The Ministry of Home Affairs hosted the 23rd GovernmentWare (GovWare) conference & exhibition event on 23 to 25 September 2014.
With the whipping boy of cyber threats in today's connected cyber world identified, the Government urged academia and industry partners to develop a close partnership which will enable such initiatives and measures as the sharing of information, development of innovative cyber solutions, training of the next generation of cyber security professionals and the establishment of local operational or research facilities. These and other "collaborative" efforts are supposed to aid in the shaping of a cyber security ecosystem that is both robust and vibrant.
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One of the secret documents exposed by Edward Snowden was a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining the function of PRISM, the program used impudently by the National Security Agency (NSA). The first to provide PRISM with material was Microsoft (September 2007), followed by Yahoo (March 2008), Google (January 2009), Facebook (June 2009), YouTube (September 2010), Skype (February 2011) and AOL (March 2011). Apple held out till October 2012. The top secret PRISM program allows the spy agency to access emails, Facebook posts and instant messages.
When challenged - Google prided itself on its mission statement "Don't do evil" - the tech companies said they only released information to NSA in response to a specific court order. It was only part of the story. In October 2013, the Washington Post revealed that NSA had hacked into the private fibre-optic links "on British territory" that inter-connect Yahoo and Google data centres worldwide. The NSA codename for the tapping operation is MUSCULAR, with the British doing the actual tapping on behalf of the US, and sending the data back to NSA's Fort Meade headquarters ("The Snowden Files", Luke Harding, page 206, 207). Snowden says it was his concerns over PRISM that pushed him towards whistleblowing.
What is pushing the government into all the talk about need for cyber security specialists is easy to guess. While George Bush had the Patriot Act to go by in the aftermath of 9/11, our great leader is paranoid about old geezers pining for home in a documentary movie. Transparency and accountability were never their goals, neither was the privacy of the citizens they are supposed to serve. Their invasive bags of dirty tricks makes the NSA rogue agents look like angelic forces.
With the whipping boy of cyber threats in today's connected cyber world identified, the Government urged academia and industry partners to develop a close partnership which will enable such initiatives and measures as the sharing of information, development of innovative cyber solutions, training of the next generation of cyber security professionals and the establishment of local operational or research facilities. These and other "collaborative" efforts are supposed to aid in the shaping of a cyber security ecosystem that is both robust and vibrant.
When challenged - Google prided itself on its mission statement "Don't do evil" - the tech companies said they only released information to NSA in response to a specific court order. It was only part of the story. In October 2013, the Washington Post revealed that NSA had hacked into the private fibre-optic links "on British territory" that inter-connect Yahoo and Google data centres worldwide. The NSA codename for the tapping operation is MUSCULAR, with the British doing the actual tapping on behalf of the US, and sending the data back to NSA's Fort Meade headquarters ("The Snowden Files", Luke Harding, page 206, 207). Snowden says it was his concerns over PRISM that pushed him towards whistleblowing.
What is pushing the government into all the talk about need for cyber security specialists is easy to guess. While George Bush had the Patriot Act to go by in the aftermath of 9/11, our great leader is paranoid about old geezers pining for home in a documentary movie. Transparency and accountability were never their goals, neither was the privacy of the citizens they are supposed to serve. Their invasive bags of dirty tricks makes the NSA rogue agents look like angelic forces.