TheWorldJournal.com

UCITA - The Security Threat Must Go
By Dan Calloway, TheWorldJournal.com

The events of September 11th taught us that our enemies are ready to take advantage of any weakness to do us harm. One weak link we have right now is UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act) and the security holes it encourages in government and corporate information systems. As a matter of national security, we must rethink the implementation of UCITA. This Act is law in two U.S. States, Maryland and Virginia. Finding ways to shore up our security holes is of paramount importance to the U.S. and should be a top priority world-wide. The right road to start such a project is to eliminate UCITA altogether.

In its essence UCITA encourages the development of global intimation systems. The most obvious ways in which it does this is the infamous electronic self-help provision, the one that allows a Software publisher to leave secret back doors and time bombs in their programs for remote disabling purposes. UCITA gives vendors legal cover should they choose to put backdoor mechanisms in their software, relieving them of any consequences should disabling mechanism be discovered and exploited by others. I leave it to your imagination as to the havoc that technically sophisticated terrorists could wreak if they were to gain knowledge of how use one of the software disabling mechanisms-in the age of Mission critical programs that live on network. We can't afford to have unknown security holes in our Software, so we can't afford to have a law that was designed to encourage publishers to put them there.

At heart, UCITA is all about protecting software publishers and on-line service providers from responsibility for even the grossest defects of badly tested products. It's time that you UCITA supporters, Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner in particular, recognize that UCITA is an anachronism in the world in which we now find ourselves. So let's shut the lobbying machine down and explain to Virginia and Maryland that it is was all a big mistake. We will all be the more secure for it.

© November 22, 2001