democracy

Eugene kaspersky have some very strange ideas on what would be good for the Internet:

Q: That’s it? What’s wrong with the design of the Internet?
A: There’s anonymity. Everyone should and must have an identification, or Internet passport. The Internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the U.S. military. That was just a limited group of people–hundreds, or maybe thousands. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong…to introduce it in the same way.

I’d like to change the design of the Internet by introducing regulation–Internet passports, Internet police and international agreement–about following Internet standards. And if some countries don’t agree with or don’t pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off.

Emmm.. OK. Speechless. Overall it’s a very bad idea. I’m guessing it’s some kind of russian way of looking at society, mixed up with some orweillian influences.

Doing this would make identity theft so much easier, and also more fun & profitable for “the bad guys”… It would not solve a thing, just make it worse and probably bring more AFK violence into the picture.

What is it about some corporate leaders and politics? Something that they might want to consider is to pay at least some respect to the bigger picture, and to try to propose solutions that do not only target the symptoms but the root of the problem.

In this case, people from the eastern block (Russia, Ukraine etc.) that make millions on malware…

I agree with Paperghost… just a terrible idea. More discussion over at The Register as well.

UPDATE:

Eugene Kaspersky follows up with an article on ThreatPost meant to explain his statements. None of his arguments are valid though, and they’re shredded in the underlying comments.

I’m just going to comment on his first point, as the rest are just words without substance:

“Common users are NOT anonymous for police and governments. Today the authorities can find any person they are after easily. There is a wrong perception about Internet anonymity – very few people realize that it does not exist for ordinary users. But the worst part of the story is that the ones who are truly anonymous are professional cyber criminals, because they know what to do to hide their real identities in the Internet. That is why we have millions of malicious programs and successful network attacks every year, and we don’t know who’s behind them.”

And this will change how? Having an endpoint authenticate with (supposedly) secure credentials will not change one thing. All botnet C&C-servers, as an example, is run on other peoples machines and the authors are always bouncing through other computers on their way there. It simply will not change a thing.

All this will do is make regular Joe more vulnerable to identity theft and exposure to corrupt regimes, while still leaving the bad guys anonymous. You might even consider the bad guys more secure, as they’re hiding behind someone elses credentials. Instead of sponsoring insane schemes that would fit into a George Orwell book, try to attack the core of the problem.

If lobbying for something, a good starting point for Mr. K would probably be at home. A lot of malicious sites and campaigns are run out of Russia (and other countries in the eastern block). Try to put pressure on legislators in these countries so we can capture the criminals with good old investigative police work instead.

As it is now, police in these countries are either ignoring the problem or just do not have the resources they need.