Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA
February 14th, 2008Another mulibillion dollar boondoggle.
In the Wired piece below, there’s just one voice of reason. John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, says, “They’ve got the whole thing tarted up, and it’s hard to tell what they’re actually doing.”
That’s it. He gets it.
Information Warfare is part of the military industrial complex now, but look into it and what you’ll find is that most of the “business” exists atop a false assumption: That the physical infrastructure will remain intact (no Magic Anchor jokes, please).
Spend $2 billion, $10 billion or $100 billion. It wouldn’t change the fact that .mil IS POWERLESS to stop highly motivated individuals from attacking undefended, critical infrastructure.
Why don’t “the terrorists” pull the plug on the intertubes?
Well, “the terrorists” don’t do it because taking out the infrastructure isn’t part of the plan to milk billions of dollars worth of pork for a good, old fashioned boondoggle. Wired continues to get it wrong by saying that, “logic bombs, Trojan horses, worms and bots,” are the weapons to be concerned about.
Why doesn’t Wired mention places like Manasquan, New Jersey, Boca Raton, Florida and San Louis Obispo, California in their cyberwar articles? Why doesn’t the reporter ask the Big Cheese Cyberwar General how his multibillion dollar charlie foxtrot is going to prevent people—armed with public information and little else—from doing bad things to the fiber?
“Well, I… errr…uh… Interview is over. Get out and don’t come back.”
Via: Wired:
When a reporter enters the Air Force office of William Lord, a smile comes quickly to the two-star general’s face as he darts from behind his immaculate desk to shake hands. Then, as an afterthought, he steps back and shuts his laptop as though holstering a sidearm.
Lord, boyish and enthusiastic, is a new kind of Air Force warrior — the provisional chief of the service’s first new major command since the early 1990s, the Cyber Command. With thousands of posts and enough bandwidth to choke a horse, the Cyber Command is dedicated to the proposition that the next war will be fought in the electromagnetic spectrum, and that computers are military weapons. In a windowless building across the base, Lord’s cyber warriors are already perched 24 hours a day before banks of monitors, scanning Air Force networks for signs of hostile incursion.
“We have to change the way we think about warriors of the future,” Lord enthuses, raising his jaw while a B-52 traces the sky outside his windows. “So if they can’t run three miles with a pack on their backs but they can shut down a SCADA system, we need to have a culture where they fit in.”
But before Lord and his geek warriors can settle in for the wars of the future, the general has to survive a battle of a decidedly different nature: a political and cultural tug of war over where the Cyber Command will set up its permanent headquarters. And that, for Lord and the Air Force, is where things get trickier than a Chinese Trojan horse.
With billions of dollars in contracts and millions in local spending on the line, 15 military towns from Hampton, Virginia, to Yuba City, California, are vying to win the Cyber Command, throwing in offers of land, academic and research tie-ins, and, in one case, an $11 million building with a moat. At a time when Cold War-era commands laden with aging aircraft are shriveling, the nascent Cyber Command is universally seen as a future-proof bet for expansion, in an era etched with portents of cyberwar.
That’s what they have InfraGuard for. However, the intractable problem with cords and pipes is they’re as long as they need to be.
There is so much more to this than I know that it boggles the imagination -while it inflames it.
There is a shock and awe factor to the current birth of a total surveillance world. What is being built, and it’s interneccine squabbles during which (such as how much the UK will share with us and so forth), is by it’s nature meant to be as much unknown to us as possible. All this growing cyber defense defends all that activity and it’s growing aggregate database.
On top of which lies the part of the original PNAC agenda to totally, and ever so slowly -like slow ice -militarize and monopolize the web. Certainly to totally oversee and control it in minute detail. (I think all that a pipe dream but regardlessly efforts will be made, yes?)
We don’t know what we don’t know save by silhouettes, much as a far off unseen planet betrays it’s presence by the void of stars in it’s silhouette.
Things like the storm worm bot or the cut cables or the NSA / telecom collusions do hint for me things *not* occurring as I might have suspected or feared, staving a runaway imagination to some degree for me. I’m pretty sure there’s no completely unknown web as big as the one we know.
But I am sure there are packet radio webs I don’t know of, even lesser landline/dial-in networks perhaps still in existence, and so on, where skirmishes may be waging even as info is passed and exchanged as if through small but significant hubs.
It does boggle and inflame my imagination. I’m no geek or have IT interests or involvement, but when stories like this pass by -whoof! The immensity of the subject overwhelms. Like Mr. Pike said and you so well highlighted, it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Deja vu struck as I typed that. This subject always leaves me feeling there’s yet one more thing to be said yet never recalled.
Could it be the future of what may yet be hardwired into our very processor chips themselves? Nah nah, I don’t even want to speculate.
Brrr…
Shock and awe.
Oh dear, it’s the Air Force infosec boys playing with toys again.
I’d be willing to bet that it’s mostly the same crew of ex-AF goons behind FEDCIRC/US-CERT and VA-CIRC who are involved with this, regardless of Gen. Lord’s background and motivations.
There is a degree of collusion between the parties involved that is unimaginable unless you’ve witnessed it. Former US Air Force (and other .mil/.gov agencies to a lesser extent) information security personnel, specific major IT security companies like ISS (now part of IBM), politically-minded officers and SES-grade federal bureaucrats who ride this wave to their own benefit, and major IT/defense contractors (Lockheed, Northrup-Grumman, SAIC, CSC, GD) who funnel money out of the federal government via these contracts are all paying guests to the boondoggle party.
John Pike knows what he’s talking about when he says this is so much gee-whiz flackery.
I like it. A ‘cyberwar’ outfit with one physical location? Not a distributed, multi-routed setup?
I’m not so sure there are not actual terrorists, but they might not be as strong as we’ve been led to believe. They might not be messing with the electronic infrastructure because they know we’d be after them for real, as opposed using them as justification to invade countries not actually involved in their predations. If we had really wanted Osama Bin Laden, we could have gotten him in late 2001/early 2002. But we didn’t, and the old fellow may be long-dead now, for all we know.
If you could see the half of it. If there is a cyberwar going on – in my universe- its between the numbnuts who can’t move their mouse to click the right button to prevent access to NNSA (nuclear and classified) computer systems.
For me its not really a cyberwar, its a war to see who can be the most STUPID.
http://www.ig.energy.gov/documents/CalendarYear2004/ig-0645.pdf
Recommendations on cyber access still open since 2001!
Its a beautiful thing really. How effing dumb can people be? Myself included, but at least I put my shoes on the right feet.
Being a Monday morning quarterback SUCKS!
But here you go,my life in a nutshell. Preaching, trying to do some teaching. Essentially spinning my wheels in the sand.
http://www.ig.energy.gov/reports.htm