Did you know Islamic subversion is infiltrating the highest levels of US government?
Today, Bill Gertz of the Washington Times published the claim that Hillary Clinton might be associated with it, all revealed in a course offered by Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy and Islam-o-phobe Frank Gaffney.
Gaffney’s a birther. And a great deal of his current business is centered around the alleged security threat of shariah-law permeating the US justice system.
Islamists linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups are working to undermine the U.S. government through “civilization jihad??? aimed at imposing Islamic law rule in the United States.
That is the conclusion of a new 10-part online video course produced by the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a Washington think tank, that was made public Tuesday.
The briefing-style educational video, “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: The Enemy Within,??? features lectures by CSP chief Frank Gaffney.
The video includes a detailed section on “Team Obama??? that identifies six people working close to or inside the Obama administration that the course says are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood or similar Islamist groups through numerous front organizations.
They include Rashad Hussein, special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; Huma Abedin, deputy chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton …
It’s a bit unfortunately hilarious in its psychosis because Huma Abedin — a trusted assistant of Hillary Clinton, is Anthony Weiner’s much put upon wife.
Weiner, if you’re a Euro-reader and do not recall, was the Democratic Rep. who saw his career ended for sending someone else not-his-wife a picture of his pecker.
Many years ago Bill Gertz was an investigative journalist who often pried interesting information from the warren that is the US intelligence community.
Over the years Gertz has also been responsible for vaporware/dept. of fiction journalism on electromagnetic pulse.
Today was no exception:
Military officials say the threat of electromagnetic pulse weapons in future warfare is growing …
A military source tells Inside the Ring that Russia has already developed battlefield EMP weapons and used them in combat.
During the early 2000s, Russian military forces fired an EMP mortar round that deployed a small metal-coated parachute. As it floated to earth, the EMP energy burst was reflected downward by the underside of the parachute and also spread by the cords attached to the shell. The result was a cone of anti-electronic energy that disrupted all electronics within its area.
The mortar was used by Russian forces to attack hand-held cellular telephones used by Chechen rebels …
Everyday, someone somewhere spreads rubbish in an effort to get you to think the reality in the robot novels and short stories of Isaac Asimov are just years away.
Often they come from the military. Along with the military robot research stories come emphases that projects are all for good Samaritan work — like wanting fire-fighters, this rather odd at a time when state governments have fired workers that do these essential jobs. Due to economic collapse.
From MSNBC:
Uncle Sam wants you to make a military robot capable of walking on two legs, handling power tools and even driving vehicles. Luckily, the U.S. military’s new robotics challenge aims to save lives rather than hunt down human warriors …
[Yeah, luckily.]
The $2 million challenge by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency appeared in an official online solicitation Tuesday. DARPA wants a humanoid robot to replace humans doing dangerous work in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, industrial accidents or natural disasters … the U.S. Navy already has plans to build its own robotic firefighter capable of doing humanoid tasks such as climbing ladders and throwing extinguisher grenades.
The Government anticipated receiving approximately $11.5M of FY04-07 funds for this program. The Government expected TO 1 costs would not exceed $500K, TO 2 costs would not exceed $3M, and TO 3 would not exceed $8M. It was anticipated that an IDIQ contract would be awarded with a maximum ceiling of $20M since it was impossible to accurately estimate all requirements during the five year period of performance. This funding profile was an estimate only and is not a promise of funding, as all funding is subject to changes/availability and Government discretion. It was desired that contract expenditures be managed and billed so as to maximize FY05 expenditure of FY04 and FY05 funding.
It weighs as much as the bell in Big Ben; it’s capable of plunging through 60 feet of reinforced concrete and has the most ridiculously sexual name imaginable for a deadly weapon – but the Massive Ordnance Penetrator is THE bomb, says the Pentagon.
Talk of beefing the bomb up with a hardened case and further advancements has been ongoing since the Air Force took delivery of it in September 2011. But Bloomberg reported that, in response to “an urgent request??? from the Pentagon, immediate approval was given to shift $81.6 million to the so-called MOP program.
