Secondly, even leaving aside that issue, how will the McAfee system "determine" when a user might be visiting a site distributing allegedly illegal content? The patent application describes one particularly dangerous approach:

Various embodiments, described in more detail below, provide a technique for performing a check of a distribution source prior to allowing its content to be downloaded. The implementation could utilize a "cloud" of resources for centralized analysis. Individual download requests interacting with the cloud need not be concerned with the internal structure of resources in the cloud and can participate in a coordinated manner to distinguish potential threatening "rouge hosts" and "authorized distributions" on the Internet.

Clearly, that is a gross violation of privacy, with huge potential dangers. For a start, the centralized analysis system that the McAfee patent speaks of would be the perfect place to check up on everything that a person was doing on their computer, since all Internet requests would be routed through it. That makes it even easier than it is today for the authorities, who would no longer have to go to several Internet service companies in order to spy on users without the latter being aware of the fact.

Naturally, such issues of censorship and surveillance wouldn't worry the copyright companies in the slightest. If such a system were available, they would doubtless push hard for ISPs to adopt it -- perhaps on a purely "voluntary" basis, just like the new "six strikes" system in the US. Indeed, I'd be surprised if they aren't already having discussions with McAfee on how they can work together for their mutual benefit here.

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“The companies surveyed estimated they lost a combined $4.6 billion worth of intellectual property last year alone, and spent approximately $600 million repairing damage from data breaches,” the release said. “Based on these numbers, McAfee projects that companies worldwide lost more than $1 trillion last year.” The release contained a quote from McAfee’s then-president and chief executive David DeWalt, in which he repeated the $1 trillion estimate. The headline of the news release was “Businesses Lose More than $1 Trillion in Intellectual Property Due to Data Theft and Cybercrime.”

The trillion-dollar estimate was picked up by the media, including Bloomberg and CNET, which expressed no skepticism.

Among [the study's researchers] was Ross Anderson, a security engineering professor at University of Cambridge, who told ProPublica that he did not know about the $1 trillion estimate before it was announced. “I would have objected at the time had I known about it,” he said. “The intellectual quality of this ($1 trillion number) is below abysmal.”

.... The company’s method did not meet the standards of the Purdue researchers whom it had engaged to analyze the survey responses and help write the report. In phone interviews and emails to ProPublica, associate professor Jackie Rees Ulmer said she was disconcerted when, a few days before the report’s unveiling, she received a draft of the news release that contained the $1 trillion figure. “I expressed my concern with the number as we did not generate it,” Rees Ulmer said in an email. She added that although she couldn’t recall the particulars of the phone conversation in which she made her concerns known, “It is almost certainly the case that I would have told them the number was unsupportable.”

...The news stories got the worried attention of some of the report’s contributors because McAfee was connecting their names to an estimate they had no previous knowledge of and were skeptical about. One of the contributors, Augusto Paes de Barros, a Brazilian security consultant, blogged a week after the news release that although he was glad to have been involved in the report, “I could not find any data in that report that could lead into that number.... I’d like to see how they found this number.”

“Far from being broadly-based estimates of losses across the population, the cyber-crime estimates that we have appear to be largely the answers of a handful of people extrapolated to the whole population.”

In a motion filed today, the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the "secret room" at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006.

One of the things that we have to have then [in cybersecurity legislation], is if the critical infrastructure community is being attacked by something, we need them to tell us... at network speed. It doesn't require the government to read their mail -- or your mail -- to do that. It requires them -- the internet service provider or that company -- to tell us that that type of event is going on at this time. And it has to be at network speed if you're going to stop it.

It's like a missile, coming in to the United States.... there are two things you can do. We can take the "snail mail" approach and say "I saw a missile going overhead, looks like it's headed your way" and put a letter in the mail and say, "how'd that turn out?" Now, cyber is at the speed of light. I'm just saying that perhaps we ought to go a little faster. We probably don't want to use snail mail. Maybe we could do this in real time. And come up with a construct that you and the American people know that we're not looking at civil liberties and privacy, but we're actually trying to figure out when the nation is under attack and what we need to do about it.

Nice thing about cyber is that everything you do in cyber, you can audit. With 100% reliability. Seems to be there's a great approach there.

The key thing in information sharing that gets, I think, misunderstood, is that when we talk about information sharing, we're not talking about taking our personal emails and giving those to the government.

Adobe, Apple, Arial Software, Autodesk, Carbonite, Corel, Kodak, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, McAfee, Online Holdings, Oracle, Rockwell, Rosetta Stone, SAP, Siemens, and Sony.