Should Government Be Involved in Global Networking Securities?

 

By ArickStall

I assume by now that most users from the video game and entertainment streaming world are aware of the Playstation Network being hacked and taken down on April 17 - 19, 2011. This is, of course, an international network of gamers, but also entertainment consumers (like Hulu Plus and Netflix subscribers), that havebeen directly affected.

Source: PCMag.com

While I believe this sort of hack was inevitable in this modern age (whether it be Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, PC or otherwise), Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) has received a lot of flack for bad PR in the mean time. They have taken it upon themselves to completely shut the system down and create a new, secure foundation.

But they have not plugged back into the servers of San Diego, California, for governments and government agencies to not take notice. Agencies are now seeking answers from SOE for the late April outage. According to Mark Hachman over PCMag.com,

interested parties include the Connecticut state attorney general, the FBI, government privacy officials from Australia, Canada and the U.K., and even the city of Taipei (Taiwan).

At this point the FBI's cybercrimes unit out of San Diego is investigating and looking at recent credit card charges that may link to the hackers.

Kotaku also reported that Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen had sent a letter to Sony, asking for more information about the hack and whether consumers would be compensated for the outage.

That now puts 22 state governments involved, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's cybercrimes unit. Now that we have hit the two week mark without any online networking capabilities, I have to ask: Should any government agencies be involved? Or should we sit back patiently and allow Sony to handle this mess alone?

Personally, I have never had anything but a great experience with SOE. In fact, it should be noted that this outage was caused by external villians as opposed to any internal mishap. What are your thoughts?

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=42010