The urgency is not explained – but it can be speculated that the Pentagon does not want to mop up a potential mess if (or when) it goes to war with Iran. So they’re putting a rush on something that can easily destroy things like underground labs, or secret nuclear facilities.
Two million puts life-saving clean-up after terrorist attack robots as posh hobby/corporate welfare money for relatively small business and/or vanity projects.
TheJoseph K Guide to Tech Terminology was an infrequent feature in Crypt Newsletter from the mid Nineties. It was a satirical collection of tech terms current to the time.
So if you weren’t around then, or remember it only faintly, a lot of it has aged out of relevance. It would mean nothing to anyone in their twenties, and a bit older, I suspect.
Anyway, I decided to rescue it from the Internet archive for my own purposes. Some notes added.
CRYPT NEWSLETTER’S “JOSEPH K” GUIDE: AN OCCASIONAL GLOSSARY TO TECH TERMINOLOGY
“This is not a psychotic episode, it is a cleansing moment
of clarity.”
–Howard Beale in “Network”
antilethal: Opposite the spirit of maximum lethality but still deadly.
Usage: The antilethal precision munition had incinerated only two hundred civilians when it landed on a bunker in downtown Baghdad so the generals could not understand why the international newsmedia became so irritated.
[Era First Gulf War. While the US military and groupie arms trade industry magazines employed it, it never stuck.]
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Associated Press: an international misinformation vendor. See Reuters.
Usage: An Associated Press wire news story told of Vice Miskovic, a Croat teenager who had downloaded the entire U.S. strategic arsenal into his home in Zadar through an Internet connection to Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam.
[Vice Miskovic was an actual Euro-hacker. Pretty much just a witless teenager, for a short period he became the object of great press exaggerations for, gosh, getting into some military networks. That never happened.]
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commerce: something indeterminate that’s always booming on the Internet, although no one you know has ever seen or benefited from it.
Usage: Representatives of a grotesquely hyped Internet start-up asserted that its commerce was tripling monthly in cyberspace even as the firm surreptitiously filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11.
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computer virus: a small replicating computer program designed to spread autonomously; or, a marketing tool used by computer security experts and anti-virus software companies; or, something indeterminate responsible for making any computer or network behave weirdly.
Usage: Angered by the mystifying and increasingly nettlesome crashes of his new WIN95-equipped computer, Loy suspected a computer virus.
[Do you remember Windows 95? “Oh, the pain.” — Zachary Smith]
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consultant: U.S. Department of Defense or civil service free-lancer usually involved in a conflict of interest; or, a recently downsized employee of corporate America.
Usage: The consultant from Science Applications International Corporation enjoyed writing policy papers for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs that always cleverly ensured more DoD business for his firm.
Usage: Two years after being downsized by Acme Data Systems, Scroggins’ carefree life as an Internet consultant came to an end when he declared bankruptcy, was divorced by his wife and lost visitation rights to his children.
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content: an amorphous term encompassing material of utterly no value found on World Wide Web sites.
Usage: The mouthpiece for a conglomerate of entertainment magazines, whose readership encompassed a great number of gossip-hungry simpletons, vowed his company’s Web site would be content rich.
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cutting edge: hackneyed usage meant to convey a quality of hipness and intellectual excellence but, instead, standing for quite the opposite.
Usage: One editor at a stodgy newspaper declared his business and technology section cutting edge even though everyone knew it was only a forum for rewritten press releases issued by corporate America.
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cybercash: a fuzzy concept glossy magazines and Internet flacks claim will make everyone — except maybe you — wealthy in cyberspace. Not to be confused with cash money.
Usage: Wackerman dreamed of the cybercash riches he would reap from the sale of his electronic story of a shy but brilliant software engineer who saves the country from destruction at the hands of international terrorists and information warriors.
[Still true for most people.]
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The Daily Crapper: your local newspaper.
Usage: The Daily Crapper featured science and technology reporters who often turned in stories that claimed soon computers would be made of DNA and protein or that by the year 2006 the U.S. Army would defeat enemies through the clever use of telepathy and electric rays.
