Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • February 26, 2021 5:54 AM

@ AL, Winter,

I don’t see why it needs to include Australia. The best people to be working on that report would be people in Australia.

I see you don’t get the point, whilst Winter did.

The report is in effect an excuse to declare warfare on China.

By and large those in the US including the politicians have been too stupid and short sighted, thus the neo-con, libiterian attitudes has led the US into the dire straits it’s got it’s self in economically and now realises it can not catch up on on it’s own merits.

Thus the only way it can keep it’s dominance over the world is by “Bombing them back to the stone ages” or it’s modern equivalent.

What do you think all that nonsence over 5G has been about?

It’s to try and destroy China’s ability to become the worlds leading telecoms producer, with it’s own technology.

As for 5G enabling spying, actually rather less so than any telecoms tech that has dribbled out of the US since the late 1970’s early 1980’s when compared like for like.

The US is in serious trouble, because it has chosen not to invest in it’s future. Instead it chose the route of short term cut and run investing and debt leveraging to maximize paper profit. It’s got so bad that even US universities do not see teaching as a core activity any longer and certainly not research that is anything more than short term. In fact a valid critisim against certain prestige universities is that they have become “Hedge Funds” as a core activity.

I’ve been warning here for years that outsourcing jobs was a very bad idea. For several reasons,

1, It gives IP to your potential competitors.
2, Because they not you are resolving issues they get a technological lead.
3, It takes money out of the US economy and it injects it into the foreign economy. If you understand economic churn and the ten to one model, every direct dollar you take out of the US economy removes ten times the economic activity, but it creates ten dollars of economic activity in the foreign country. So a hundred times the harm is done. You can argue if it’s ten to one less or more but the result is still the same.
4, It creates job losses and long term unemployment in the home economy and does the opposit in the foreign economy.
5, As a result it destroys the home customer base, thus weakening the US company significantly.
6, The lack of jobs stops the home workforce investing in it’s self through education, the opposite happens in the foreign economy.
7, The lack of skilled workers stops most attempts to reverse the trend and research and development stagnates in the home economy whilst it takes of in the foreign economy.

And there is worse to come because since the invention by a couple of Europeans of the junk bond market to get around the Bretton Woods agrement “smart money moves” or if you want it more graphically it’s become the number one “Economic Vampire”. The only reason the US has not sunk way way further economically is the US Dollar is used as the world trading curancy. If that stops, then the US would be in such deep trouble even laundering drug money will not stop it’s economy freezing up. Historically the way to halt that kind of depression was to open up the Treasury and buy your way out by investment in workers to create economic need, one way was by internal investment in infrastructure, but the other was by “going to war” where not only do you put money into workers and troops, you also destroy another nations economic ability by “bombing it back into the stone ages” but that only realy works when two things apply,

1, You have technological superiority.
2, You can stop the enemy destroying your home production.

There were accusations that China stole the F35 designs and it became a political idiom. But then people noticed that the Chinese plane not only took off it landed as well, and could handle a little bit of rain unlike the F35. Then a joke started in the industry about “Maybe we should outsource the F35” or variations on it.

Another sad little truth, why do you think the DoD got it’s panties in a wad over “supply chain security”?

Well the truth is all those hightech weapons the US has all have Far East technology in them thus the DoD realised they had two problems,

1, They could not make more weapons in times of war if thr Far East cut off supply or even just delayed it a bit or made it slightly unreliable.
2, If the suppliers had thought far enough ahead then the weapons they had in stock might not work either.

But there was another issue, that has been known about for years, Isaac Asimov even used it as a plot line in his Foundation Series back in the early 1950’s. Put simply if another nation controls the production of all those non war devices such as domestic appliances and industrial machinery or in the more modern era computers they also can stop your ability to fight a war simply by crippling your home economy. Ask people in California and Texas what power outages have ment for then both last summer and this years snap winter? What do you think would happen if every fridge/freezer in US homes stopped working? How about computers? Oh and cable/broadcast television?

Then ask your self why the Obama idea of the “Big red Internet off switch” disapeared from view? How about the idea of Smart Grids?

The US is overly dependent on flaky technology in the Internet and lack of Security in smart tech, combined it’s realy a question of IF not WHEN it’s all going to go wrong.

I kind of hoped the US and other countries would realise the real message behind 9/11, but in the main they have not, nor have most other Western Nations. It’s this,

“All technology is agnostic to use, and will work as well for good as evil those ideas being human social constructs. The more reliant a society becomes on technology the more easily it can be used against the society.”

You would have thought having a number of passenger aircraft turned into guided missiles for the price of a few box cutter knives by just a hand full of technically incompetent idiots resulting in the destruction of iconic buildings and thousands of lives might have been a wake up call…

Anyway the usual US solution was applied “Start a War in name and deed” but this time the target was both the US citizen and the US economy…

I could list a whole lot more, but as long as the US keeps doubling down on stupidity things are not going to get any better. Thus in effect writing a precursor to a declaration of war against a country that,

1, Has technological superiority.
3, Has developed the weapons to easily defeat your armed forces and drop nuclear devices all over the US homeland.

Does not exactly strike me as a wise thing to do, especially when just about everything in the US has due to neo-cons become way way to fragile.

Ask yourself a personal question,

What are you going to do when Uncle Sam says “Ship up soldier it’s time for you to die in a pointless war”?

