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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Curious

With the military announcing a new cyberwarfare arm, and the Obama administration starting a coordinating position for business network security, I thought maybe it was time to ask this question again.

Does the US still produce the best hackers in the world?

There was a time not too long ago when that wouldn't have even been a question, but with so many Chinese working (allegedly) for their government testing US systems, and the Russians and Eastern bloc hackers doing so much of the cybercrime, does the US constituency still stack up?

I have no real idea, and I don't really know how you'd measure such a thing, but if things ever got really nasty, and we had to tap into that resource, do we still have that advantage?

4 Comments:

  • I think, under Bush, we really back-slid in the whole area of technology and science. Couple this with a fantasized world view staffed by people with a brute force mentality... Well, subtlety and espionage in the computer age really falls by the wayside.

    Interestingly, I wonder of the cyber-espionage effort was focused more domestically (Total Information Awareness) than toward hostile foreign sovereignties...

    By Blogger -epm, at 8:05 AM  

  • As for the government efforts, no, the Bush admin didn't do too much visibly on computer warfare, and they took criticism from many about ignoring the risks of a cyber 9-11.

    But my question was more aimed at the non-governmental/criminal aspects. Do we still have the wizards in our country if we need them?

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 8:09 AM  

  • " Do we still have the wizards in our country if we need them?"Did we ever, really? I'm going on nothing but my feeble memory, but I seem to remember that many of the sensationalized hackers were from Northern Europe... (Scandinavia, Netherlands...) But even if we did have great hackers (and I know there were some), maybe law enforcement and harsh punishments really had the deterring affects they intended?

    (I'll toss in the aggressive RCIAA and DCMA crackdown on "pirates" as further emasculating would-be hackers.)

    By Blogger -epm, at 8:38 AM  

  • I'm not really talking about the copyright stuff, I'm talking about the king of the hill hackers who used to do stuff just to prove they were better.

    The US does still host the biggest hacker convention.

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 10:57 AM  

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