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posted by takyon on Wednesday June 24 2015, @07:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the insecurity dept.

The seven young men sitting before some of Capitol Hill's most powerful lawmakers weren't graduate students or junior analysts from some think tank. No, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge and the others were hackers who had come from the mysterious environs of cyberspace to deliver a terrifying warning to the world.

Your computers, they told the panel of senators [YouTube] in May 1998, are not safe — not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that link them together. The companies that build these things don't care, the hackers continued, and they have no reason to care because failure costs them nothing. And the federal government has neither the skill nor the will to do anything about it.

"If you're looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be," said Mudge, then 27 and looking like a biblical prophet with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders. The Internet itself, he added, could be taken down "by any of the seven individuals seated before you" with 30 minutes of well-choreographed keystrokes.

The senators — a bipartisan group including John Glenn, Joseph I. Lieberman and Fred D. Thompson — nodded gravely, making clear that they understood the gravity of the situation. "We're going to have to do something about it," Thompson said.

What happened instead was a tragedy of missed opportunity, and 17 years later the world is still paying the price in rampant insecurity.


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  • (Score: 2) by No Respect on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:13PM

    by No Respect (991) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:13PM (#200560)

    Glenn might be an exception, but Lieberman and Thompson... LOL Just thinking about guys like that in charge of anything at all having to do with technical issues is side-splittingly hilarious. Glenn at least had the background to be a force for positive change there, but by that time I think he had already been co-opted by corporate interests.

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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday June 24 2015, @09:59PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @09:59PM (#200624) Journal

    The senators — a bipartisan group including John Glenn, Joseph I. Lieberman and Fred D. Thompson — nodded gravely

    They weren't nodding gravely; they were nodding off...

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