Weldon, who is currently being investigated by the FBI over alleged corruption during his time in office, visited Libya in March to discuss a possible military deal, according to a letter describing the trip from Weldon to Defense Solutions CEO Timothy Ringgold. In May, Weldon, together with Ringgold and another company representative, traveled to Moscow to discuss working with Russia's weapons-export agency on arms sales to the Middle East.

Both trips were part of the company's effort to tap into the growing -- and often legally murky -- market for selling weapons from former Eastern Bloc countries to the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Ex-Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Penn., is helping broker deals between Russian weapons suppliers and the Iraqi and Libyan governments through his company, Defense Solutions.
Photo: H. Rumph Jr/AP

The Russians want to sell weapons to Iraq directly, but "must go slow on Iraq because of political reasons" and want to work with an "intermediary" like Defense Solutions, CEO Ringgold subsequently wrote to colleagues. "They have not spoken with any American company that can offer the quid pro quo that we can or that has the connections in Russia that we have," he boasted.

A few years ago, an American company proposing to sell weapons to Libya might have triggered a congressional hearing. So, too, would have a proposal to conduct arms deals with Russia, which the United States has accused of selling high-tech weapons to Syria and Iran.

However, U.S. government efforts to rapidly equip countries like Afghanistan and Iraq -- which have largely Soviet-origin weapons -- have created legal ambiguities and loopholes in export controls that didn't exist in years past and given rise to a new class of arms trade middlemen. So, even though both Libya and the Russian arms export agency are on official U.S. blacklists, government officials and analysts involved in weapons sales say the rules have become unclear as the push to equip allies in the global war on terror has blazed new but uncertain legal ground.

Eagerly stepping into that virgin territory is Defense Solutions, a Pennsylvania-based company that is carving out a small but lucrative niche in a new international arms bazaar. The firm boasts as its advisors a number of influential Washington insiders, such as retired General Barry McCaffrey, the former White House drug czar.

Helping the firm make key connections is Curt Weldon, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania at the center of an FBI investigation into alleged conflicts of interest during his time in office. Weldon, now a key executive at Defense Solutions, is working with the company to set up these weapons deals.

Defense Solutions has also proposed refurbishing Libya's BTR-60 armored personnel carriers, according to a sales proposal seen by Wired.com. Defense Solutions denies drafting a sales proposal to Libya.

It's an unusual, if not an entirely unexpected chapter for Weldon, whose time in office included frequent trips to Russia. As an influential member of the House Armed Services Committee, Weldon pushed for multibillion-dollar defense programs, like ballistic missile defense, and earned a reputation as a foreign policy gadfly, boasting of his contacts with officials in nations labeled by the administration as "rogue states" such as Libya and North Korea. Weldon's wild claims about a 9/11 cover-up and his sensationalist book warning of an Iranian terror plot, sometimes earned him official scorn and public ridicule, but it was accusations that he steered contracts to Eastern European businesses linked to his daughter's lobbying firm that drew the government's attention.

Weldon was voted out of office in 2006 just weeks after the FBI raided his daughter's home, and that of one of her associates.

Weldon did not respond to e-mails and phone requests to be interviewed or comment for this article. But in a 2006 interview, before the FBI probe was public, Weldon spoke enthusiastically about setting up a "front company" to work with the Russian arms agency, Rosoboronexport. Weldon hoped this company could sell weapons to the Middle East, and other regions, particularly to countries where the U.S. has strained relations. He claimed the director of Rosoboronexport approached him to work with "an American company that would act as a front for weapons these nations want to buy."

Weldon called the proposal an "unbelievable offer."

The administration, he acknowledged at the time, did not welcome the idea of an American company selling Russian weapons to potentially unfriendly countries. But two years later, Weldon, now a private citizen and chief strategic officer for Defense Solutions, appears to be working on precisely that sort of deal. And whether illegal or not, Defense Solutions' business represents a new phenomenon in the international arms trade business.

