05.01.10
Cult of Cyberwar: When in doubt, make stuff up
As an appendix to today’s earlier Cult of Cyberwar piece, DD brings you an editorial writer at a Dallas newspaper who can’t help but conflate it with electromagnetic pulse doom, or the Cult of EMP Crazy. After recommending Richard Clarke, he goes on an electromagnetic pulse weapon jag.
It’s not uncommon but always surprising to see what rubbish people will publish, just for the sake of convincing you that something very dangerous out there is about to hurl us back to the Stone Age.
[Forget about BP’s oil spill, dangit, that’s just nothing compared to EMP and cyberwar.]
Opines an editor at the Dallas Morning News:
[Retired Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege Jr.] spent most of his 35-year military career studying the effects of electromagnetic pulses. The good news, he said, is that the fiber-optic cable that makes up much of our ground-based communication network would survive an EMP attack. But anything that uses micro-circuitry would be “tremendously impacted,” he explained; the pulse would “literally fry” such components.
A single electromagnetic pulse weapon, he says, “can kill electronic systems in an area the size of a tennis court or throughout the entire United States.”
We know this because our country has developed and tested such weapons, clearly with plans to deploy them in the event of war against another technologically advanced country. But it would be naive to think we’re the only ones with this weaponry.
More chilling is the fact that an electromagnetic pulse bomb would be relatively easy for terrorists to build and deploy. In 2001, Popular Mechanics magazine described an electromagnetic-pulse bomb that it said could be built for $400 and would be capable of sending out a pulse that “makes a lightning bolt seem like a flashbulb by comparison.” It wouldn’t harm humans but would fry all the microcircuits we rely on, including in our cars. Imagine real disaster scenes like those depicted in ABC’s hit show Flash Forward.
Over the last decade, a constant feature in talks on notional electromagnetic pulse bombs and/or rays is that they can do just about anything. In this case, a single weapon could fry electronics in a tennis court, or in the entire nation. And they’re so easy to make anyone can have them for a paltry few hundred dollars.
For instance, from Congressional testimony ten years ago:
During [a] June [Congressional] hearing, [retired Army general Robert Schweitzer] made seemingly contradictory claims during the course of his presentation. At different times, Schweitzer claimed that electromagnetic pulse guns could be made for $800, that they could be made for $35, that they had been used against London banks although he was informed this was a hoax, and such weapons were now capable of disrupting Wall Street.
??? . . . the cost is about $800 to do this,??? Schweitzer said at one point.
As for knocking out Wall Street, Schweitzer later commented to Congressman Saxton, “[It] can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components . . . And the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components and do a number on Wall Street.??? Schweitzer also alluded to, but did not mention by name, a generic hacker tech catalog that claimed to sell parts and schematics for such a weapon.
Further, Schweitzer testified that London banks were attacked by radio-frequency weapons, a myth that has been touched on in Crypt Newsletter.
“I was told that was a hoax,??? Schweitzer said to Saxton. “. . . and it’s disputed in the Intel community and elsewhere but I think, frankly, and having gone into this in great detail, the dispute is to protect the fact it happened.???
Schweitzer added later: “I validated [this]. It isn’t just taking rumors or drivel off of the tabloids. These are solid facts that I’m giving you.???
As a matter of fact, it was rumors and drivel. And Schweitzer died a few years later, never having seen his electromagnetic pulse weapons.
And from April of last year, on the old blog:
The second category of crazy associated with electromagnetic pulse doom lobby is filled with ‘experts’ who believe electromagnetic pulse weapons can be easily made from stuff cadged at Radio Shack. (Well, not quite, but for the sake of this post, the demographic extends into this domain of consumer electronic store junk.)
“Electromagnetic pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counterterrorism analysts,” reads a very recent piece of EMP crazy emission at the New Scientist. (If you saw it originally, readers will note the other ‘most read’ story on the site — how masturbation might protect one from hay fever, certainly puts the entire matter in proper perspective.)
