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The Clean Network – United States Department of State

state.gov

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Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#261

Post by squidlogic »

elliekelly wrote: post #239
dannyw wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chinese has shown no interest in co-operating with the world. They are an enemy. What’s wrong with keeping them out of our internet when they have their own? To put it another way; this is like allowing your enemy to design and manfacture your military jets.

The Chinese government has shown no interest in cooperating with many western governments . Even though the Chinese government is, in some ways, an “enemy”, most of the 1.5 billion people living in China are not. We should be interested in what the people have to say and I’m sure the people of China are interested in what we have to say, too. We should be building connections amongst the people, not walls. I’d even s…

There will be a natural decoupling between our two nations. We did the same with Soviet Union when we realized their ideology left no room for long term peaceful coexistence (see the Long Telegram).

A lot of political leaders are realizing that the communism of China, while different in many ways to the Soviet variety, is still incompatible with the USA.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#262

Post by wahern »

remus wrote: post #201
zepto wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We actually don’t know that the US has gathered the largest database of sensitive information. Only that it used to gather a lot before Snowden.

I'd bet a lot of money that the NSA didn't just turn off their servers and sit their twiddling their thumbs after the Snowden leaks.

I think the intimation is that it's not only the NSA or the United States building such databases, and the assumption that the NSA would have the largest database may no longer be credible--not because they stopped gathering data but because they were surpassed.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#263

Post by adventured »

csb6 wrote: post #238
booleandilemma wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The US is not a democracy for the vast majority of Americans. It is an oligarchy posing as a democracy.

Nearly every affluent liberal democracy on the planet qualifies as an oligarchy by the premise that gets floated about the US.

Similarly qualified: Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Iceland.

Have you looked at how many billionaires there are in Sweden and Norway? Oligarchy. Sweden has considerably more billionaires per capita than the US does. They're clearly not a democracy at all. The billionaires control the entire country including its government, obviously.

Ever look at the perpetual old money dominance in Germany and France? Oligarchy.

You're down to there only being a dozen or so liberal democracies that aren't in some way broken, severely tainted by money or entrenched power groups, etc. - if you use the same standard used against the US.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#264

Post by rtkwe »

solstice wrote: post #244
mthoms wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no HW guy but when "activated", could it not brick itself? Or, only transmit packets passing to/from certain IP addresses?

That doesn't sound useful or very sophisticated from a spying POV. I guess mass-shutdown of Telco infrastructure would be catastrophic but that could most likely be avoided by having a mix of suppliers and a minimum of known-good hardware in the field.

You'd have to maintain that mixture of manufacturers broadly across all the 'critical' bits of infrastructure for it to really matter and there's a lot of infrastructure to defend. Just disrupting payments or mobile data sporadically across the US could deal a big blow to a lot of businesses. Just look how poorly they've fared with the COVID disruptions.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#265

Post by saagarjha »

waihtis wrote: post #90
ISL wrote: post #80

I have the same feeling about this as I did the announcement of the "Department of Homeland Security". The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States. "We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network." is a sentence straight out of an authoritarian playbo…

> Furthermore, State is a decade or more behind the game. It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly. Unfortunately far from true. There's a small percentage who have the resource to run this kind of ops. Don't look at FAANG on how security is in companies, they're outliers by far.

There's also massive amounts of variation between the companies in that group. Some are prohibited from taking source code off a computer located on premises (employees' take-home machines are "dumb" to the extreme in that they basically connect directly to their computers at work); others encourage their employees to use pre-production and internal products for personal use. As you can guess, they have dramatically different models for how to approach corporate security.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#266

Post by saagarjha »

Angostura wrote: post #232
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It is ridiculous how closely the language sounds to that of a dictatorial regime. The language is just so.. cringy. When I first read, I genuinely could not believe it was not onion or some weird caricature.

The first sentence really stood out to me... "The Clean Network program is the Trump Administration’s comprehensive approach to..." Isn't that a bit odd? Surely these things would be worded as 'is the United States Government approach..' It almost smacks of 'errr, don't blame us guys, it wasn't our idea. Love the low res images of the logos too.

Alternatively, it's a "look at what our administration is doing to stop…"

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#267

Post by op03 »

ISL wrote: post #98
waihtis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Furthermore, State is a decade or more behind the game. It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly. Unfortunately far from true. There's a small percentage who have the resource to run this kind of ops. Don't look at FAANG on how security is in companies, they're outliers by far.

State's 2020 budget is $52B. It has direct-collaboration access to DOD and NIST. We should expect our national-security infrastructure to be more resilient than commercial infrastructure, not less.

Man you actually think they spend that on Capex? Most of that is to pay pensions, salaries and healthcare of bureaucrats.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#268

Post by saagarjha »

reaperducer wrote: post #209
apazzolini wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The JPEGed giant logo It's almost like they ran it through jpegify.me on purpose as a joke, but really it's just another sign of the US's government technical incompetence.

it's just another sign of the US's government technical incompetence. Not "the government." "A person in the government." The federal government has a very good design system. But for some reason, whoever built this page chose not to follow it. https://designsystem.digital.gov

> The federal government has a very good design system.

Having no knowledge of how the federal government works, but having worked for fairly large organizations, I would still guess that the design system exists and is used in many places but a significant fraction may not even know it exists much less that they are supposed to use it.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#269

Post by dheera »

ISL wrote: post #80

I have the same feeling about this as I did the announcement of the "Department of Homeland Security". The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States. "We call on all freedom-loving nations and companies to join the Clean Network." is a sentence straight out of an authoritarian playbo…

Yep. This "Clean Network" BS reminds me of the "Golden Shield" project (official name of the project that China's firewall is part of). Not something I'd expect from the US.

Re: The Clean Network – United States Department of State

#270

Post by glenstein »

csb6 wrote: post #238
booleandilemma wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The US is not a democracy for the vast majority of Americans. It is an oligarchy posing as a democracy.

It's possible to criticize the national security state in the U.S. while not losing sight of the fact that China is run by an authoritarian government guilty of abuses at a completely different order of magnitude.

That difference is important, because a lot of people even in this thread seem to completely lose sight of it.

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