In years past arms brokers -- firms or individuals who serve as middlemen to facilitate weapons sales between countries -- were largely the stuff of spy thrillers. Unlike traditional American defense companies, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, which typically sell weapons directly to NATO countries or other governments regarded as friendly to the United States, brokers are often small outfits run by people with sometimes questionable experience and reputations they will sell to anyone. One of the most infamous arms brokers, a Russian named Viktor Bout, is charged by the United States, United Nations, Interpol and others of funneling arms to terrorists and rebels around the world. He was recently arrested in Thailand. The United States is requesting his extradition on charges of supplying arms to a terrorist organization.

Two Marines lower the trim vane on the front of an Iraqi BMP-1 mechanized infantry combat vehicle that was captured during Operation Desert Storm. The American defense consulting firm Defense Solutions has proposed refurbishing Libya's aging fleet of BMP-1s. Defense Solutions denies drafting a sales proposal to Libya.

But ironically, Iraq has fueled a new market for these professional middlemen; the United States is funneling billions of dollars into modernizing Iraq's army so that the country's government can fend for itself after coalition troops withdraw. And Iraq's largely Soviet-equipped military is a natural market for Eastern European countries brimming with old or out-of-date equipment they would like to unload. The middlemen, in these cases, serve a key role by allowing the U.S. government to do business with an American company, which in turn buys equipment from Eastern Bloc countries in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it financed with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

One of Defense Solutions' sales -- a deal to sell Hungarian-owed T-72 tanks to Iraq in 2005 -- was typical of these new foreign military sales. But on the more questionable side is the company's plans to work with Rosoboronexport, which is barred from doing business with the U.S. government, and Libya, which is still on the State Department's arms embargo list.

The Eastern European-Middle East arms-brokering business, while in some cases sanctioned by the U.S. government, has run into problems, including outright corruption and quality. Defense contractor Dale Stoffel, the president of Wye Oak Technology, and another American were gunned down in Iraq in December 2004 after Stoffel alleged that the Iraqi Ministry of Defense was involved in a kickback scheme. Like Defense Solutions, the company Stoffel worked for was refurbishing the Iraq's army Eastern Bloc equipment.

Another problem is quality. Weapons from the former Soviet Bloc, which the U.S. military euphemistically calls "nonstandard equipment," have been flagged as substandard, acknowledges Brigadier General Charles Luckey, who is in charge of security assistance at Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq. In an interview from Iraq, Brigadier General Luckey said: "One of the frustrating things about buying nonstandard [weapons], is that I'm the guy who has to deal with the fact that some broker I've never heard of allowed weapons to get to Iraq before they were inspected."

Defense Solutions is carving a new niche in the arms trade, selling Soviet-made weapons to Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Defense Solutions sold Hungarian-owed T-72 tanks to Iraq in 2005.

In one high-profile case, Iraqi officials alleged that a corrupt firm sold them $400 million in shoddy helicopters from Poland. More recently, a company led by a 21-year-old and a former masseur was offered a U.S. government contract worth nearly $300 million to sell ammunition to Afghanistan. The ammunition turned out to be outdated and of dubious origin and several people connected with the company have been indicted. A congressional investigation concluded that the company, which was on a State Department watch list, was able to take advantage of regulatory loopholes by using middlemen.

For those concerned about illicit arms trade, this new wave of weapons deals is rife with the potential for corruption and abuse, but for companies eager to pursue markets once regarded as dubious, it represents a lucrative business opportunity. The problem in these cases, according to those familiar with arms sales, is that it's no longer clear what's legal and what's not.

Rachel Stohl, an expert on international arms trade and a senior analyst at Center for Defense Information, says that in many ways, the rush to equip Iraq has led the United States to throw caution to the wind. She points to a report by the Government Accountability Office last year that found that some 190,000 weapons sold to Iraq have gone missing. "I think the reality is we won't know, until way after the fact, about all of these irregularities with the Iraq weapons provision program," she said. "We were providing them all these assault rifles that have gone missing. Why? They were not following the standard procedures that were in place."

But Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the only markets available to arms brokers like Defense Solutions. The gradual normalization of relations with Libya opens another door into a quasi-legal area of sales.

