Fergie's Tech Blog

Marcus Ranum: U.S. Hypocrisy in China 'Cyber War'

Karen Dearne writes on Australian IT:

The recent China-US "cyberwar" exposed American hypocrisy on the issues of government surveillance and censorship, according to a US-based expert on security system design.

"Why is the country with the best technology for online surveillance of its citizens' communications taking other nations to task over censorship and free speech?" Mr Ranum, chief security officer of Tenable Network Security, challenged a packed forum at AusCERT 2010.

"For years, the US has embraced portions of the hacker community into our labs to build cyber-weapons, and there's government funding connections between our offensive weapons writers and our defensive weapons writers.

"We own the search engines everybody uses, and the incredibly valuable data they produce.

"So it's bizarre that in the recent exchange of accusations over China targeting dissident supporters of the Dalai Lama, no country asked the US to rein in its own cyber-hackers."

Mr Ranum said it wasn't necessary for US authorities to engage in cyber-spying or collect information from botnets because "by law, every carrier in the US has to back up all their systems so the FBI can do wiretaps".

posted by Fergie @ 5/18/2010 05:11:00 PM