08.03.11
The Plutocrat of Cyberwar speaks
A dose of horseshit from plutocrat Richard Clarke today, one of the fathers of cyberwar and cyberterror furor going back to the Clinton administration.
Clarke opines on the pages of a Boston newspaper. Very little of it is worth reading for value in 2011 America. Arguments about cyberwar are of no interest to the American middle class. National “defense” again it is without value.
What Clarke knows — he’s a smart guy — is that the serious attacks on the country have all been internal. And they have nothing to do with the bullshit meme of cyberwar.
The problems that plague the United States — economic failure on a breath-taking scale — have nothing to do with the issues he’s pursued for the last decade. It’s an astonishing thing to have been shown to be so wrong in the last three years.
The enemy was not the explosion of the wired world. And, in comparison to what has been done to the average well-being of Americans, theoretical cyberwars and Stuxnet viruses are trivial things.
In the US, most journalists on the cybersecurity/cyberwar beat act like insane people. They call up and always want to talk about what a cyberwar would look like and what can be done to forestall or mitigate it.
My gut reaction is “Who cares?” Americans want protection from Wall Street and the economic system that has, for instance, caused a record explosion in the number of people who must rely on food stamps.
When I tell American reporters these things they act as if bitten by a poisonous snake coming out of the telephone line.
What? You question the authority of the Clarke’s and Mike McConnell’s of our great nation?
Nope, just asking for some grounding in the real world. Some perspective. Not the opinions from someone used to employing argument from totem pole authority over and over.
Anyway, some excerpts from Richard the Plutocrat and “The coming cyberwars:”
IMAGINE IF President Kennedy issued a nuclear war strategy in the 1960s that omitted the fact that we had nuclear weapons, B-52 bombers, and long-range missiles. What if his public strategy had just talked about fallout shelters and protecting the government? As absurd as that would have been, that is similar to what the Obama administration just did with regard to the nation’s cyber war strategy …
[Generals] have bemoaned the inability of the civilian departments and the private sector to defend critical US networks (like banking, electricity, and transportation) and have suggested the military may have to defend those networks.
During his confirmation hearings, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta voiced concern about the possibility of a “digital Pearl Harbor’’ that would cripple our electric power grid, banks, and transportation networks.
There it all is. The plutocrat obsession with attacks — always mentioning banking and electrical power — the former which gives away the concern that the paupers could come for their stuff. And so they need military grade protection.
You can ask people to mull over a simple thought experiment having to do with the US economy.
Yesterday, the news was very bad. The stock market tanked due to lack of faith in the stability and wisdom of the US government and economic health of the nation, so reliant upon it. The Chinese — who are often mentioned as those who could launch a cyberwar on the US — issued a dressing down on the matter.
As tightly intertwined as China is with the US, it absolutely must export to this country, of what possible value would be an attack from that country on our economy and financial system in cyberspace?
Assuming such a campaign could be mounted (and I doubt that it actually could), it would be a disaster for them. Yes, try to damage the purchasing power of your biggest customer even more.
That’s just rubbish thinking.
But that’s the Richard Clarke view. Clarke knows absolutely nothing of what matters to or affects average Americans.
In his last book of fiction, Breakpoint, which included various cyberattacks on the country, Clarke telegraphed to readers his great fondness for Kistler, sellers of 80 dollar bottles of white wine. (That’s the low ball figure, here’s the high. Only $114.00, cheap.)
Nice drink. I heard about it from the famous cyberwar plutocrat.