Like Iraq, Libya has a substantial arsenal of Soviet-origin military weapons, offering a potential market for brokers working with Russia and other former Soviet states. But even when there's not an outright ban, sales to the Middle East are often fraught with controversy, particularly to countries like Libya, which was under international sanction for more than a decade. Even as sanctions against it have been lifted, European companies proposing to sell arms to Libya have faced steep criticism, particularly since the country is still ruled by dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who took power in a military coup in 1969.

While the United States lifted Libya's "state sponsor of terrorism" designation in 2006, other restrictions, such as on the sale of arms, remain in place. A State Department spokesperson confirmed that exports of "lethal munitions" to Libya, such as tanks or related equipment, are still banned, although sales of nonlethal equipment are now allowed on a case-by-case basis.

In late March, Weldon traveled to Libya for a weeklong trip at the invitation of the Gaddafi Foundation, a group run by the son of Libya's leader, and the chairman of Libya's foreign affairs committee, according to the report he sent to Defense Solutions (.pdf), a copy of which was obtained by Wired.com. The trip reports states: "Agreement reached for Weldon to quickly return to Libya for meetings with son [of Libyan leader Gaddafi] Morti regarding defense and security cooperation."

A document dated April 16, just two weeks after Weldon's trip, outlines Defense Solutions' proposal to Libya to refurbish the country's fleet of armored vehicles, including its T-72 tanks, BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles, and BTR-60 armored personnel carriers. A copy of the sales proposal, also provided to Wired.com, is on Defense Solutions' letterhead, appears to bear the signature of company CEO Timothy Ringgold, and is addressed to Libya's defense procurement council. "Defense Solutions is committed to delivering a full end-to-end solution to its clients," the proposal states. "Besides refurbishing these vehicles, we are capable of providing a full logistics support package, including a two year supply of spare parts, maintenance and repair services, and operator, maintenance, and repair training."

In an interview with Wired.com, Ringgold admitted that he's interested in doing business in Libya and confirms receiving Weldon's trip report from Libya, but denies drafting or signing an arms-sale proposal. "I've never made such a document to Libya," Ringgold insisted, after being read the proposal, and told that his signature is on it.

In addition to the Libyan arms-deal document, Wired.com has also reviewed copies of e-mails from Ringgold discussing the Libyan deal.

While Ringgold denies proposing an arms sale to Libya, he is open about speaking with Rosoboronexport, which has been on a U.S. government sanctions list since 2006, after the Russian state agency allegedly violated the Iran and Syria Nonproliferation Act. An April e-mail provided to Wired.com describes Ringgold, Weldon and Stephan Minikes, a senior advisor to Defense Solutions and a former ambassador, meeting with Rosoboronexport. The conversations included a number of potential deals, including supplying Mi-17 helicopters to Afghanistan and spare parts for Iraq's infantry fighting vehicles. Ringgold wrote to colleagues following the visit, describing the meetings as a "spectacular success," saying the Russian agency "has the ability to undercut all cost proposals from brokers."

Ringgold confirmed those discussions and said that his company has sought to do business with Rosoboronexport. Asked whether Ringgold considers his dealings with Russia to be legal, he argued that U.S. companies could work with Rosoboronexport on a "case-by-case" basis. "The particular purpose of the meeting we had -- and I want to be crystal clear -- was in response to a U.S. government requirement," he said.

A number of officials at the State Department and in the Pentagon, when contacted for this article, could not say whether working with Rosoboronexport is legal or not. A Pentagon spokeswoman said she was familiar with the issue, but deferred the question to the State Department. When asked about Rosoboronexport's status on the blacklist, John Herzberg, a State Department spokesman replied: "What's on there is on there."

Asked whether, given the ban, there was any way a company could legally work with Rosoboronexport, as Ringgold suggested, Herzberg provided an equivocal answer. "At the stage of the process we're at, I'm unable to give you an answer," he said. "You can try elsewhere in government, and maybe they'll be braver than me."

In an interview from Iraq, General Luckey conceded it was a murky area, but said, "My understanding is they are currently on our no-go list."

