"One journalist described to me an anti-American demonstration held last April in Baghdad to celebrate Saddam's sixty-fifth birthday. She saw the same high school students pass by several times, simulating an endless stream of angry protesters. When her colleagues turned their cameras on, officials with bullhorns instructed the crowd to increase the volume of their chants. "Everyone knows they're a sham," says the journalist. "But CNN in Atlanta is telling Nic Robertson that he has to file a story. He doesn't have anything else to work with. So he shows the demonstration." "

A very good article in the New Republic on the price of being a foreign journalist in Iraq.  CNN in particular gets pointed to as a particularly compliant organization.  A good demonstration of why modern mass-media news is fairly empty.  Ahhhh, pseudo-events.

[via BlogCritics]

So here's a Cyber Security strategy that would work. It's as anti- competitive as you can get and has a snowball's chance in hell of being adopted. It's downright Machiavellian. Or, perhaps, Napoleonic:

1. Make it illegal to sell a PC that doesn't come with a fully-licensed Antivirus product and personal firewall pre-installed on it.
   
   
2. Standardize government Infosec products in use on a best-of-breed basis like any FORTUNE 500 company would - across all federal computers.
   
   
3. Terminate federal employees and their supervisors if they are proven responsible for security breaches due to their negligence.
   
   
4. Spend a few million dollars (or use some internal resources) to code a government-issue personal firewall and anti-virus product. Give it away. Standardize on it. Make it available to ISPs. Writing firewalls isn't hard. I've written two single-handedly.
   
   
5. Establish a standard firewall configuration policy (e.g.: a site security policy) for all internet-connected federal agencies and adhere to it rigorously. 99% of the government's security problems result from incompatible policies and lax enforcement. FORTUNE 500 firms get this right; the taxpayers' employees should do no less.

So it's anti-competitive and Machiavellian. National defense always is.

Don't sweat consensus. Lead.

Marcus Ranum, the man behind SEAL - the first commercial firewall, Gauntlet - another early commercial firewall, and NFR - the first commercial intrusion detection platform, comments on the lack of teeth in Bush's Cybersecurity Plan, and offers a plan of his own.