Module 8 Textbook Reading The textbook reading assignment for Module 8 is pages 193-216. Understand the Limits of the State in Cyberspace: Why Can't the Government Handle it? Governments cannot control the movement of data the way that governments can control the movement of people and things. Surprisingly, the authors don't point out the two main reasons this is true: • A country may try to control all physical connections to the internet, but wireless is almost impossible to control. • Even if a government were able to monitor all internet traffic, the meaning of data is often unclear to anybody other than the sender and the recipient of that data. The most obvious example of this is when data is encrypted, but even unencrypted data is often meaningless without context. On top of that, data can be instantly moved across borders to anywhere in the world. One day it might be stored in Seattle, the next day in Finland and the next day in South Africa. One of the ramifications of these facts is that governments cannot control internet content as much as they would like. The other ramification, which is more immediately of interest to us, is that governments also cannot simply monitor internet traffic for attacks and block the attacks. There's no way to monitor the internet for cyberattacks in the way that radar can be used to monitor for attacks by aircraft. The authors discuss other related topics in this section as well, including the government's reliance upon the private sector. For instance, at the top of page 196: “98 percent of US. government communications, including classified communications, travel over civilian owned-and-operated networks” This statistic makes it easy to grasp just how dependent the government, including the military, is dependent upon private sector infrastructure. (by the way, they are not saying that classified communications travel over private networks in plaintext, they would be encrypted to preserve confidentiality while on those networks) Rethink Government's Role: How Can We Better Organize for Cybersecurity? This section and the next have a lot of good information in them, but I have to admit that the organization of these sections is not obvious to me – it almost feels like stream of consciousness writing. For instance, in this first section, I made a list of 21 separate topics that the authors cover in just seven pages. Perhaps the authors wrote these sections to make clear one of their main points – that the government is also not organized when it comes to cybersecurity! IT 238 Introduction to Cyberterrorism Central Washington University – ITAM Module 8 Textbook Reading 2 You should probably view both this section and the next more as examples of what the government is doing, is not doing, and could be doing to improve cybersecurity. I will just point out some specific topics you should not miss. By the way, very little has changed in any of these topics since the ...