Piotr Chmielnicki writes: > I'm a bit shocked by the content of this email. > > Securing data of persons as important as the European Commission > Officials should be the full time work of a dedicated elite infosec > crew. I would be very surprised if there were no such things in place.
When I went Washington to lobby staff of U.S. legislators about surveillance issues last fall, it appeared that most U.S. legislative offices had little or no official information security resources, plans, tech support, etc. There are legislative committees that officially deal with classified information, and those committees get official information security support (including SCIFs in which to hold classified conversations), but for the ordinary legislative office where the member of the legislature works on a day-to-day basis, not so much. Clearly there are some people who investigate particular cases of espionage and try to detect or punish it, but in terms of giving resources to the legislators and their staff members in order to protect themselves, not much, from what I heard during the lobbying meetings. The staff members do receive official Blackberries, but they and the legislators also conduct legislative business over ordinary e-mail and telephone calls, including mobile calls from ordinary smartphones. I also remember talking to a junior diplomat from a Western European country at a conference last year. My impression from him was that he _did_ have official information security briefings and resources, but found them fairly rudimentary, and that they didn't really stop his colleagues from doing appreciable amounts of work over unencrypted channels. One challenge for both the legislators and the diplomat was that, even if they did have some kind of encrypted communications channel to use for internal communications within their organizations, they often had to have discussions with people from _other_ organizations and countries, and nobody had made arrangements to secure those communications. -- Seth Schoen <sch...@eff.org> Senior Staff Technologist https://www.eff.org/ Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/join 815 Eddy Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 +1 415 436 9333 x107 -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
