Reading Reaper0bot0's diary tonight reminded me very much of all the Internet Security debates I have been involved with since the early nineties. I invented one of the early firewalls (BorderWare), and since that time it has been my mixed pleasure and angst to engage in heated debates that are very very similar to this one.
The people who know a lot about Internet security are by and large very smart technical geeks who spend all their time thinking and worrying about keeping bad folks from doing nasty things. We get really passionate about it - if we screw up people are harmed. In some areas of our profession like Critical Infrastructure (which I focused on 2005-2007), when we screw up, people die.
Tempers get very sharp about the specific things we should do, and how we can do them. The worst part? I never know whether what I believe to be the right thing to do is not horribly wrong, and may lead to horrible consequences. But since the alternative is doing nothing, I have to do the best I can and live with the results.
Early in this phase of my career, I was virtually alone is reiterating that we have to do possible things, or we would end up being an immaterial debating club. "Firewalls are no good, people can hack through them by doing XYZ!!!!!". OK, true. Still. But since every person and organization in the world would be getting online in the coming years (as they pretty well now have) - and that at the end of the day there are only so many infosec folks, and that the sheer logistics of building and securing this entire global network thing are staggeringly large - we needed to build (and yes, even market and sell) appropriately to keep the ball moving down the field to the Desired Perfect Solution we all agreed was the goal.
That view did not always make me popular, but my popularity (of lack thereof) did not make me incorrect. Today, many in my field understand the pragmatism necessary to address this overwhelmingly large and complex endeavor.
Politics are no different. Folks who blog a great deal about politics (like myself of late) are rare. Most people do not focus so much on this stuff. Most people are not politicians - we have a few hundred people working on thousands of issues, many of them literaly life or death and almost all of them complicated and interconnected. The ability to move the political ball down the field is incorrectly believed by most people to be something that "those folks" should be able to do any way they like. The reality is that a limited number of people are dealing with an enormous number of complex and inter-related issues in a sliding window of time. No matter how much any political geek wishes to make a given "answer" to a given issue pop into existence overnight, the reality is that a positive outcome is one where - on average - the situation moves in the right direction over time.
So. Should FISA and the overly-intrusive and underly-accountable bits intrinsic in it be killed on sight? Probably. Is that possible in the matrix of Doing Good Things that we will analyze and judge from the historical perspective of, say, ten years from now? Maybe not.
What I want to see is that the issues of this country, and of this world, improve over time. The details of how to do all of that I am happy to ponder and discuss, but not at the expense of moving that ball down the field one play at a time and winning the Big Game in the end.
-chris
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