Written for decades — the original electromagnetic pulse gun stories date from at least as early as 1994 — this flavor always has one thing of note: EMP rayguns are easy to make from plans found on the web and materials available in every town.
The New Scientist story obfuscates this cliche only slightly. Instead of using the word ‘easy,’ practical synonyms are employed.
“[An ‘expert’] told delegates at the annual Directed Energy Weapons conference in London last month that … basic EMP generators can be built from descriptions available online, using components found in devices such as digital cameras,” reads New Scientist. “These are technologically unchallenging to build and most of the information necessary is available,” she said.
And DD wrote a syndicated news piece from just before the war, from which I will now draw:
“Talk of the secret electromagnetic pulse bomb was mythology as news, taking on a uniquely American demented quality,” wrote Crypt News in a syndicated feature published around the beginning of the second war in Iraq, the one we’re still in.
“No other single weapon — real or imagined — rivaled its power for sensation. In fact, in a nation where photographs of all weapons, no matter how trivial, are either officially distributed by the Department of Defense or leaked to the public, it was simply astonishing that absolutely none existed of the e-bomb.
“Bubbling over with excitement at something they’d never seen, the media mused openly on a wondrous capacity to destroy the Iraqi military without harming people. How the bomb would stop soldiers with old-fashioned artillery, automatic weapons, or tanks was nowhere to be seen. And guerrilla warfare was completely off the radar.
“Instead, the U.S. media furnished hyperventilated comment on the wonder bomb, exclamations suitable for Hollywood script.
“‘ Kabammy! A huge electronic wave comes along and sends out a few thousand volts,” blared one newspaper. ‘. . . like man-made lightning bolts!’ crowed another. Weeeee! Watch out Iraq, said the American buffoon corps, it’s the e-bomb.
“Reporters certainly believed this copy. As non-embedded journalists moved into Baghdad in the days prior to hostilities, editors contacted military analysts asking for advice on how to e-bomb-proof the electronic tools of the profession. Would cell phones survive? Could a microwave oven be used as an improvised microwave-proof carrier?”
Yes, the invisible e-bombs certainly took care of Iraq.
If DD goes back even further, to the time of the old Crypt Newsletter, we read that home-made or guvmint electromagnetic pulse weapons have always been arriving but never quite appearing. Or they are said to already be here though no one has seen them.
Or because someone has seen them in a computer game or on a TV show like 24 they must exist. Just like the bioweapon that caused rapid onset Alzheimer’s disease in Jack Bauer curable just in time for the next season.
From Crypt News:
A collection of comment and blurt from various EMP weapon kooks was originally [published under the title] “Calling Victor von Doom.”
That piece, from the Crypt Newsletter, cites an original electromagnetic pulse gun story from 1994 in Forbes magazine, one in which hackers are interviewed for their expertise in such things.
The EMP-weapon-used-against-Iraq (this time in the first war) myth was deployed:
“Forbes writer: Have you ever heard of a device that directs magnetic signals at hard disks and can scramble the data?
“Dangerous ex-hackers, in unison: Yes! A HERF [high energy radio frequency] gun.
“Dangerous ex-hacker A: This is my nightmare. $300: a rucksack full of car batteries, a microcapacitor and a directional antenna and I could point it at Oracle . . .
“Dangerous ex-hacker B: We could cook the fourth floor.
“Dangerous ex-hacker A: . . . You could park it in a car and walk away. It’s a $300 poor man’s nuke . . .
“Dangerous ex-hacker A, on a roll: They were talking about giving these guns to border patrol guards so they can zap Mexican cars as they drive across the border and fry their fuel injection . . .
“Dangerous ex-hacker A, really piling it on: There are only three or four people who know how to build them, and they’re really tight lipped . . . We used these in the Persian Gulf. We cooked the radar installation.
“In other parts of the article the “dangerous ex-hackers” discuss the ease of building what purports to be a $300 death ray out of Radio Shack parts and car batteries. In a rare moment of intellectual honesty and self-scrutiny the ‘dangerous ex-hackers’ admit there are a lot of ‘snake oil salesmen’ in the computer security business.”