Everyone here is more capable of computer thought than I am so I am requesting opinions about this article that I read today. The article is at : http://www.mises.org/story/2017

the articles title is: Department of Computer Security? It's a Joke by Jeffrey Tucker

What I skimmed is that the threat of viruses, unauthorized access, and various other exploits are rampant.
This does not seem like news to me......

Can a government be trusted to provide security to a nation of computer users. On one hand they have resources that are beyond the scope of almost any company, and they have the power to bend other organizations to their will.

But it is true that government can often be slow & clumsy and inflexible. Yet there is talent in this field working on behalf of the government, for example the NSA has an interesting group of geeks who have discovered quite a lot about computer security (although it appears that they limit how much information that they wish to share with the rest of the public, as well as some of the select DoD teams, that also seem to limit their interactions with the outside world).

I believe that the primary concern of getting the government involved in computer security at a greater level is that it would be very difficult to trust that they really do have everyone’s best interest at heart. Or would such a group get bogged down by special interest graft, incompetent appointees (i.e. Mr. Brown), or unmotivated personnel with nothing to gain / lose.

It is possible that the government could field a strong and useful agency. Yet it is far more likely that they would create a mess of monumental proportion. To date the only example that I have been able to think of where (quasi) governmental agencies can manage to consistently outperform private enterprise, and that is college football.

If only the writer of that article could differentiate between a "hacker" and a "cracker" we'd be right.

I would say its a typical BS article, it's just the authors thoughts. I mean he isn't quoting anyone or anything..... He should have kept that one in his diary.

Likes to use the word geek. It seems to be another life form.
Throw in virus, spyware, and adware. Some people apparently do not categorize the threats to their computer.
Mentions "trojans" without naming them. Alludes to the fact that a malicious hacker would just as well add your computer to his botnet as hack into a "large website".
Apparently people running servers on hosted websites are not all security experts. Hint: the requirement for starting an account is money, not experience.
The old "life expectancy of unpatched Windows" experiment. Before service pack 2 it was under a minute while some particulary nasty exploits were open.
Guess what, you are never 100% safe. Yes.
Surprise, computer experts have more knowledge than non experts. I doubt if they all wear hats, perhaps baseball caps with their favorite team.
It seems IE has security problems. Good thing "server-level" software is better. Not sure what he means there.
How should discovered software holes be disclosed? There are those darn geeks again.
Stuff to make things sound complicated and confusing.
Then ask why the government gets a default white hat instead of a baseball cap like everyone else.

This is not an informative article that explains things to reach a logical conclusion. It throws everything including the kitchen sink at the reader and makes a conclusion.

It is not total BS but it is not a great article.
IMO

I know you often ask about security in your posts cousinlucky. Are there particular things that interest you in the article?

Thanks Folks,

Being a computer idiot the article was very confusing to me which is why I asked for opinions from this forums very aware members. The article seemed to bounce every which a way like it was cut up from different trains of thought. You might go as far as to say that I was bewildered.

The thought of some government bureau being put in charge of the Internet or computing caused a chill to run in my back.

I have been touched by multiple Hijackings and the like while using Microsoft XP on the Internet; and the trauma has not totally left me as yet, but I am very comfortable using Linux.

I suspect my ISP downloads something onto my computer every once in a while because I hear my computer clicking as it does during a download. Whatever it is my computer is not being hijacked, so it does not bother me too much.

I have been labeled as computer gullible so I sought qualified opinions.

Again my Sincere Thanks for everyone who took the time to respond to this.