Arts+Labs’ co-chair Mark McKinnon weighed in last Friday at Internet Evolution on the 4Chan/AT&T debacle in which AT&T was mistakenly accused of censoring parts of the website 4Chan by, well, just about everyone:

As reports surfaced Sunday evening that AT&T was blocking parts of 4chan, the immediate reaction from several quarters was that this was an attempt by the telecom giant to “censor” objectionable content on the Web, and that consequently AT&T should suffer mightily for its shameless violation of network neutrality.

Encapsulating those basic responses, LA Metblogs asked: “Why does AT&T think they can censor parts of the web, and how quickly will 4chan retaliate?” iReport ramped up the rhetoric, asking if the block signified “The End of Free Speech.” TechCrunch upped the ante again, calling AT&T’s act a declaration of war against 4chan; and SaveTheInternet linked approvingly to this breathless heap of hyperbolic nonsense at Fudzilla.

Rerutled, a diarist at Daily Kos immediately dismissed AT&T’s description of the DoS problem as a ruse to shut down the hapless 4channers.

The idea that any disruption in service is a calculated decision by an ISP wanting to lock up information is a fairly typical knee-jerk response from some network neutrality supporters: Lob accusations first, gather facts later.  

Meanwhile, George Ou of Digital Society wrote that AT&T did precisely the right thing by blocking the parts of 4Chan that appeared to be the source of a DDoS attack on some AT&T customers:

When a DoS attack occurs, the victim being attacked can block the attack traffic but not before the attack has already jammed up and killed their Internet connection.  Only the network operator can block the attack far enough upstream that the network isn’t flooded.  This not only preserves the network for the direct victims of the DoS attack, it also keeps the network unclogged for everyone else.

It was clear early on from the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) message boards that many ISPs were blocking 4chan IP addresses due to the massive amounts of DoS attack traffic coming from 4chan.  We’re talking about enough traffic that could fill up gigabit Ethernet links which is the equivalent of hundreds of broadband connections.  It turned that 4chan was being DoS attacked by others using spoofed (forged) addresses and 4chan in turn reflected the attack traffic onto other forced IP addresses of other victims many of whom were on AT&T’s network.

Unfortunately, despite the baselessness of the accusations against AT&T, there hasn’t been much eating of crow by those who were in the wrong.  Looks like for some bloggers, the idea is shoot first, don’t ask many questions later, and never apologize.   

Yesterday the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on ways to improve cyber security, clearly an important issue in 2009.  Just how important is it?  Consider these two things:
1.) The New York Times’ Bits Blog reported yesterday that on April 1, the Conficker virus–which resides quietly on as many as 12 million computers worldwide–is set to activate on April 1. And the scariest part? No one is quite sure what it will do:

Speculation about Conficker’s purpose ranges from the benign — an April Fool’s Day prank — to far darker notions. [...] Conficker’s authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet, the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship of documents impossible. Or perhaps the Conficker botnet’s masters have something more Machiavellian in mind. One researcher, University of California at San Diego computer scientist Stefan Savage, has suggested the idea of a “Dark Google.” What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers?

2.) The FBI recently estimated that cyber-crime has now replaced drug trafficking as the most lucrative global crime. The agency estimates that cyber crime is now pulling in over $1 trillion a year in profits.
At yesterday’s hearing, Edward Amoroso, senior vice president and chief security officer at A+L member-company AT&T described how cyber attacks can “devastate infrastructure,” and offered the committee a few ideas on how to combat the problem:

We believe that the public and private sectors can and should create structures for timely and secure sharing of cyber-security threat and response information between government and industry, and between and among critical infrastructures in a trusted, collaborative environment. [...] Perhaps most importantly, the government should collaborate with industry on research and development efforts in pursuit of critical cyber-security capabilities, and in furtherance of interoperable identity management processes between government and the private sector.

It should come as no surprise that these solutions rely on collaboration both within the industry and between industry and government.  We’re all a part of the same global network, and solutions to the problems we face from cyber crime–whether it’s malware, piracy, SPAM, phishing, or any other threat–will require collaboration, coordination, and implementation on a truly global scale.