The confusion over debarred parties has even led the U.S. government into its own legal tangles, according to Jim McAleese, a Washington attorney who specializes in government contracting and foreign military sales. Because the Russian government violated U.S. nonproliferation laws, even NASA had to go to Congress to ensure it could work with Russia on Soyuz flights to the international space station. "What I'm warning you about is, don't be surprised by the confusion," McAleese said. "There are a whole bunch of different statutes that were adopted piecemeal and were never intended to be reconciled."

But it's the very ambiguity of the law that troubles those who monitor export control. "It's highly unusual to do anything with the Russians, particularly Rosoboronexport," said Scott Jones, director of Export Control Programs at the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia.

Legal or not, reputable American companies simply don't want to work with banned entities, Jones said, for fear of risking their reputations and business. "Even if it's not an outright prohibition, most companies don't want to put themselves in a liability situation that has really bad PR … and they stay away from it," Jones said. "But if that's your business, pimping out arms from the U.S. or Russia, that's the way it works, and you push as much as possible."

Finding any U.S. defense company working with the Russian government at this point would be "remarkable," Jones added.

In the meantime, the future for Weldon is unclear. The FBI investigation continues and Weldon's former chief of staff recently pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge and is cooperating with the government, notes Melanie Sloan, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which filed a complaint against Weldon in 2004. Sloan speculated that Weldon may be charged with "honest service fraud" for misusing his office for personal gain. "It's an easier standard than bribery," she said. "I wouldn't be surprised [if he's charged] with bribery, but I think it will be honest services fraud."

Ringgold insists that he and Weldon are on the right side of the law. "Everything we do is in strict compliance with international and U.S. law and we operate only in the best interests of the U.S. government," he said. "I didn't serve 30 years in the United States Army to throw that away on a whim."

Asked if Weldon is still working for the company, Ringgold replied: "Absolutely, proudly so."

While NAC tools are often advertised as plug-and-play, GuideWorks found that the NAC setup required a high level of networking expertise. Fortunately, the Inglewood site had plenty of technical expertise because that’s where many of the company’s developers are stationed. In addition, GuideWorks put one of its front-desk employees in charge of setting up new accounts. But because her technical background was limited, the company had to walk her through a learning curve.

Now the company is planning to deploy the system at its Radnor office, which will be a bit more challenging since there’s less technical expertise there, and that office gets a greater number of visitors. So GuideWorks has been on the search for employees to support the NAC system there. The company expects to have NAC up and running there by the end of the summer.

So 2 years after trial they are rolled out in one office and have to hire employees to support the NAC system at the next office. This was a problem with many of the failed NAC companies over the last few years and I think the problem with this Tipping Point solution. Just providing guest access should not be that hard! Yes the StillSecure Safe Access solution would have been much easier and faster to implement, but to be fair, any of the leading NAC solutions would have been up and running easier as well.

While this article was supposed to serve as reference and case study for the Tipping Point NAC solution, it is far from inspiring. If I were a customer looking into NAC, I don't think this would make run out and look at the Tipping Point solution. Moral of the story is, just because you made a good IPS doesn't mean you have a very good NAC product. When it comes to something like NAC, quality counts and buying a 2nd tier solution can cost you in time to implementation and total cost of ownership.

Products that monitor all activity in a business application and database, identify and audit users and content, and, based on central policies, protect data based on content, context, and/or activity.

Browser Troubles

As we discussed in part 1, one of the biggest problems in web application security is that the very model of the web browsers and the World Wide Web is not conducive to current security needs. Browsers are the ultimate mashup tool- designed to take different bits from different places and seamlessly render them into a coherent whole. The first time I started serious web application programming (around 1995/96)this blew my mind. I was able to embed disparate systems in ways never before possible. And not only can we embed content within a browser, we can embed browsers within other content/applications. The main reason, as a developer, I converted from Netscape to IE was that Microsoft allowed IE to embed in other programs, which allowed us to drop it into our thick VR application. Netscape was stand alone only; seriously limiting it’s deployment potential.

