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Tech at Night: FCC costs us jobs, Cybersecurity threats real and imaginary, FISMA in the House

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  March 24th, 2012 at 03:30 AM  | 

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Tech at Night

Ah, the FCC. If The FCC wanted to do incentive auctions to free up spectrum for wireless Internet, they could just do it. They wouldn’t need to set up a task force to talk about the National Broad band Plan to consider it, while instead getting involved in unrelated things like making its own security rules. We need FCC reform. Just say yes to Coase.

Remember when they said that an AT&T/T-Mobile merger would cost us jobs, as only after the merger would there be layoffs? Oops, the FCC and Holder DOJ cost us jobs, instead.

Of course, we also need Senate reform, better known as electing Republicans.

PATENT WARS: I’ve lost count of how many volleys have gone on in The Samsung/Apple patent war, but on it goes. Facebook is ready to fight, too, Buying 750 patents from IBM to prepare to fight against Yahoo.

Speaking of Facebook, it’s absurd to think that we’d bring government into regulating Facebook passwords. Your Facebook account and your employer are none of my concern. Handle it yourself. Or let Facebook handle it by setting its own terms and conditions of use. Not my problem. Not the people’s problem.

There are reasons to pass a good bill that enhances voluntary information sharing about cybersecurity threats. There is no reason to expand government, or to claim that we’re all going to die if we don’t pass a bill to grow government right now.

That said. If you want to improve security, start with government itself. An open FISMA reform process is one way to accomplish that.

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  • dvijay

    What AT&T said was complete BS. They were only interested in the spectrum that T-Mobile had. They would have eliminated T-Mobile as an operator, led to 10s of thousands of layoffs and eliminating all low cost data plans. T-Mobile’s plans are much cheaper than AT&T and Verizon/

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    We hadn’t had any socialist trolling in Tech at Night in a while.

    I was feeling neglected.

  • trutexan

    I’m an Information Assurance analyst for the federal government and this whole FISMA thing is such a joke. I do annual FISMA reviews on all information systems under our perview and all they are is an on-your-honor review that all stuff is still in compliance. Sorta. You spend two weeks creating a bunch of red tape to satisfy Big Brother, change a date in EITDR to say you did it, and no one is the wiser. Oh sure, someone could check, but they don’t. Then Big Brother sees the date change and all is well in their world. Is the system truly in compliance? Only I know for sure.

    Guidance came out in 2008, then again in 2010, and now again in 2012. Why on earth are there so many policy updates? Possibly because in 2008 they wrote the policy to be complete overkill to ensure compliance but going through the motions was so painful it was like a complete system reaccreditation. So they backed off the requirements in 2010 and the review process is finally down to about two weeks. Not a big deal unless you’ve got over 150 systems like we do and not enough folks to do it. IA isn’t something you pick up in a couple of weeks. It takes about 3 years to create an IA analyst and even then, they can become pigeon-holed into a specialty (Windows security, network, web, incident reporting, the mire that is 8570, etc.) A well-rounded analyst has been in the business at least 8 years. The work is incredibly boring, and it sucks, but it’s a job … and one not going away any time soon.

    I believe the premise is sound and IT security is no longer an afterthought in the IT development process. It can’t be. But leave it to the federal government to screw it up. It is only through the dedication and professionalism of my co-workers (system admins, network shop, touch maintenance, help desk, etc.) that keep our network safe. We understand the threats, (the Chinese attempt to break in thousands of times a day) and I work with people who know these systems better than they know themselves. They work like crazy to allow access while providing security. Their intent has absolutely nothing to do with meeting federal guidelines. They do it because that is the nature of their business. I envy those job descriptions. Me? I am the Red Tape. If I didn’t show up to work tomorrow, the IT world would continue to hum along. My office is only here to appease the federal government and give them the warm fuzzy that they are in charge.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    I suspect people will think you’re exaggerating, but anyone with an ssh port open sees it.

  • dvijay

    You seem to have no clue. T-Mobile does a very effective job of keeping data plans’ prices in check. AT&T was just trying to grab the spectrum that T-Mobile had and in the process eliminate a competitor.

    By the way, T-Mobile was consolidating call centers. They let go of 1900 people and hired 1400 people in other 17 call centers they have. They shut down two. Here is a link to the article. T-Mobile is also paying for the relocation costs for the people who want to move to the other call centers.

    http://www.fiercemobileit.com/story/strange-war-words-erupts-over-t-mobile-job-cuts/2012-03-23