Clive Robinson • February 26, 2021 1:38 PM

@ AL,

I’d like to see a story on how it was that the U.S. adopted Modern Monetary Theory without a political debate.

Though it makes me grind my teeth, it’s fairly easy to explain[1],

1, Gov purchases from “favoured” suppliers by printing money.

2, The suppliers move the money into real assets or effrctively off shore.

3, The suppliers pay legislators to give them favoured tax status of fractions of a percent or less.

4, The workers carry the tax burden on renumeration, purchases and often sales of assets especially those held long term.

5, Shortfalls are made up by fines to workers and non favoured suppliers.

So the legislators are being paid to asset strip the nation into foreign currency or real assets beyond taxation.

This COVID relief given to major corporations who put money in politicians election campaigns and other “dark money” systems almost immediately moved it out of the US or out from under US Dollar rates etc by the purchase of real assets. The tax and fine paying public will spend the next three or five generations paying that back via taxation or worse fines.

As I’ve noted on the blog several times over the years Governments are failing to recover taxes from corporations that have become virtual and move around off shore as fast as radiowaves move. So Govs increased taxation on individuals in various hidden ways untill it was nolonger possible to raise them any further. So they turned to fines and other similar systems to asset strip those that become politically undesirable. Part of this is the “hard on criminals” where what they reaky mean is “asset strip the poor and lower waged classes”.

As part of this is systems used to seperate individuals from real assets so they become the source for “rent seeking” which helps keep the value of the currancy.

In a way MMT is “stealth inflation” in that on by far the majority of the population who have only financial assets (savings etc) not real assets (property etc) the result is they and they alone subsidise the currancy and the effect through taxes and fines has the same depreciation on their financial assets as that of the coresponding inflation.

So when you realise who the political paymasters are and how they benifit by MMT it’s not hard to “follow the money”.

Expect to see more ways to seperate those who arecwaged and salaried from any assets they might own. One such trick is that land taxes increase in handling fees as well as per area fees. Which automatically disadvantages small area property holders especially small comercial interests. Large commercial interests however negotiate significant discounts and some actually get paid by negative fees. This is sold to the public as “bringing XXX to the community” where XXX is employment, amenities, or some other thing that can be made to sound like a “Social Good” but is infact actually a deficit to individuals either directly, or indirectly through others such as small traders having to raise their prices thus increased sales taxes etc, which also puts the small traders at a very significant further disadvantage against the large commercial interests.

Such is the “hidden hand of the market” of neo-capitalism, that sees any disaster-capitalism it can create as not just beneficial but necessary to short term profit.

Which is why you get so much under investment in strategic services such as services and infrastructure. They create a disaster by deliberate underspending, then hit those who are dependent with well over actuall cost demands, which becomes profit to attract shareholders etc.

Something those in California and Texas are now starting to realise. That is not only does the “free market” give them higher than average bills per kWh they also get hit with infrastructure repair and development costs as further fees on top…

[1] One of the things I hate about those in “economics” is how they find new ways to lie about reality while being “subsidized” in various hidden ways by those who benifit most from the lies… MMT and it’s supporters should have their incomes and benifits traced right back to the source through think tanks and other financial cut outs.

Clive Robinson • February 26, 2021 2:40 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

The primary reason the USA public doesn’t see it in use at that level is that too much global traffic passes along the USA backbone and Bluffdale would starve.

You also forgot to mention what would happen to the US economy… To say it would “grind to a halt” would be like comparing a glaciers forward momentum to that of a rocket going for a moon shot.

Because the Internet is seen as “free to use” it’s had just about everything put on it…

So the logistics that get food to the shops “check”. The power that gets to your home “check”. The water that gets to your home “check”. The sewage that gets taken away from your home “check”. The rubbish that gets taken away from your home “check”. The bills you pay “check”. The investments you make “check”. In many cases in Western countries the release from the employer to the bank to transfer wages/salary “check”.

But it gets a bit more subtle when it comes to communications. In theory voice and seconfary services like SMS are independent of the Internet, the reality is the two are deeply interteind at the physical layer they share. But with LTE and 5G the pretence of seperation is gone all services will be IP based on the developing back bone. Thus to shut down the Internet means shutting down mobile communications.

But due to licencing costs all the Emergancy Services not just first responders are moving off of “Private Mobile Radio” to “Mobile networks”. This also includes all the service maintainence personnel going out ensuring that infrastructure is functioning.

Likewise delivery services, taxi drivers, and just about anything else that provides services of any sort you can imagine…

But what about traffic managment? Are people aware of just how much of the street lights and signals run off of the mobile network. What do you think would happen if all the traffic lights and pedestrian crossing lights in New York and Washington DC just stopped?

The way the Inyetnet anf mobile communications have built up and have become so intertwined, you can not just shut “one thing down” without many others being significantly adversly effected.

So the whole system is very very fragile with all the potential unseen side effects just kicking in but… Not being able to be kicked back up when they have gone down because of the intertwined and often circular interdependancies…

In short in the US in particular stoping the internet would be the equivalent of dropping a ton of nuts and bolts directly into the engine of not just the economy but also the engine of state…

What is the betting that if you cut off either the Internet or Mobile comms in Texas the right way you will get the same effect if not worse of frozen fuel supplies?

Would that despised by “exceptionalist neo-cons” “Green deal” generation give enough power to bring things back up again or would they all fly to Mexico?