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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.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VortexCortex on Wednesday June 24 2015, @11:53PM
I think that if full encryption was attempted today, various governments would shut it down.
Yes, that actually happened. With the IPv6 migration was supposed to come full end to end encryption on by default. The goverment(s) shut it down.
(Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:09AM
Don't forget the 90's when real encryption was made illegal to export!
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @08:00AM