Essentially "we care about privacy, until something comes up that scares the general public and makes us care less about privacy", a.k.a. Ohlocracy [1].

It also doesn't address the problem of abuse. Remember when the NSA agents spied on their spouses, girlfriends, and lovers [2]?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy

[2]: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/nsa-analysts-spied-...

The security industry has largely given up on prevention as a means of stopping breaches, the current trend is very much based on fast detection & response.

Neither the NSA's nor these systems have the capacity to store full-take data, hell even just netflow data can be a challenge to store for any extended period of time.

The only thing that can really be done is streaming monitoring.

To the people wondering why decryption is necessary: HTTPS is ubiquitous and ip/port info is not actually enough to figure out where the communications are going, SNI helps quite a bit, but it may not be enough e.g. if a bad guy decided to use Twitter or AppEngine/Spot or an S3 bucket for C&C.

In a corporate environment your options are usually either network or host agent based, and frankly the network approach is significantly less intrusive, but also less effective.

According to an earlier article [0] about this, there's enough storage to keep 30 days of network traffic. That's not nothing. It's also something that apparently the regular UC IT folks have no control over whatsoever.

0: http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2016/01/ucop-ordered-spywar... 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11006915

That's strange. My company uses the same Fidelis XPS appliances Berkeley is using, and they're entirely installed, administered, managed, configured, and monitored by our internal IT security staff. Only our staff has access to alerts it fires and the snippets of traffic it captures (for example, if it detects potential malware C&C beaconing, it'll show the bytes it flagged as matching the signature, and some ~200 bytes before and after it). We're also able to view, change, or add all the rules it uses. The source code is closed, so that part is a blackbox, but it seems like a huge stretch to call the entire appliance a blackbox considering we're 100% responsible for integrating, managing, and utilizing it.

I imagine Fidelis probably also offers a professional services option that allows them to manage setup and maybe even remote monitoring. If this is true, there's absolutely no reason why Berkeley can't hire competent infosec folks to handle it all internally, especially considering they have a lot of smart students in the field.

My understanding of the situation (which I'm not involved with since I'm no longer Berkeley faculty, but I follow because I was in the past) is that the office of the president (UC-wide, not just UCB) ordered the systems installed and specifically out of the control (and over the objections) of UCB IT services.

I see. That certainly makes it more interesting. In that case, all of the criticism should be directed at him, and not at Fidelis or their appliances.

*Her

http://www.ucop.edu/president/index.html

> If this is true, there's absolutely no reason why Berkeley can't hire competent infosec folks to handle it all internally, especially considering they have a lot of smart students in the field.

University IT tends to be super fragmented with each department having their own IT. It was probably a lot simpler to contract it out than try and build a central org... and infosec people ain't cheap these days.

There will still be a central IT group, who provide services like the backbone network, university-wide email, authentication etc.

Presumably this department: https://technology.berkeley.edu/about

The devices were installed by UCOP, not UCB.

UCOP is responsible for the entire university system, whereas UCB is just one campus.

That's certainly longer than I expected, but still not really all that long.

Define "breach" for a bunch of students and professors who just want to connect to the internet on their personal laptops.

Somewhat sad to see given the high profile McCarthy era cases that placed staff and faculty in the UC system front and center in the 40's and 50's. Saying "we have no interest" is somewhat ambiguous; it is after all public money.

Actually,this response is really good. Thanks for posting the link. I hope this actually works and ends up providing a good example on how to secure high valued targets. How is this action surprising or even debatable?