A California senator playing a key role fighting cyber attacks is raising new concerns that street view mapping sites like Google are revealing too much detailed information, so much they might be a burglar’s best friend.
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who co-authored a controversial cybersecurity bill this year, also said that cyber terrorists are moving so fast to outsmart authorities that the nation’s electric grid, dams and the U.S. air traffic control system are threatened.
“I believe that it’s only a matter of time before these attacks progress to our critical infrastructure like the electric grid, dams, air traffic control, and other key systems,” she said. “When that happens, we won’t be talking about stolen money, or destroyed systems, we’ll be talking about thousands of lives that have been endangered,” she said.
Despite the public outcry for new internet security measures following recent major data breaches, Feinstein said that she has faced pushback from many quarters. But she isn’t giving up her war on cyber thugs.
Her next target is data breaches. She said the public has a right to know when their data has been compromised in an attack and that includes when Google takes high-resolution photos of homes for their street view mapping system.
“People are entitled to know to protect themselves,” she told a legal conference last week at the Washington firm Arent Fox.
“We all know that we are all tracked, our devices become more sophisticated, facial recognition is becoming a major focus…our homes are on Google, sometimes with so much clarity that you worry that about them being a place that someone is going to burglarize,” she warned.
Her comment struck a chord with one audience member. A federal law enforcement officer, he said that his personal information and address were stolen in the recent Office of Personnel Management data breach and he is worried that potential terrorists will use Google Street View to find his house and threaten his family.
While legislation and federal programs can work to limit cyber attacks, Feinstein raised the possibility of a mind-boggling technological revamp to the internet.
“Some have suggested a 2.0 system to replace the current internet,” she offered. She recently discussed it with Cisco’s head of technology and during a classified session with the government’s national laboratories.
At Cisco, she said, they believe “that it would be possible to create a 2.0 internet. They describe this as a moon shot.”
And the labs, she added, were encouraging. “It may well be a way to move forward.”
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
