Security quotes of the week [LWN.net]

L. If your community is pressuring you to be more restrictive, that’s when it’s time to educate, not capitulate. Overzealous blocking and filtering has real and significant negative impacts on information access, student learning, pedagogy, ability to address required curricular standards, and educators’ willingness to integrate technology. It also makes it awfully tough to prepare students for a digital era.

[...] V. Don’t abdicate your teaching responsibility. Students do not magically gain the ability at the end of the school day or after graduation to navigate complex, challenging, unfiltered digital information spaces. If you don’t teach them how to navigate the unfiltered Internet appropriately and safely while you have them, who’s going to?

-- Scott McLeod gives "26 Internet safety talking points"

"Security" is now a catch-all excuse for all sorts of authoritarianism, as well as for boondoggles and corporate profiteering.

-- Bruce Schneier (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

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Security quotes of the week

Posted Aug 31, 2012 9:25 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> D. You don’t need special policies for specific tools. Just check that the policies you have are inclusive of electronic communication channels and then enforce the policies you already have on bullying, cheating, sexual harassment, inappropriate communication, illicit behavior, etc.

This is a good one. I remember being thoroughly puzzled when I heard that we absolutely need "cyber-bullying" laws, as if cyber-bullying was not bullying. And on a broader scale, things like secrecy of correspondence are sacred when applied to paper mail, but somehow can be blatantly ignored when applied to electronic communication. Which is absolutely wrong.

> T. When you violate the Constitution and punish kids just because you don’t like what they legally said or did and think you can get away with it, you not only run the risk of incurring financial liability for your school system in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars but also abuse your position of trust and send messages to students about the corruption of power and disregard for the rule of law.

This one is not Internet-related, but it's brilliant.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Sep 2, 2012 20:37 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

What's more bizarre yet is that when 'bullying laws' have been passed, they have proved entirely ineffective. Bullying normally happens out of sight of adults and enforcers, and it is often in the interest of the victim not to report it (since the bullies will then make his life even more hellish). Bringing the lawhammer down on children is also considered bad unless in extreme cases, e.g. those resulting in death: we don't have enough antibullying enforcement as it is, and adding the full force of the law is going to make people much more hesitant to move against it, if it now means bringing the law on children.

All these reasons apply just as much to 'cyberbullying' (which is a seriously stupid name: do we call bullying over the telephone 'telebullying'? No, we call it bullying). So explicit laws for it would be useless.

-- N., permanently traumatized by bullies but still thinks laws against bullying are certain to be useless, or worse than useless

Security quotes of the week

Posted Sep 3, 2012 23:24 UTC (Mon) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

>they have proved entirely ineffective

Oh ho ho ho, they only appear ineffective if taken at face value. The true goals of
(a) bloating staff,
(b) extending authority, and
(c) silencing dissent
are happily met by these cyber-bullying rules.
You apparently have missed the point that people must be infantilized in order to accommodate The Future.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Sep 4, 2012 14:16 UTC (Tue) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

Ah, the naivety of young conspiracy theorists... *sniff*

You've missed the most important reason - being seen Doing Something About The Problem(tm). _That_ affects things immediately. The really important ones - odds of getting re-elected[1]. Granted, not by much, but what does it cost?

As for making the populace more infantile, what timescale would that be on? Decades? Not even on the radar. Do you seriously buy into the notion of politicians capable of making decades-long plans and sticking to them?

[1] and before gvy starts bemoaning the Inherent Evils of Democracy and suggesting everyone to learn Russian, s/re-elected/picked for promotion by higher-level management/; slightly different target audience, but mechanism is the same.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Sep 4, 2012 18:40 UTC (Tue) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

I submit that you are arguing the tactics of bureaucratic behavior, while I'm arguing the strategy.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Sep 5, 2012 23:29 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

s/Russian/English/, as a permanent civil service is just as effective at this sort of thing (though an appointed one is even worse for other reasons).

Obviously what is really needed here is for smitty_one_each to sit down with _Yes, Minister_ and watch it (again, one hopes). A nice dose of cynicism will soon help.

(I just assumed the 'we must do something. this is something. therefore we must do it' part of things. That's what drives almost *all* panicked political action, so there's little need to mention it: the important thing is why they picked this 'something' over another one.)

Security quotes of the week

Posted Sep 7, 2012 1:06 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

Great series!