Apparently, the Comcast win yesterday in a District Appeals court means, among other things, that the FCC's plan to extend broadband across the US -- lifting us closer to a standard reached by many other countries years ago -- is dead. Now it depends on an increasingly contentious Congress.
But then any efforts now to open up high speed internet -- and keep it open and relatively safe -- are probably useless.
Richard Clarke -- remember Richard Clarke? -- warns, "We're probably doing things on lots of networks around the world to get ready for cyberwar, and yet we do not have a military strategy that has been shared with the Congress or the public. And I suspect we don't really have a military strategy at all."
For a country whose economy operates largely in cyberspace and whose military pioneered Net-centric warfare, this is a serious failing.
Lewis [James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies] likes to cite the German military leaders 70 years ago who took pride in their ability to encrypt radio communication through their Enigma machines. What they did not realize, Lewis says, was that U.S. allies had cracked the Enigma code and were intercepting all those "secret" German messages. "Unfortunately, today we've reversed the roles," says Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "We're the people sitting there fat, dumb and happy, thinking we're getting all this advantage from our network and not realizing that our opponents are sitting in it and reaping all the benefits."
He adds, "I see this as possibly one of the gravest intelligence battles the U.S. has ever fought, and it's a battle we're currently losing." ...NPR
