By Brad
Last month, the Obama administration announced it was creating a national “Cyber Czar” to oversee efforts to fight cyber attacks. Now the United Kingdom is following suit, creating a new Office of Cyber Security. Reports ZDNet:
The Office of Cyber Security (OCS), dedicated to protecting Britain’s IT infrastructure, will be created in line with a model proposed — and in part practised by — the US, the Cabinet Office said on Thursday. The OCS will have charge of a cross-government programme of work, while a multi-agency Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), based at GCHQ in Cheltenham, will coordinate the protection of critical IT systems.
As well as cyber-defence and cyberattack coordination, the OCS will act as a conduit for information security collaboration between government and industry experts.
By Brad
Over in the UK, a new proposal would allow the government to keep tabs on how citizens use popular social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Civil liberty watchdogs are, predictably, up in arms about the plan. And as the BBC reports, so are some politicians:
Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake said the websites contained sensitive personal details and he was concerned information could leak from any government-controlled database.
The Independent newspaper quoted him as saying similar plans to store phone and email records threatened to be the “most expensive snooper’s charter in history”.
“It is deeply worrying that they now intend to monitor social networking sites which contain very sensitive data like sexual orientation, religious beliefs and political views,” he said.
Facebook’s official response is that the proposal is “overkill.” As for the government’s response:
A spokesman said: “The government has no interest in the content of people’s social network sites and this is not going to be part of our upcoming consultation.
“We have been clear that the communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we collect communications data needs to change, so that law enforcement agencies can maintain their ability to tackle terrorism and gather evidence.”
Stay tuned…
By Brad
As the U.S. seeks to boost its broadband development, our allies in the United Kingdom are hatching plans of their own.
Britain plans to provide universal broadband access along the lines of the post and telephone services in a bid to make the country more competitive and help drag it out of recession.
A report by Communications minister Lord Carter said Britain would work to provide Internet access to the whole country at around 2 Megabits per second (Mb) through a mixture of fixed and wireless connections by 2012.
At the moment, around 99% of the UK has access to broadband, with an estimated 60% of the country actually using it. Many of them, however, don’t have access to service at the required 2 Mb speed.
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