Jim Harper over at Cato lays out just how ridiculous Senator Jay Rockefeller's argument is. Even when the worlds best hackers take out some website like the DOJ or the CIA, it's their websites. That's like taking out their radio commercials. It's not critical infrastructure. Rest easy, the important stuff is locked safely away from the Internet freaky-freakies.
I love me my Internets, but folks, we don't build critical infrastructure onto it, nor should we. To quote Harper, quoting Tim Lee:
[S]ome mission-critical activities, including voting and banking, are carried out via the Internet in some places. But to the extent that that’s true, the lesson of the Estonian attacks isn’t that the Internet is “critical infrastructure” on par with electricity and water, but that it’s stupid to build “critical infrastructure” on top of the public Internet. There’s a reason that banks maintain dedicated infrastructure for financial transactions, that the power grid has a dedicated communications infrastructure, and that computer security experts are all but unanimous that Internet voting is a bad idea.
The internet is made for easy access to worldwide data. In all data security, there is a trade-off between sharing data, and protecting data. It is a sliding scale, and it is absolutely impossible to have it both ways. The internet is reasonably secure, but not secure enough to start risking real critical infrastructure to it. So of course, we don't. And I don't foresee us doing so at any time in the near future.
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