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> The name sounded Soviet in origin, with only the exchange of "Homeland" in place of "Motherland". It reminded me of things my family had taught me didn't happen in the United States.

Back in 2014, China launched a crackdown on illegal online content, it was named "净网行动", which literally translates to "Clean Network Campaign/Action". The targets were illegal materials, mainly materials officially considered obscene, but also included unwanted cultural and political materials considered harmful. Since then, the name became a codename for most government crackdowns, and can be referred to in a satirical manner by the people. Naturally, after Michael Pompeo announced The Clean Network Campaign in the United States, it has immediately became a meme in China, comparisons were also made by the international press like the BBC in their Chinese editions. Now, if you search this keyword in Chinese, it's extremely amusing that you'll see news reports on both governments.

:) Learning from each other will continue. Especially how to bypass govt erected half baked BS.

Instead of the Great Firewall of China we get the half-assed Trump Firewall that doesn't really get built and doesn't require anything more complicated than a SOCKS proxy.

Baudrillard made the observation that the Soviet Union as well as the US during the Cold War really should be seen as a larger reinforcing system of deterrence that is used to map out and control rather than a conflict, two sides of the same coin.

Rather than being afraid of a single hegemon, it's the internal opposition that stabilizes systems of control, and he also pointed out that this is even mirrored within the oppositional two party system of the United States, which while looking like it advances freedom and debate and so on really advances security, and it's much more efficient in doing so than monolithic autocratic governments which tend to collapse in on themselves.

> It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly.

I think more to the point, Google et al assume that all networks are compromised by state level actors. As in NSA. As in the people who wrote this "Clean" policy.

Yeah I think Google calls it BeyondProd their version of a zero trust network.

I believe it's BeyondCorp: https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp

BeyondCorp is their term for secure communication between users and services, BeyondProd is for communication between services: https://cloud.google.com/security/beyondprod

Thanks for the link, didn't know that existed.

Reminds me of when Google security engineers...ahem...reacted...to the Snowden leak that the NSA was spying on internally decrypted traffic. [1]

It's insane to me that the US spied on an American company's internal traffic, got busted, and the only viable response was "well, I guess we have to make HTTPS mandatory in the protocol now".

Not that it was the wrong response. Just that it wasn't even on the table to say "hey, NSA, wtf..."

Unless you see the NSA as some sort of weird, legally protected black hat blue team.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googl...

I'm not defending this thought process, and I disagree with it, but I can at least understand.

You basically have two levels of recourse against the state for redress of grievances: elections and litigation. You absolutely can, and I believe every major corporation should have, sued the NSA and the larger federal government post-Snowden. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know the specifics of what that would have looked like but it seemed like a pretty egregious violation of a whole list of rights. But litigation, especially against an intelligence agency, seems a little quixotic in this context.

Elections don't seem like they'd have much impact against the NSA. They're not elected officials, and only the top leadership is appointed. Most of them are career bureaucrats (I don't necessarily mean that in a negative way) and scientists/mathematicians. You could replace a third of the Senate and the entire House every 24 months and you're not going to get sweeping changes throughout the NSA. From a national security, somewhat hawkish perspective, that might be a feature rather than a bug? But from a civil liberties/freedom perspective it's definitely a concern.

Do you want to add the CCP to that list?

Probably after NSA, with "banned" devices from at least Juniper (who got caught for shipping NSA backdoor that was repurposed by IIRC China, but only because there was an NSA backdoor to utilize), and probably ban Ericsson due to well-known rogue state with penchant for messing with telecoms in order to do industrial espionage.

Said rogue state is, of course, United States of America.

> Furthermore, State is a decade or more behind the game. It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly.

Unfortunately far from true. There's a small percentage who have the resource to run this kind of ops. Don't look at FAANG on how security is in companies, they're outliers by far.

State's 2020 budget is $52B. It has direct-collaboration access to DOD and NIST.

We should expect our national-security infrastructure to be more resilient than commercial infrastructure, not less.

Hmm, absolutely.

However, the infrastructure and scenario may be wildly different from your average (modern) big tech company.

There's always the notion that your national infrastructure needs the security applied as an afterthought, VS maybe more careful planning and less heavy "legacy" dragging them down in the tech companies.

AWS 2020 budget is $40B and that's just one cloud provider.

Man you actually think they spend that on Capex? Most of that is to pay pensions, salaries and healthcare of bureaucrats.

FANMAG is also the infrastructure that most of these companies are running on, so in a way, they are delivering it bit by bit to most companies. Especially as companies move from doing things like 'running their own exchange server' to 'buying a microsoft 365 subscription'.

Chromebook + google apps is what most companies need, and really good security for the most part.

While I don't disagree with your statement, it's important to remember that cybersecurity is a "weakest link" issue. If 90% of your infrastructure/tooling is provided by FANMAG companies, you are still pretty weak from the remaining 10% -- unless your company has higher security standards than FANMAG, which is not typical.

