U.S. Government Helps Chinese Hackers

The Wall Street Journal’s report of a massive hack into American networks, including those run by Verizon and AT&T, should remind Americans of two points.

• There are no secure networks, certainly none available to American consumers or businesses. The bigger and more convenient the network, like the Internet itself, the more laughable the security. Currently, the only way to create a secure network is to make it not much of a network. Tin can and string from your house to your neighbor’s could work. It’s the Battlestar Galactica solution: Solve network insecurity by eliminating networks.
• Though networks have many vulnerabilities, the ultimate reason none are secure is that the U.S. government forbids them to be. The U.S. government requires all network providers to leave open a “back door” just in case the federal officials want to spy on their citizens. Nearly all developed nations do the same.

Increasing the outrage in the United States is that this hack was apparently executed by a Chinese group with “close ties” to the Chinese government. We have, however, no viable anti-hacking treaty with China or any other nation. The U.N. has drafted one, but naturally it is crafted to give authoritarian governments more power to beat up on not only their citizens but the free peoples of the world as well.

Nor do U.S. citizens have any way of knowing how much hacking into Chinese networks our own government does. Even more importantly, we have no basis to assess the cost/benefits of mutually tolerated hacking. Is it the judgment of the U.S. security apparatus that we are better off letting the Chinese hack us so we can hack them?

The U.S. government’s refusal to allow Americans to have secure networks is largely down to “9/11 syndrome.” That’s the notion 9/11 could have been avoided if the U.S. security apparatus had more tools and was even more centralized, as it has been since the post 9/11 creation of a national security directorate. This is always government’s solution, but the evidence goes the other way. Centralizing security only increases vulnerability as it expands the attack surface on a single system.

The U.S. national security apparatus likes to take credit for there having been no repeat of 9/11. This is a fantasy. The 9/11 hijackings were carried out by men armed with box cutters, which were legal to carry onto commercial flights at the time. 9/11 has not been duplicated because box cutters are no longer okay to bring on board.

More to the point, 9/11 was mostly a result of not paying enough attention to “distributed security.” In this case distributed security would mean training our people to defeat attackers wielding blades about an inch long. Most commercial pilots are military veterans. Does the U.S. military not train its people to defeat attacks by one-inch blades? And if it does not, why not lock the door to the pilots’ compartment? We do now.

For the Internet, distributed security is readily available via a block-chained security system anchored to biometrics such as fingerprints and retinal scans. Your data and everyone else’s would hide in plain sight, somewhere out on the net, but at an address not only private but redefined with every transaction, including any addition or access of data at any location on the chain. Only a private key would provide access; your key would be triggered by your biometrics.

No more hacking, overnight.

It won’t be allowed, not because governments fear dusky foreigners with box cutters, but because governments don’t want you moving your money any place they can’t track and attack. The ancient right to keep your assets to yourself was long preserved by using cash, now impractical for most purposes. A blockchained Internet would create the electronic equivalent of cash. Good for us; bad for government.

The U.S. national security apparatus is not much good at national security. It’s quite good at keeping tabs on American citizens. Should we rethink this?

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