Well, I totally agree with Andy Grove on how only the paranoid survive. However, the strongest points in most systems are typically the systems themselves. The routers, the server hardware, and as time goes on, infrastructure services like private and public clouds become more of a hardened commodity system. The weakest spots are typically with regards to endpoints (i.e. laptop and desktop software) as well as people (i.e. social engineering). Freeing up sys admins from commodity tasks like replacing hard drives and installing physical servers means they can spend more time focusing on logical information control and therefore, security can really be improved by moving more services to cloud-architectures - even if those architectures leverage private clouds within the organization's own facilities. -Adam --- Kili.io - OpenStack for Africa: https://angel.co/kili-io Musings: https://twitter.com/varud About Adam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcnelson On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 3:37 AM, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Kivuva
Your guess is as good as mine...But rest assured that hosting Government data in the public cloud may not be in the interest of 'National Security'.
As Andy Grove, an Intel Co-Founder said - Only the Paranoid Survive.
Ali Hussein CEO | 3mice interactive media Ltd Principal | Telemedia Africa Ltd
+254 713 601113/ 0770 906375
"The future belongs to him who knows how to wait." - Russian Proverb
Sent from my iPad
On Jul 30, 2013, at 9:36 PM, Kivuva <Kivuva@transworldafrica.com> wrote:
Thank you Brian for this.
"Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder" I'm just wondering where as a country we are in the global scheme of things. How safe is government data from "foreign enemies". Does the government have any form of encryption in it's communication?
How reliant are we on foreign owned data centers and hosted applications? Should we be paranoid? Are we spectators?
Kind Regards ______________________ Mwendwa Kivuva twitter.com/lordmwesh google ID | Skype ID: lordmwesh
On 29 July 2013 10:18, Ali Hussein <ali@hussein.me.ke> wrote:
Brian
Thanks for sharing. The issue of Internet Governance is a contentious one. And always will be. This article exposes the hypocrisy all round. We know that China, Russia and the Middle East and like minded governments don't make a secret of the fact that they snoop on their citizens and enemies alike. It was a foregone conclusion that the US does this as part of its National Security Apparatus.
A few months ago on my blog I advocated for a sort of 'Non-Aligned Movement' and hinted that Kenya could actually take a leadership role in this space - which I think we already have been to some extent with our well organized IGFs courtesy of Alice Munyua, CCK, KeNIC and MOIC.
See my blog on Internet Governance
http://www.alyhussein.com/internet-governance/
This could be the start of a Non-Aligned Movement in Internet Governance. And this is what we should be pushing. Ali Hussein CEO | 3mice interactive media Ltd Principal | Telemedia Africa Ltd
+254 713 601113/ 0770 906375
"The future belongs to him who knows how to wait." - Russian Proverb
Sent from my iPad
On Jul 29, 2013, at 9:55 AM, Brian Munyao Longwe <blongwe@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,
A phrase in this article boldly states "the issue of internet governance is about to become very difficult.Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable."
Food for thought.....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/28/edward-snowden-death-of-int... --------------------------------------------------------------------
Repeat after me: Edward Snowden<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/edward-snowden> is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoop_%28novel%29> was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.
In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinion/global/the-service-of-snowden.html?_r=0> thus far.
Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/nsa>) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet> companies to its demands for access to their users' data.
Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such asBooz Allen Hamilton<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/edward-snowden-investigate-booz-allen> and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.
These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.
As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.
The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.
Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become *very*contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.
Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out<http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwachung/information-consumerism-the-price-of-hypocrisy-12292374.html>, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."
That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.
They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/privacy> or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.
And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently<http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-13-654_en.htm>. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."
Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder
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