03.05.10
Cult of Cyberwar: Excessive even by relaxed US standards
This week the Cult of Cyberwar was out in force at the RSA convention. At such a security con one expects a good deal of hot air meant to serve the corporate and government cybersecurity business infrastructure.
But even by the really lax Americans standard for cyberwar/cyberterror hype, this was an excessive exhibition.
If one can trust the Associated Press’s sampling of it.
Some quote:
“Every major company in the US and Europe has been penetrated — it’s industrial warfare … All the little cyber devices that the companies here sell have been unable to stop them. China and Russia are stealing petabytes of information … Nation states have created cyber-warfare units. They are preparing the battlefield … We have the governments of China and Russia engaging in daily activities successfully that the US government and private industry are not stopping and they are stealing anything worth stealing.” — Richard Clarke
Clarke was mentioned earlier in the week, here coincidentally, in a flog for his April-skedded book on the menace of cyberwar.
In that piece, it was said our most backward enemy, North Korea, is a deadly menace because the very nature of their backwardness renders them immune from our cyber-retaliations.
“White House Internet security coordinator Howard Schmidt on Tuesday at RSA released a declassified version of a Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative,” informed AP.
The Federation of American Scientists posted a copy of that here.
To call that an underwhelming contribution to public knowledge on the government’s cybersecurity strategy is to do a disservice to the definition of underwhelming. By reasonable standards, Schmidt and the White House could have done nothing at all and the end result would be indistinguishable.
DD blog posted on Howard Schmidt being dubbed a ‘rock star’ of cybersecurity on Monday here.
It was a ludicrous statement then. Now it’s even more so, if such a thing is possible.
More quote, from FBI head Robert Mueller:
“As you well know, a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a well-placed bomb … In the past 10 years, Al-Qaeda’s online presence has become as potent as its in-world presence … Al-Qaeda uses for the Internet range from recruiting members and inciting violence to posting ways to make bio-weapons and forming social-networks for aspiring terrorists, according to Mueller,” informed the AP.
This material has been debunked so often it’s not worth going into detail over why it’s so pandering. Suffice to say, DD has looked at virtually all al Qaeda recipes for bioweapons.
They can’t make them from their Internet-distributed recipes. Period.
Mueller knows this, or some certainly do at the FBI, very probably those who just closed the case on a real bioterrorist, Bruce Ivins, the anthraxer.
Bruce Ivins did not use Internet recipes to make anthrax mail that killed five and terrorized the country. He used a gold standard flask of anthrax spores accumulated in his laboratory at Fort Detrick. Plus his lab skills as one of the foremost experts on anthrax in the country.
And DD wrote about that, too, earlier in the week.
All this does is point out the obvious: That you can say anything you want in the US, no matter how devoid of content, substance or full of stuff handcrafted for an audience of unquestioning fools and get away with it all the time. As long as you’re vetted as an allegedly sane authority figure.
And that goes double and triple for the Cult of Cyberwar.
There is one thing the Cult of Cyberwar and its fuglemen never allow in stories.
That would be comparisons from the real world. That’s because incoveniently bringing up Bruce Ivins when someone is babbling about al Qaeda passing around bioweapon recipes on the Internet is a real show-stopper.
Another such show-stopper was posted by Paul Krugman earlier this week. Krugman is a Nobel laureate. Richard Clarke, Howard Schmidt and Robert Mueller are not Nobel laureates.
Krugman knows how to use data and statistics graphically to make a point.
In his “Great Failure” blog post, Krugman put up a plot showing a projected one trillion dollar loss in real goods and services in the US as the a result of the economic collapse brought about by Wall Street.
Not hackers and nation-states prepping the battlefield against us for cyberwar.
“It’s crucial to realize that the trillion dollars’ worth of goods and services we could have produced this year, but won’t, is a loss we’ll never make up,” wrote Krugman on Monday. “And that doesn’t count the suffering and damage to our future inflicted by the non-monetary costs of mass long-term unemployment.”
It certainly puts the Cult of Cyberwar in perspective.
Alert readers will have noticed that recently DD began throwing Cult of Cyberwar stories into the ‘extremism’ category. That’s because that’s what the public message on the subject now amounts to.
Cult of Cyberwar — from the archives.