06.18.13

Touching off cyberwar

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 12:28 pm by George Smith

For about a year I’ve been saying the US has touched off cyberwar on the Internet. When it deployed Stuxnet into the Iranian nuclear program and continued to write and deploy malware for that purpose it ignited a clandestine battle.

Stuxnet could not be restricted or contained, as has always been the case with computer viruses. And that secret war has spread and resulted in retaliations.

It set up a growing black market for the hoarding and misuse of security vulnerability information by national cyberwar programs. And it triggered a digital arms and acquisition race among nations with the resources to dig deeply into the mechanics of cyberwar.

The US demonstrated it had an active and busy offensive cyberwar program and that it was expanding its size and capabilities. This has gradually come out in thinly veiled government and military position papers, security contractor news and hiring trends and in speeches delivered by US military men.

In effect, the US has made cyberwar a growing national security business, one that is global, one that a lot of big arms manufacturing and defense service corporations want in on. And there’s no putting the stops to it now. It will continue to roll, gaining momentum as more and more money is spent. More simply, there’s a lot of moolah to be had in screwing with people and other countries through digital arms. Organized crime has proven very little can be truly made secure and now professionally staffed and trained corporate military and intelligence agencies have great incentive to increase their action and leverage.

America has efficiently put itself in a terrible position to complain about the bad doings of others. We have always reserved the right to overdo stuff and this has backfired. Again. It’s a national trait.

Cynically, this may have been impossible to avoid. Having looked in on matters of national security for two decades, the corporate arms and government/military interests, purely on a profit-seeking basis, grew way too large and powerful for it to be otherwise. Lacking any oversight or serious attempt to rein things in, and there were none, the umbilically connected national security powers, mega-businesses and policy-makers were always going to go ahead with lobbying for and building a structure that was for cyberwar.

However, by ingenuously continuing to deliver the script that other bad actors, China, Iran, North Korea, etc., were behind much of the alleged badness on world networks, we set the stage for ruining our reputation.

These countries were at it, probing American business, infrastructure and military sites, putting in place mechanisms and practicing techniques that would allow them to strike in America at later notice. The mainstream media was complicit in delivering this baleful warning without daring to look in the mirror or inspect the other side of the coin.

And up until the Snowden affair, all you could read was the government and national security industry line, that digital Pearl Harbor was coming to the United States, courtesy of many bad guys aimed at … the financial system, the power, the water and on and on.

There was literally no end to it.

This was easily recognized at GlobalSecurity.Org and the other one or two respectable mainstream outlets I normally correspond with.

NSA director Keith Alexander, in the same speech last year where he claimed Chinese cyber-spying was bringing out the “greatest transfer of wealth in history,” added he was trying to ready the nation so that he would not have to go to Congress and explain things the day after a catastrophe.

Well, today General Alexander was in front of Congress, again after last week, for explaining things. But it wasn’t because this country had been subjected to “electronic Pearl Harbor.”

It needs repeating: The reveals by Edward Snowden have derailed Alexander’s (and the government’s) complicated script on digital doom and the accompanying mythology, delivering fundaments and information easier to grasp. The news is not as nebulous, the narrative more compelling.

As the owner of the most powerful military in world history, the US has been consequently also engaged in building the largest cyberwar machine.


From Schneier, at CNN (no link):

Today, the United States is conducting offensive cyberwar actions around the world.

More than passively eavesdropping, we’re penetrating and damaging foreign networks for both espionage and to ready them for attack. We’re creating custom-designed Internet weapons, pre-targeted and ready to be “fired” against some piece of another country’s electronic infrastructure on a moment’s notice.

This is much worse than what we’re accusing China of doing to us. We’re pursuing policies that are both expensive and destabilizing and aren’t making the Internet any safer.

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