Internet Security: a conspiracy against the customer?
In the first week of July, 1980, the world would have been destroyed if computer systems had been left to their own devices. Here’s the novelist Christa Wolf, writing her diary in what was then East Germany, on the very brow of the face-to-snarling-face confrontation between capitalism and communism: “Meteln, July 8. Twice in the past week, the US computer has sounded the alarm: Soviet rockets are flying towards the United States. In such a case, we are told, the President has twenty-five minutes to make a decision. The computer (we hear) has now been switched off. The delusion: to make security dependent on a machine, rather than an analysis of the situation possible only to human beings”. From the fact that we’re still here one can deduce that human intervention – probably a red-phone call between White House and Kremlin – overrode the intentions of the machine and prevented our annihilation. But now fast-forward almost thirty years to the recent RSA Europe 2009 Conference in London,...