11.21.14
‘Cyberwar is Bullshit’ Took long enough
A very young person named Russell Brandom at clickbait news site, The Verge, has discovered this is so.
He’s figured out, rightly, that cybersecurity in the US, and — in general, and among its toadies in the West, is solely for protecting the shit of the 1 percent.
Former NSA director Keith Alexander, the million dollar, then 600,000 dollar man for protecting Wall Street from the depredations of Chinese and Russian hackers is the leading man for it. He is custom-made as the apparatchik-of-protection for the banksters and they, in turn, deserve him.
In another way of saying it, there’s no reason at all that anyone without a mansion in the Hamptons should care that hackers are into giant American corporations of finance and manufacturing. Only those at the very top derive any benefit at all from cybersecurity. Everyone else gets zero to very little.
So if you found spyware on your computer tomorrow, the NSA would not help you. Maybe you could reach someone at the FBI who cared, but I wouldn’t bet on it. US Cyber Command is designed to defend military and government infrastructure. When James Clapper talks about defending the nation from cyberattack, these are the people he means. Everyone else is on their own …
In fact, most of the cyberdefense money is actively making things worse. The techniques behind these weapons were all actively developed by organizations like the NSA before trickling out to more oppressive regimes. The same agencies are lobbying against encryption that might protect your conversations from being stolen, and planting backdoors in the algorithms you might use to encrypt your files. They’re buying up software vulnerabilities and keeping them secret, leaving the door open for anyone who discovers them in the future.
Hey, go read Bill Blunden and Violet Cheung’s Behold a Pale Farce: Cyberwar, Threat Inflation & the Malware Industrial Complex. (A review is here.)
If you read the entire piece at the Verge (it’s short), you’ll also see they’re naive, or perhaps ignorant, about the line on Mandiant.
Mandiant was quickly identified as part of the problem.
Its security story/analysis, delivered so self-servingly by the New York Times, was quick convenience for Keith Alexander’s NSA narrative that Chinese hackers were stealing the entire country’s economic future, a now laughable assumption then taken seriously until Edward Snowden showed up and began showing details on the nature of the American cyberwar machine.
Anyway, readers know I wrote a lot on these matters. That is until the natural nausea that results from dealing with the stories of American computer security experts got to be too much.
Sou can also read read Computer Security for the 1 Percent, or the Cyberterrorism tab on this blog.
Or Hacking to Save Corporate America. (AKA Stooging for the Man)
Or Poverty and the Annual National Security Ogres & Wealth Festival.
Or “Pentagon declares Chinese cyberespionage the cause of all woe.”
Hey, those are some snappy titles. Funny, even! National Security Ogres & Wealth Festival — a great name for a record album or band.