Eh, configuring SaaS stuff to be secure is not easy either.

Aye, a lot of moving parts, and most of them aren't in your space. You gotta take it on faith that the SaaS provider is doing their due diligence.

There's also massive amounts of variation between the companies in that group. Some are prohibited from taking source code off a computer located on premises (employees' take-home machines are "dumb" to the extreme in that they basically connect directly to their computers at work); others encourage their employees to use pre-production and internal products for personal use. As you can guess, they have dramatically different models for how to approach corporate security.

Google does both.

Yes. It is ridiculous how closely the language sounds to that of a dictatorial regime. The language is just so.. cringy. When I first read, I genuinely could not believe it was not onion or some weird caricature.

In some sense all governments are the same. Any government trying to create a great firewall will use the same kind of propagandistic, utopian-seeming verbiage and metaphors.

This document looks like a prop from Starship Troopers or Robocop.

Cyberpunk is now!

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

"Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology won't." - Stephen Lea Sheppard.

This is definitely in the "won't" category.

Also consistently calls out PRC as a threat without acknowledging the diversity of bad players on the net. This is more about posing and politics than countering real threats.

Gotta spice up your propaganda with some attacks attributed to North Korea, Iran and Russia.

The first sentence really stood out to me...

"The Clean Network program is the Trump Administration’s comprehensive approach to..."

Isn't that a bit odd? Surely these things would be worded as 'is the United States Government approach..' It almost smacks of 'errr, don't blame us guys, it wasn't our idea.

Love the low res images of the logos too.

Alternatively, it's a "look at what our administration is doing to stop…"

No doubt - Start by cleaning the image.

Probably the same reason why every white house announcement has to say that whatever it is is way better than any previous administration did or could have done.

Every time Pence talked during a Covid update, he'd say "Thanks to President Trump's leadership...".

God fucking damnit...

Thanks for posting this, I was looking for this comment. I had to check the URL multiple times because the more I read the more I was convinced it was a parody site. Even the "Clean" typeface evoking the Mr. Clean brand, I thought surely this must be a joke.

> It is my impression that modern companies that care about security assume that all networks are compromised and act accordingly. See https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp as an example.

No, you assume the network can be compromised like any other device in the system. You still defend the network and add in layers of access control. Employees of Google still use VPNs to connect into sensitive networks.

With the prevalence of 0-days and demonstration of usage by nation-state actors, you have to have multiple layers of defense to try to have any reasonable chance of preventing a compromise.

> Employees of Google still use VPNs to connect into sensitive networks.

Not really. Maybe the people that keep BeyondCorp-related systems running, if at all. There are VPNs, obviously, but not directly accessed by 99.9% of employees.

> There are VPNs, obviously, but not directly accessed by 99.9% of employees.

Requesting VPN access is trivial, and it's used heavily in some large teams for pretty banal engineering workflows (i.e., not maintaining BeyondCorp or anything).

BeyondCorp is essentially a VPN but a different structure. That puts security on all the machine nodes. It's more secure than a VPN because it doesn't have a gooey center being a single entry point.

Calling it a VPN muddies the point you are tying to make.

People think of a VPN as a secure perimeter (like a thick ship's hull), but BeyondCorp is layered security (like the many smaller compartments within a ship that can be isolated in case of a hull breach).

To be honest they are forcing a "National Internet" in Iran, and the language in this document just reminded me of that. Huh.

This has more or less existed in Iran since forever. As far as I can tell everything has been chokepointed through TIC/ITC ASNs for connectivity.

"Build the Firewall" and get China to pay for it?

+100 points for this quip.

Yep. This "Clean Network" BS reminds me of the "Golden Shield" project (official name of the project that China's firewall is part of). Not something I'd expect from the US.

If the Clean Network lasts even so much as a few months as an infrastructure with a non-trivial amount of activity, it will be a fascinating time capsule. It will reflect a very strange kind of culture and bizarre set of national security assumptions and political constraints.

When we look back at the archive.org copies of Clean Net, it will be like visiting a bizarre short lived theme park.

> archive.org copies

> short lived

Two predictions I really hope are correct.

I also personally agree with Fletcher Prouty (rip) that the naming of the department of war to the department of defense falls under this same category.

The parallel effort is the demonization of Section 230. Subjecting web companies to liability for users' speech is the surest way to squelch all that messy, hard to control speech.

Things will certainly be much cleaner when your public information comes from a short list of large companies with a lot to lose.

As a Canadian, I learned about the American melting pot as "drop your culture and adopt ours" in contrast to the Canadian multiculturalism.

The melting pot makes non-white people idealize white people, which is hard to imagine as anything but a top down imposition of standards

I'm an American in Canada and this is bunk. "I learned about" translates to "I've never spent any time below the border".

