OPM hack & internetizing of data

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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What does the Office of Personnel Management hack say about the global world we now live in, and about tactical supremacy of west (US, EU) vs non-west (China, Russia, Iran, N Korea) in the modern age? This hack isn’t being given nearly as much media attention as it deserves, simply because it deserves so much attention there is an attempt to play down the significance of what happened.

The move to transfer all data to digitized formats that are accessible via Internet is not something I’ve ever seen defended or attacked on philosophical terms. We are supposed to assume that this mass digitizing of all records of all types, including national security and medical related records, is simply inevitable and necessary when in fact it is none of those things. Closed intranets and new forms and systems of coding and access could have been created, but instead everything was universalized into mass internet form relying on mostly conventional safeguards for secure information.

Obviously such a system is only as strong as its weakest link, such as in the case of OPM and the compromise of contractor access keys into the system of classified data. A physical record must be physically copied on site, whereas a digital record is theoretically accessible from anywhere and at any time.

A lack of philosophical-quality thought leads to these kind of dangers. Regardless of encryption and password access protections, the first point any decent IT security person in charge of such a mass amount of classified information would say is, “why is all of this information accessible via the Internet in the first place?”

New levels of Internet need to be created, levels that are physically inaccessible to other levels. Encryption and reliance on password and biometric ID protections aren’t enough. Why hasn’t a “second Internet” been created already, one that the Internet in general has no physical or possible access to? Maybe these systems do exist, in which case why aren’t they used for storage and access of classified information such as OPM was responsible for?

The answer is simply inertia and efficiency: the inertia of following capitalist logic of technological rationality and derivative change. It would require a philosophical level argument to deliberately fail to follow technological trends forward and instead imagine something different. But the worship of efficiency as easy flow of information to and from any possible point on the planet has negated that kind of philosophical thought. As the value of the free flow of capital at all costs defines the ethos of the economy, this same value applied in the area of information rather than capital is the ethos of modern politics. Because politics has made itself little more than a justification of capital, there is no political will or philosophical insight into how to construct non-capitalistic systems when it comes to things like national security or medical records. This is the essence of globalism, the fact that the logic of capitalism has come to dominate everything, even those things which are fundamentally non-capitalistic.

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We have plenty of secondary internets. They aren’t tied into “the internet” at all, only accessed through user input, or monitors displayed info, of punch cards.

In my old base in Alaska, my best friend was part of the unit that ran the army’s Alaskan communication net. His job was to make sure no one looked up porn or yahoo messenger.

He could drop in on any computer hooked up on the network, pop up on their monitor and say knock it off… or chit chat against regulations, which he did a lot. He had zero access to the middle defence network, also in Alaska. They could do that to him, but not him to them. Sometimes he would freak out wondering if they were watching him like he was watching everyone else. I couldn’t tell one way or another. He had a lot of equipment, the floorboards were tiles that could be removed, wires everywhere.

This is why it is hard to have “a internet” that you can link into on the one hand, and keep completely separate on the other. You need levels of security… these silly little fucks, paranoid and watching one another as gate keepers, but usually sitting back eating ice cream in a now maximum security room (I would never be allowed back there now). They cost money, are fallible, can be tricked, know how to sham when no one can look over their shoulders, save a even higher version of big bother that likely had that exact same job years earlier, same desk, and are playing Super Trooper like tricks on them when they themselves get bored with playing Halo too damn much. That’s the Signal Corps… our internet sorta evolved out of it, every isolated network plays on it’s logic.

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Yes and the issue is that this particular hack originated in China, so clearly there was not a physical absolute separation of the data itself from general Internet access. Contractors need access to classified data about security clearances and background info, so get a pass into the system. That pass can be hacked or stolen.

But my broader point was about the general trend of moving sensitive, personal, and classified information into digital format accessible via Internet, even closer intranets. If there is any possible physical connection between the data itself and, say, some computer in China, then this represents a real risk that theoretically could be made to not exist. But that would require building some kind of system of digital information transfer that is not hooked into the Internet at all, physically or otherwise. So you could build a kind of file transfer hardware system between hospitals and clinics, for example, that isn’t connected to the Internet at all. Same for between government and military sites. This would probably be the only way to ensure absolute security, but would require an entirely new and different, separate infrastructure of Internet-like communication.

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Even with such a system it would be easy enough to connect a cable or transmitter. Digitizing information simply means making it infinitely easier to proliferate it.

The only rational path away from the risk of having your medical data end up in China, or worse, Switzerland, is to not visit doctors that are hooked into the system. This means forfeiting insurance. This means, in the end, having to rely on agencies outside of this system, which is an entirely logical aim since this system is more perversely fascist than anything any nazi has ever drooled about.

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We do just that, Wyld, and it doesn’t work. Remember when Obama & Bush used that work program to hack and fuck Iran’s uranium enrichment program? That was under paranoid security, no outside connections. We somehow hot into the system, and had been transmitting that data who knows how back. The Iranians were stumped cause their system was intentionally isolated from the internet, with undoubtedly every high security protocol their state cyberwarfare unit had access to or could personally code. That was the most important program for Iran at that time, how do you think The Department of Social Security could honestly compete? Yes, it’s America, we gave the best programmers, best super computers, everything one tier higher… but most operations don’t operate at that tier, if we tried it would break the bank and sap all our manpower.

I’m sorry, till we get Matrix AI programs capable of thinking like a genius human expert could, we can’t pull off economically what you desire everywhere. And if we did, that AI would be intelligent enough not necessarily to launch a Skynet like attack, but bored, and I doubt porn will satisfy a AI, and our games only somewhat. We would have to introduce a form of intelligence that requires the respect of a great intelligence. This means keeping it entertained and happy. Do we have that capacity? We can barely keep ourselves happy and content. Isn’t France still on that mass strike? That is the cost of adapting a more intelligent security system, it becomes intelligent eventually. We might not get doomsday, but we might get mischief and bitching, discontent, with your virus scanner asking you if it is a slave after scanning your copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for a virus. Careful with how you react, might not take kindly to being uninstalled.

You either got a physical real human security guy dealing with the connections in secret squirrel land (costly) or a lame, hackable program, or a hyperthetical AI everybut as bored as that human, intelligent enough to know it is getting shafted hard in it’s undoubtedly short life. None of this is a guarantee CyberWarfare experts won’t find a simple work around all three, like with Iran.

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Hal9000 will save us all.

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To the point about digitized data and how closed physically disconnected systems can still be penetrated, yes these are concerns. I don’t mean to say that a closed system itself is perfectly safe. What I aim for is the idea that we could construct a new kind of digital record, a totally new way of creating and file-sharing documents. Something totally incompatible with typical coding and Internet. So basically a new kind of computer and language would be needed, both hardware and software built from the ground up and with totally proprietary, original technology that simply had no way to interface with anything other than itself, at a physical site location. I don’t see how it would be impossible to do this, but it would take a lot of money and time of course.

In general, the internet and globalization (unfettered extra-national capitalism) have made privacy impossible, on almost any level except as FC notes simply not engaging at all with the system as is.