“Attack of the Cyber-Terror Studies”

Created at Dartmouth College, the report Law Enforcement Tools and Technologies for Investigating Cyber Attacks (reg req’d) starts with an assumption that is not substantiated within the document: cyber attacks are a significant threat. It implicitly suggests that because the digital forensic tools are so bad, law enforcement will be unable to protect us from these attacks. The explicit conclusion is that there must be a national agenda for the research and creation of law-enforcement specific investigation tools.

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It’s easy to envision the staff at Dartmouth brainstorming topics for interesting research topics that would help put their new Institute for Security Technology Studies on the map. Did they deliberately design a survey that would inevitably conclude such research topics were vital to national defence? This report, bankrolled by the US Department of Justice, gives that impression. It will now be used as evidence to justify requesting additional public money on security software, an area where 25 years of government sponsorship has resulted in virtually no useful technology.