This also makes life a royal pain on the security front where we often need some level of isolation. Sure, we have the same origin policy, but browsers and web programming have bloated well beyond what little security that provides. Same origin isn’t worthless, and is still an important tool, but there are just too many ways around it. Especially now that we all use tabbed browsers with a dozen windows open all the time. Browsers are also stateless by nature, no matter what AJAX trickery we use. XSS and CSRF, never mind some more sophisticated attacks, take full advantage of the weak browser/server trust models that result from these fundamental design issues.

In short, we can’t trust the browser, the browser can’t trust the server, and individual windows/tabs/sessions in the browser can’t trust each other. Fun stuff!

WAF Troubles

I’ve talked about WAFs before, and their very model is also fundamentally flawed. At least how we use WAFs today. The goal of a WAF is, like a firewall, to drop known bad traffic or only allow known good traffic. We’re trying to shield our web applications from known vulnerabilities, just like we use a regular firewall to block ports, protocols, sources, and destinations. Actually, a WAF is closer to IPS than it is to a stateful packet inspection firewall.

But web apps are complex beasts; every single one a custom application, with custom vulnerabilities. There’s no way a WAF knows the ins and outs of the application behind it, even after it’s well tuned. WAFs also only protect against certain categories of attacks- mostly some XSS and SQL injection. They don’t handle logic flaws, CSRF, or even all XSS. I was talking with a reference yesterday of one of the major WAFs, and he had no trouble slicing through it during their eval phase using some standard techniques.

To combat this, we’re seeing some new approaches. f5 and WhiteHat have partnered to feed the WAF specific vulnerability information from the application vulnerability assessment. Imperva just announced a similar approach, with a bunch of different partners.

These advances are great to see, but I think WAFs will also need to evolve in some different ways. I just don’t think the model of managing all this from the outside will work effectively enough.

Enter ADMP

The idea of ADMP is that we build a stack of interconnected security controls from the browser to the database. At all levels we both monitor activity and include enforcement controls. The goal is to start with browser session virtualization connected to a web application gateway/WAF. Then traffic hits the web server and web application server, both with internal instrumentation and anti-exploitation. Finally, transaction drop to the database, where they are again monitored and protected.

All of the components for this model exist today, so it’s not science fiction. We have browser session virtualization, WAFs, SSL-VPNs (that will make sense in a minute), application security services and application activity monitoring, and database activity monitoring. In addition to the pure defensive elements, we’ll also tie in to the applications at the design and code level through security services for adaptive authentication, transaction authentication, and other shared services (happy Dre? :) ). The key is that this will all be managed through a central console via consistent policies.

In my mind, this is the only thing that makes sense. We need to understand the applications and the databases that back them. We have to do something at the browser level since even proper parameterization and server side validation can’t meet all our needs. We have to start looking at transactions, business context and content rather than just packets and individual requests.

Point solutions at any particular layer have limited effectiveness. But if we stop looking at our web applications as pieces, and rather design security that addresses them as a whole, we’ll be in a lot better shape. Not that anything is perfect, but we’re looking at risk reduction, not risk elimination. A web application isn’t just a web server, just some J2EE code, or just a DB- it’s a collection of many elements working together to perform business transactions, and that’s how we need to look at them for effective security.

The Browser and Web Application Gateway

A little while back I wrote about the concept of browser session virtualization. To plagiarize myself and save a little writing time so I can get my behind to happy hour:

What we ideally need is a way to completely isolate our content in the browser. One way to do this is session virtualization, pioneered by GreenBorder, who was later acquired by Google (the GreenBorder site is just in support mode now). When a user connects to our site, we push down some code to create a virtual environment in the browser that we strictly control. We wall off that session, which could just be an isolated iFrame in a page, so that it only accesses content we send it. Basically, we break the normal browser model and hijack what we need. This would, for example, help stop CSRF since other browser elements won’t be able to trigger a connection to our application. Done right, it limits man in the middle attacks, even if the user authorizes a bad digital certificate.

To work properly, this needs to be tied to a gateway that controls the session. While we could do it from the web/app server itself, I suspect we’ll see this as a web application firewall feature, just as we see similar features from SSL-VPNs. I think isolated WAFs have a very limited lifespan, but this is exactly the kind of feature that will extend their value. Better yet, we can tie this in to our Application and Database Monitoring and Protection to build a browser-to-database protected path. We can completely track a transaction or piece of content from the database server to the browser and back.

