http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/21892.html By John Leyden Posted: 26/09/2001 at 14:31 GMT The clamour for the introduction of wider surveillance measures has been deafening in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks. To date, opponents against such moves have argued mostly for civil liberties reasons. But the case against can also be made on the grounds that more surveillance simply won't work. That's the analysis of Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, who says the failure to anticipate the September 11 attacks was one of data interpretation, not data collection. Speaking today at the Information Security Solution Europe conference in London, Schneier drew parallels between Internet security and physical security to make his point that more widespread monitoring is in itself unlikely to prevent terrorism. "You can either build a system right or build it wrong and watch everybody," said Schneier. "Broad surveillance is generally the sign of a badly designed system of security." Instead of relying on collecting more data (signals intelligence), counter terrorism agencies should put more effort into human intelligence. "The Stasi collected data on four million East Germans, roughly one fourth of their population. Yet they failed to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall because they invested too heavily in data collection and too little in data interpretation and human intelligence," Schneier argued. He said it was possible to increase security without taking away privacy and liberty and encouraged people to look for real answers to the problem of terrorism, which he admitted was far from straightforward. He suggested combing prevention, detection, and response to achieve something approaching robust and resilient security was the best we could hope for. There's a chance to redesign our "public infrastructures for security", according to Schneier. We wonder if this root-and-branch option will be adopted. reg; - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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