04.11.13

Fundraiser — a basic plea

Posted in Cyberterrorism at 1:32 pm by George Smith

Bigger.

See the headline. It is truly about budgets: The president’s, ours — as a nation, and mine.

Implied in the wire service headline and text is one of the big lies of our time: The idea that cyberwar, waged by nations or groups, can switch off the United States.

It has grown and metastasized like an untreated cancer, spreading corrosive, deadening myths, frank lies and gross exaggerations. The financial system could be crippled, the power turned off, the water corrupted. Indeed, cyberwar has been packaged as an event, or series of them with destructive power in excess of natural disasters.

What it comes down to is money. There are no statistics on what cyberespionage or cyberwar costs (or could cost) the nation, just claims and wild estimates based on nothing.

By contrast, charts and graphs of hard statistics are published weekly on the horrifying state of the economy for the middle and lower class. They show that among western civilized nations, yawning inequality that dwarfs the rest has grown. They show that foodstamp usage has ballooned to an all time high because the American economy does not produce jobs that pay a living wage. They show that corporate profits have soared but that the great majority of people have seen nothing except shrinkage or, even, total collapse in their worth and fortunes.

Yet today we are saddled with an administration that has actively worked to create the impression that defense against cyberattack is one of the country’s most pressing problems.

And last year, in an attempt to get cybersecurity legislation through congress, it empowered people like the National Security Agency’s Keith Alexander to state that cyberattacks and espionage against the United States were constituting the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.”

It was and is a lie stupefying in its audacity.

All for the sake of toxic legislation and the expansion of money for cybersecurity services from in the national security megaplex.

As the sequestration slowly starts to grind at the sick, the poor, the elderly and the other parts of the middle class, the cyberwar-is-coming campaign is all about realignment of taxpayer dollars for the preservation and expansion of security jobs and services, a transfer of wealth from the bottom and the middle of American society, to the top.

And this is immoral. It is just that simple. Because we’ll never benefit from it. Only the recipients of the contracts do.

I have never argued that the daily securing of the world network is not a significant problem. It is global in size. The job has grown with the times but it continues to be a matter of risk management and amelioration by everyone involved, not an excuse to spread fear and misinformation in the cause of making the cybersecurity arms of America’s defense industries more wealthy.

As a writer, journalist, author and expert on the issues, I’ve been on the beat since 1994. That’s almost twenty years and I’ve grown old doing it.

During the time, serious journalism and writing on the subject — which was always scarce, just withered away and died to be replaced by stenography of whatever is the current official or private sector word on the matter. It went away for the same reason serious journalism has collapsed on just about everything. The net destroyed the model by which journalism supported itself and replaced it with nothing, only the illusion that the same thing could be carried out by websites like grains of sand on the beach, and free labor.

These days I’m interviewed about once ever two weeks, almost like clockwork, for minor comment or background on transiently newsy matters on cybersecurity or some cyberattack.

And in the past ten years of this there have been no big questions addressed, or encompassing stories issued.

What is all this about? What’s the history? Why does this go on?

No one asks and very few, less than the fingers to be counted on one hand, even attempt to talk or write on it. To my knowledge, no one has ever dug into the moral component which is not that hard to understand and briefly describe.

It’s the story of modern America in the last twenty years, corporate capture of government for the sake of extracting as much public money as possible for the coffers at the top.

Another way to refer to it is “rent-seeking” for the corporate and government national security complex.

Rent-seeking behavior is the abandonment of providing a good product or service to customers (or one of even slightly minor social benefit) for the sole pursuit of wealth through private sector/government collusion.

The headline at the top of page is national corporate computer security rent-seeking.

And that is exactly what is happening inside the topic of cyberwar and the alleged peril of digital attack on the national infrastructure.

In the immediate term, it’s resulted in toxic legislation, CISPA, which immunizes already too-big-to-fail companies to transfer network monitoring information without any oversight or legal accountability.

And this is sold on the back of the corporate and national computer security sales pitch that this is the only way to protect the United States from the potentially disastrous consequences of cyberwar.

I’ll make a prediction. In 1994, I said “electronic Pearl Harbor” wasn’t likely. It was a good one.

Here’s another.

In the next five, or even ten years, Pasadena — or all of southern California — will lose electrical service from an earthquake before any cyberwar. And an earthquake in Los Angeles and the surrounding counties will give the federal government a much bigger emergency problem to deal with.

Anyway, to sum up, the idea of cyberwar and cyberespionage cutting down the United States is nonsensical. It’s been inflated into one of the major bullshits of the country of the USA.

I’d like to continue my work and I plan on it. But I need your help. The last year’s been a hard one and that’s my humble plea.

Sincerely, the Proprietor.

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