguarding the cyber world from attacks. PRISM is defended as an anti-terrorism measure, necessary to detect plots as they are hatched between evildoers communicating with one another online.

But it turns out that, from the point of view of the Watchers gathered in Tel Aviv, it’s all about expanding their gaze even further. The chairman of RSA, the digital security company best known for its password key fobs, made the case for “full visibility into all data” as essential to detecting and thwarting threats to the cyberworld as well. Art Coviello, who is also executive vice president for EMC, which now owns RSA, said computer security is no longer about throwing up a fire wall between a piece of equipment and the outside world. Consumers now move between so many digital devices, and entrust information to the cloud, that the idea of “a perimeter” has been falling apart since 2007. Coviello gestured to zettabytes – four levels up from a gigabyte – to drive home his point that there’s just too much data moving out there to protect on site: Understanding, he said, that one zetta is equal to 4.9 quadrillion books, the world traffic in data was a quarter of a zettabyte in 2007 but had become 2 zettabytes in 2013, and by 2020 might be 40, or even 60.

“The attack surface is great,” says Melissa Hathaway, a former cyberspace specialist for the White House’s National Security Council, noting the profusion of smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices that eventually will produce what several speakers referred to as “an internet of things.”

Safeguarding the data that moves between all these things is no long a matter of building walls and more one of learning to spot threats in the massive flow. “Big Data makes an intelligence driven model viable,” Coviello says. Seeing everything that flows among servers around the globe, he says, “will allow us to spot the faint signal of an attack.” It is the nature of “hacktivism,” or malware, or anyone threatening the orderly functioning of the cyber world: “Full visibility into all data,” he says, will allow cyber security authorities to “spot abnormal behavior in people and in the flow.”

[snot]

1. I have to ask:

It seems like they want to avoid reliance on human intelligence (humint), which has always, far and away, been the most valuable as well as the most cost-effective; BUT, humint is hard to do. So I can't blame anyone for wishing they could replace it with computer programs.

But we're a long way off from making computer programs as good as good humint.

And regardless, the kind of TIA required to feed computer programs that might actually, successfully replace humint are anathema to the freedoms we say we're fighting to preserve.