We could even use this to isolate out potentially “bad” content in an in-browser sandbox. For example, it could be a way to enable all those social networking widgets in a more controlled way but locking in potentially bad content instead of known good.

Will this protect us from keystroke sniffers or a completely compromised host? Nope, but it will definitely help with a large number of our current browser security issues. If we combine it with full ADMP and additional methods like transaction authentication, I think we can regain a bit of control of the web application security mess.

Thus we see one migration path for a WAF. A user goes to connect to the application and hits the WAF, which is now more of a Web Application Gateway. The gateway, like an SSL-VPN sends the session virtualization code down to the browser. We do this outside of the web application for performance reasons. The secure, virtual session is established and the gateway then allows communications with the application behind it.

For things like retail and financial sites that include only limited third party content (if at all), we can monitor activity from the browser through to the application and work within the isolated session. It improves our ability to control both what’s being sent to the browser, and gives us a higher degree of assertion that what’s coming from the browser is safer. We still validate everything, but since we’re tied to the application itself we can validate in the browser and at the gateway before we even hit the app (and further validate there). Since, in a controlled environment, we know what transactions should be allowed or not we have greater ability to detect and block “bad” transactions from the user, like SQL injection.

In less controlled environments, thing MySpace or Gmail and everything in between, the gateway also becomes a filter for third party content. Like Checkpoint’s new ForceField. The gateway filters out, to the best of its ability, harmful third party content coming from third party sites. Basically, it becomes an SSL-VPN for secure browsing.

This is obviously not viable for all sites due to bandwidth considerations, and in those circumstances we’ll drop this part and stick to the rest of the ADMP stack, or only virtualize our pieces of content knowing the user is at risk for the third party stuff we’re still linking them to.

Future of the WAF, Option 2

I’ve just described a scenario where the WAF extends into a Secure Web Application Gateway that adds virtualization, encryption, and content filtering. That doesn’t mean WAFs won’t also still exist in non-virtualized situations, since that will still be a massive volume of sites out there.

For these sites the WAF continues to progress with deeper application integration and application understanding, and works with the elements I’ll describe later that will be embedded into the applications and databases. Rather than hanging around outside the application with barely any idea what’s going on behind it, the WAF will take it’s cues from the app, help manage sessions, and monitor activity outside the app to block the few things we know we can pick up at that layer.

Why use the WAF at all? To give us a chokepoint and offload some of the monitoring and processing that could hurt application performance. Let’s be honest, maybe it will eventually go away, but a performance problems alone will probably keep next-gen WAFs viable for a while. There are also plenty of things we can now block before they ever hit the application controls, which, by nature of being integrated at the app level, will be more complex and delicate.

But again, by tightly integrating with out other layers, instead of expecting that an external black box can solve our problems, we get a much higher level of functionality. Feeding in vulnerability data as we’re just starting to do is a good beginning, but once we plug in deeper to the application and database servers we’ll get entirely new levels of functionality.

Part 2 Conclusions

What I’ve described today is how we can build a (more) trusted path from the browser to the face of the application. WAFs will add gateway capabilities, both protecting the application behind them and the browser in front of them. SInce this won’t be the right approach in all circumstances, WAFs will also evolve with tighter integration to the application and other ADMP stack components.

Again, this might sound like little more than the usual analyst fiction, but all the components are here today. Also, I don’t expect my predictions to be totally accurate. I’m roughly guessing I’m at 85% or so.

Next week I’ll start digging in to the application and database. We’ll talk about application instrumentation, anti-exploitation, DAM, trusted transaction paths, and shared security services.

• GAO Privacy Report
• Technology Liberation Front
• Center for Democracy and Technology
• And how about an analysis of the Privacy Act from DOJ for background reasons?

Well, let’s talk about how privacy and the Government works with Uncle Rybolov (please hold the references to Old Weird Uncle Harold until we’re through with today’s lesson please).

