original to: http://online.wsj.com/article/wonder_land.html (will probably change - Google for actual URL) * WONDER LAND * DECEMBER 2, 2010 WikiLeaks R Us We can't put the Internet genie back in the bottle. By DANIEL HENNINGER There is one certain fix for the WikiLeaks problem: Blow up the Internet. Short of that, there is no obvious answer. This summer I was in a movie line behind two guys, and one said: "I hate Facebook. I wish it had never been invented. But I can't live without it." Welcome to the WikiLeaks problem, which was born along with the Internet itself. What we can't live without may kill us. In October, the Secret Service arrested a Malaysian man in New York who had 400,000 bank-card numbers. He'd hacked them out of the Cleveland Federal Reserve and other financial institutions. Last year a contractor remotely inserted a potentially destructive "logic bomb" on Fannie Mae's servers that could have erased a lot of its data. What about your co-worker? Two years ago, a worker in the City of San Francisco's technology department created a password that let him access virtually all the city's files and business on its FiberWAN network, while blocking access to everyone else. They caught him, but for a while he held the city hostage, refusing to give up his key to the city. Can Bank of America say with certainty they haven't been robbed of the data Julian Assange claims to possess? No, they can't. Once you input anything into the digital ethers, it will never be "safe" or "private." Sun Microsystems' co-founder Scott McNealy famously said: "You have zero privacy. Get over it." We know that. What we don't know, or won't admit, is that the idea of confidentialityState Department cables, the design for weapons systems, health recordshas eroded, perhaps permanently. We can't put the Internet genie back in the bottle. Everyone from Hillary Clinton on down is "shocked" at the cables dump. But if last year one had polled experts on the architecture of data systems about the probability of this event, most would have said it surely would happen, eventually. The Government Accountability Office has released survey after survey on this problem, all singing the same song printed on the front of this June's report: "Cybersecurity: Key Challenges Need to Be Addressed." Congress has thrown dozens of bills at cybersecurity. Is WikiLeaks Obama's fault? No. You could throw the entire IQ capacity of Google's work force at the problem. They might devise a solution, but it wouldn't be the answer. Like the Web itself, it's complicated. Private companies already offer solutions to protecting data systems. "Data-at-rest" and "data-in-motion" programs look for anomalies in emails and other data moving through networks or resting on hard drives. SIM (security information management) software tracks network intrusions. It's pretty good, the way climatology is pretty good. But there's a maddening paradox that this technology poses to any organized group of people trying to use it for good ends: How to set up protocols that will haul in the bad guys without hampering the creative work of everyone else? If the U.S. (or Europe) has one big comparative advantage left, it is an information advantage. Out of the organized serendipity of many smart people bouncing information-laden ideas off each other, good things happen here. Whether workers in a knowledge society are creating advances on cancer or software for the pilotless drones killing our worst enemies, they need lots of information, need it now, and need to "talk" about it on the network with colleagues. That means "odd" but legitimate events are going to occur on one's data network. Separating all the odd from one bad is hard. China's security solution is to suppress the flow of information, let creativity be damned, and steal from us. (The New York Times's Thomas Friedman yesterday asked: "What if China had a WikiLeaker?" The three-word answer: They'd execute him.) The Pentagon, State Department and our banks are at risk because it is hard to define who or what should be monitored. Then each institution would have to create an Orwellian "monitoring" office. Oh wait, we already did thatthe Department of Homeland Security. Problem solved. After 9/11, non-communicating, "stove-piped" federal agencies emerged as a top problem. To open the cross-agency information flow of classified information they created SIPRNet. Now the State Department has pulled the plug on SIPRNet. Ponder this: The CIA never joined SIPRNet and took heat for that. Count me as glad that Assange doesn't have access to data on the agency's anti-Taliban drone program. Two big things transformed the postwar world: nuclear fission and the Internet. Nuclear fission gave us clean energy and the atomic bomb. The Internet? With WikiLeaks, we arrive at the Internet version of putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle. There may be no obvious fix for the paradoxes of this inherently vulnerable technology. But we also can't survive in a digital state of nature. The Internet "A-bomb" will go off eventually. Here's a thought for our befuddled national leadership: The first time humans concluded that they needed to deter bad people from taking advantage of civilization, they set common rules. If people broke them, they put them away. Pfc. Bradley Manning, charged with downloading all that data for Assange, is sitting in a Quantico jail. He could get 52 years. He should. And that's just for starters, if we hope to live with the Internet genie. 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