It's literally 99% American culture here. There isn't any "love and tolerance" that you couldn't find in any Blue State, and most of hard left types take their cues from what they see in the US; e.g. the prevalence of BLM wankery despite the fact they're in a different country with wildly different histories regarding slaves. The only things you can't find in the US are Nanaimo bars and banknotes with the Queen's face on them.

Just read in the news this morning that the intelligence community acknowledges China has a steak in Biden being put in the Oval Office and Russia has a steak in Trump staying put. Interesting that Russia's name was not in this piece anywhere...

s/steak/stake medium rare and well done puns are omitted

Why would it be? There are no plausible 5G competitors coming from Russia. There are very few (if any) electronics manufactured in Russia and imported to the U.S.

Any resources the US spends in conflict with China are resources it can't spend in conflict with Russia. The US is relatively weaker, Russia is relatively stronger. 5G is just one small piece of the puzzle.

Russia is not relatively stronger than the U.S. by any metric. And we're not in conflict with Russia. China is the #2 economy in the world...it got there at a blistering pace and it has a population advantage over the U.S. by about 3x or 4x. China has been known to steal technology from U.S. firms and universities. It's been known to spy. They have vast amounts of electronics manufacturing capacity and can completely compromise our IT security as a nation if they are allowed to proceed. No need for social engineering hackers when you can compromise chips, software and boards directly at the factory.

weaker and stronger relative to where they were before.

A point here, a point there. That's real strategy.

Mmmmm office steak.

China has an interest in anyone not Donald Trump being in office, since he's picked fights with the CCP and started a trade war.

Russia got him there in the first place, and wants to keep flexing, as it allows them to damage both China and the US.

Washington Talk; Prickly Roots of 'Homeland Security' https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/31/us/washington-talk-prickl...

>''People find it a little quaint, a little forced,'' said Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and author of ''You Just Don't Understand'' (William Morrow, 1990).

>At worst, Ms. Tannen said, the phrase is associated with sinister historical precedents.

>''There is one particular group -- American Jews, and I am Jewish -- for whom it has a menacing association,'' she said.

>Nazis favored the word ''heimat,'' or ''homeland,'' and homeland defense forces were known as Heimwehr or Heimatschutz in Austria and Germany from the late 1920's.

Yes, let's find the six degrees of Nazism in every single topic. I'm sure we can connect Kevin Bacon to Hitler while we're at it.

Well said.

The Chinese has shown no interest in co-operating with the world. They are an enemy. What’s wrong with keeping them out of our internet when they have their own?

To put it another way; this is like allowing your enemy to design and manfacture your military jets.

But they do manufacture quite a bit else

The Chinese government has shown no interest in cooperating with many western governments. Even though the Chinese government is, in some ways, an “enemy”, most of the 1.5 billion people living in China are not. We should be interested in what the people have to say and I’m sure the people of China are interested in what we have to say, too. We should be building connections amongst the people, not walls.

I’d even say that’s the entire point of the internet - sharing and inclusion. There isn’t “our” internet and “their” internet - there’s just the internet.

There will be a natural decoupling between our two nations. We did the same with Soviet Union when we realized their ideology left no room for long term peaceful coexistence (see the Long Telegram).

A lot of political leaders are realizing that the communism of China, while different in many ways to the Soviet variety, is still incompatible with the USA.

I'm not sure China under any ideology would allow for peaceful coexistence with the USA.

It seems like a national pride thing that China cannot be subservient to the US, and the US can't survive a world where it's billionaires aren't in complete control.

There's maybe a synthesis where the Chinese billionaires take over America? That way it's still wealth in charge in the US, and the Chinese in control of china

All ideology exists to, ultimately, justify the growth and success of its promulgators; ideologies that don't rapidly stagnate or die off. Basic meme theory.

China's specific ideology is irrelevant; "Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics" or balls out Marxism won't change the fact that the CCP needs to feed and manage a billion people. They will eventually engage in aggressive, even ruthless, behavior because they have to; 'tis the nature of Realpolitik. National pride and ideology have nothing to do with it, hegemonic competition is inevitable.

> We should be building connections amongst the people, not walls.

Do you think that it's really up to us? We weren't the ones who set up the Great Firewall. We have been trying to "build walls" for the past 30 years and it has gotten us nowhere. I get that people like to say things that evoke "positivity" or to feel good about themselves but there needs to be some semblance of reality if we really want to progress.

>there’s just the internet.

It is, unfortunately, a new field of warfare.

I like to think I'm the most free speech loving, liberal progressive in any room I walk into. But I think the wild west of the internet that existed in the 90s and early 2000s that leant itself to idealistic visions of what the internet could be is not what we have today.

You can't build bridges that are then used against you for espionage, theft of intellectual property, disinformation, tracking and abducting political dissidents, and infiltrating critical national security infrastructure, and then point at that and say "this is free speech!" And if there's no room to acknowledge that in your understanding of how the modern internet works in reality, then I don't know that we're operating from a similar understanding of reality.

They're cooperating with many countries in the world. What is this supposed to mean?