We have a law, the Privacy Act of 1974.  Think about it, what significant privacy-wrenching activities happened just a couple of years prior?  Can we say “Watergate Scandal“?  Can we say “Church Committee“?  Suffice it to say, the early 1970s was an era filled with privacy issues and is where most of our privacy policy and law comes from.  Remember this for later:  this was the 1970’s!

Each of the various sections of the Privacy Act deals with a particular data type.  For instance, Title 13 refers to data collected by the Census Bureau when they’ll go count everybody in 2010.

The Privacy Act talks about the stuff that everybody in the Government needs to know about:  how you’re going to jail if you disclose this information to a third party.  For those of you who have ever been in the military or had to fill out a government form that required your social security number, the light in the back of your head should be going off right now because they all have the warnings about disclosure.

Remember to respect the privacy of the beach huts and chairs photo by Joe Shlabotnik

When it comes to IT security, the Privacy Act works like this:

• You realize a need to collect PII on individuals.
• You do a privacy impact assessment to determine if you can legally collect this data and what the implications of collecting the data are.
• You build rules about what you can do normally with the data once you have collected it.  This is called the “routine use”.
• You write a report on how, why, and about whom you’re collecting this information.  This is known as the “System of Record Notice”.
• You file this report with the Federal Register to notify the public.
• This IT system becomes the authoritative source of that information.

IE, no secret dossiers on the public.  We’ll suspend our disbelief in FISA for a minute, this conversation is about non-intelligence data collection.

Now the problem with all this is that if you stop and think about it, I was 1 year old when the Privacy Act was signed.  Our technology for information sharing has gone above and beyond that.  We can exchange data much much much more quickly than the Privacy Act originally intended.  As a result, we have PII everywhere.  Most of the PII is needed to provide services to the citizens, except that it’s a royal PITA to protect it all, and that’s the lesson of the past 2 years in Government data breaches.

Problems with the Privacy Act:

• The SORN is hard to read and is not easy to find.
• Privacy Act data given to contractors or “business partners” (aka, state and local government or NGOs) does not have the same amount of oversight as it does in the Government.
• Data given to the Government by a third-party is not susceptible to the Privacy Act because the Government did not collect it.  Wow, lots of room for abuse–waterboarding-esque abuse.
• Privacy Act procedures were written for mainframes.  Mainframes have been replaced with clusters of servers.  It’s easy to add a new server to this setup.  Yes, this is a feature.
• If you build a new system with the same data types and routine uses as an already existing SORN, you can “piggyback” on that existing SORN.
• It’s very easy to use the data in a way that isn’t on your “routine use” statement, thus breaking the entire privacy system.

Obviously, at this point, you should have gotten the hint that maybe we need to revise the Privacy Act.  I think GAO and OMB would agree with you here.

So, what alternatives do we have to the existing system?

• Make blanket data types and do a PIA and SORN on them regardless of where that data lies.
• Bend the Paperwork Reduction act and OMB guidance so that we don’t collect as much information.
• Make the Privacy Act more specific on what should be in SORN, PIA, and routine use statements.

To be honest, it seems like most of this is already in place, it just needs to get tuned a little bit so we’re doing the right things.  Once again, the scale of the Government’s IT infrastructure is keeping us from doing the right thing:    there isn’t enough time in the day to do PIAs on a per-server basis or to keep track of every little bit of data.  You have to automate our privacy efforts in some fashion.

And this is why, dear readers, I think the Government needs DLP solutions more than the private sector does.  Too bad the DLP vendors are stuck on credit cards and social security numbers.

Bookmark to:

To be honest, I originally came at this piece of research as a way to define what the place of a SIEM product in a SOC, so I diligently asked everyone I interviewed what technologies they thought were central to a security operations function. The answers I got were pretty unexpected, and normally started with the phrase "Technology? Oh that's an afterthought."

When we think of a SOC, we often have this picture of a big room, full of people in rows staring at a big screen up front, with monitors in front of them...]]> Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:00:00 +0000 soc security operations function security operations center front forrester customers siem product past life afterthought piece The SIEM and the SOC -- what's useful and what's not?