02.06.13
Shoeshine
Readers will have noticed much of national security has taken an extended holiday. Cyberwar took off for a long time because the people who love to talk about it and make all the claims planted in the news, the upper tier, were enjoying Xmas and a few extra weeks sipping champagne in their chalets.
Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction have taken a permanent holiday. It is difficult to take seriously discussions on the ease of making biological weapons, or the Internet ricin recipe being dangerous when American white gun crazies have shot up more people in the last 12 months than jihadis in the US post-p/11.
All this is because much of the old national security threat matrix is shoeshine — talk to guarantee full employment in that jobs sector.
The real problems of the US are a political party that has turned neo-fascist, predatory American multi-national big business, inequality, an economy that doesn’t work for way too many citizens, and the continual real threat posed by a runaway gun lobby that exists only to stimulate the business of small arms manufacturing.
All the rest, shoeshine.
Today, from an interview at Mashable, at least one old hand who feels uncomfortable about it:
Talks of cyberwar and a cyber Pearl Harbor seem to be a regular fixture of news reports in the last few months, with prominent U.S. administration officials like Janet Napolitano or Leon Panetta regularly touting the threat of a cyber attack on the United States. But not everybody is buying it. For one, Howard Schmidt, the former chief cybersecurity advisor to President Barack Obama, is skeptical.
“I don’t share the viewpoint that we’re on the brink of disaster every time a new worm comes out or a new DDoS (distributed denial of service) comes out,” he told Mashable. In fact, he even disagrees with the terminology that’s being used. “I don’t like using the word cyberwar, and I don’t like using the word cyber 9/11, cyber Pearl Harbor and all these other things,” he said …
Schmidt said he’s not discounting the threat, in fact, he is well aware of the potential disruption that cyber attacks could cause. For him, the worst case scenario is an attack that takes out power, something that could have cascading and potentially very damaging effects. It’s exactly for this reason that he also warns that using cyberweapons or malware against another nations should be a measure of last resort.
“You can use fire in a conflict if you’re not going to burn. If you’re going to burn, you better not care about what’s going to burn,” he said. “And in cyberspace you think about how vulnerable we are in the United States and generally in the developed countries, that could have a worse effect than what we’re trying to solve to begin with.”
Of course, Mashable itself is shoeshine. It exists only because of the need for grease — and a class of publicity workers for the upper tier in US tech society, providing comment and news on material always implied to be revolutionary but of virtually zero value when thinking about the problems that have blighted the economic prospects and health of hundreds of millions in the United States.
Electronic Pearl Harbor talk is now almost twenty years old. Over fifteen years ago I flatly stated that “electronic Pearl Harbor — not likely.” The people who are writing about it now were in rubber pants when the foundations of the meme were put in place.
Howard Schmidt is an old-timer. He’s been around long enough to see that cyberwar has never made the United States skip a beat while plenty of other things from the real world have.
“[Operation] Red October is rumored to be either a Russian or a Chinese operation,” reads Mashable.
Six months from now it will be something else. Just as it’s been for the past fifteen years.
On the beat that means nothing, reporting on US cyberwar combat policy from a nation that empowers its cyberwarriors to do whatever is thought to be needed:
A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad, according to officials involved in the review.
That decision is among several reached in recent months as the administration moves, in the next few weeks, to approve the nation’s first rules for how the military can defend, or retaliate, against a major cyberattack. New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code — even if there is no declared war.
“While many potential targets are military, a country’s power grids, financial systems and communications networks can also be crippled,” reads the Times.
The financial system was crippled, by its own corrupt work and bad faith financial speculation in 2007.
What happened? The economy tottered, the world was thrown into a depression and the US government stepped in to keep the banks from failing.
Cyberwar could do that? That’s shoeshine hard at work.
A different kind of shoeshine: Cade Metz at Wired and the continued effort to make computer engineers at Facebook into something they’re not. Or, in a manner of speaking, to make lemonade out of high quality urine.
“Meet the Data Brains Behind the Rise of Facebook” reads the title and you get a picture of said brains arrayed, all guys, all smiles, trying to look as hip as can be, like a new rat pack or a famous all boy pop group.
Wired and the Facebook programmers want you to believe the worldwide data handling that goes into coordinating the nuisance ads inserted into your news feed along with all the likes and posts, is something remarkable.
Nope fellows, they’re not the new Manhattan Project in 1,000 words. They’re not even the global effort that makes the new flu vaccine every year, just guys who communicate the jargon of software platforms, big data and server clusters.
“[Someone] even graced the Facebook data team with its own theme song,” reads Wired.