[Originally from around 1994, also still true. DNA computers and electric rays, coming any day now.]
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digerati: the celebrities of the ‘Net and/or computing industry; or, Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts.” [But that’s another tale].
Usage: While the press releases and treatises of the digerati were of less value to the average American than a plate of singing maggots, the mainstream media always loved them.
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electronic bogeyman: a hacker, instrument of a hacker or anonymous source portrayed in the mainstream media as a menace to society. The electronic bogeyman must always be quoted making grandiose, unverifiable, or nutty claims (e.g., opening all the automatic garage doors in Anaheim, California at precisely 2:00 pm) about feats, usually malicious, that can be performed with a computer.
Usage: Reuters interviewed an electronic bogeyman from Taiwan who claimed his computer virus would corrupt data on Japanese computers if that country did not immediately surrender ownership of the Daioyu Islands in the East China Sea.
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electronic Pearl Harbor (or “EPH”): a bromide popularized by Alvin Toffler-types, ex-Cold War generals, assorted corporate windbags and hack journalists, to name a few. EPH is meant to signify a nebulous electronic doom looming over U.S. computer networks. In the real world, it’s a cue for the phrase “Watch your wallet!” since those wielding it are usually doing so in an attempt to convince taxpayers or consumers to fund ill-defined and/or top secret projects said to be aimed at protecting us from it.
Usage: Salesmen for the secretive Department of Defense contractor, Science Applications, were always good for quote saying that electronic Pearl Harbor had already happened, was happening even now, or would happen some day soon, depending on the needs of the reporters interviewing them.
[It’s not Science Applications anymore, a company most Americans have still never heard of unless they work for the military. Now it’s the Lockheeds and Northrop Grummans, much bigger fish in the ecosystem.]
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expert: instrument of journalists deployed to burnish whatever received wisdom is being passed on as news; or, instrument of journalists used to furnish stock criticisms for heretical or unpopular findings; or, someone frequently counted on by hack journalists to provide Delphic wisdom on a subject or subjects the expert knows little about.
Usage: The Hudson Institute expert was often asked for her comments on computer viruses and information warfare even though it had been shown she was computer illiterate.
[A real person. She died a few years ago.]
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fictive environment: a new description for psychological operations against an enemy; or, the creation of a world of information fraud surrounding consumers, marks or targets.
Usage: In the mid-Nineties, the business of a significant number of Americans armed with computers became the spinning of fictive environments, the aim of which was to defraud others of cash money.
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free speech: something everyone is required to defend, usually when practiced by the odious or students who’ve stepped in excrement.
Usage: As he studied the inside of a cramped Santa Ana jail cell, student Richard Machado concluded that the Orange County jury did not interpret the explanation that he only wanted to “start a dialogue” with Asian students when he mass e-mailed them a message that said “I will hunt down and kill your stupid asses” as a whimsical exercise in free speech.
[A Crypt Newsletter No-Prize if you can tell me what’s happened to this guy.]
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…for dummies: the trademark of a very successful line of books written for those who cannot read by those who cannot write.
Usage: The important editor wrote a querulous letter taking great umbrage at the satirical light in which his “…for dummies” books were portrayed.
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Golden Pizzle of Information: any authority figure accustomed to being publicized unquestioningly; or, computer experts fond of making dumbly obvious, fraudulent, indecipherable or insane statements which few dare to seriously question.
Usage: Assuming the leaden mantle of Golden Pizzle of Information, Vice Chairman Gary Fernandes of EDS Corp. told a rapt audience, “We have technical clutter. We speak in buzzwords and acronyms.”
[Replaced by Richard Clarke.]
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Good Times virus: A hoax believed to be true by many computer-using Americans.
Usage: Modzelewski was written up by for insubordination after laughing indiscreetly at a meeting in which the esteemed network consultant passed out memos on Good Times.
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hardware glitch: The cause of all human errors and oversights leading to down time and lost e-mail at national Internet Service Providers or Online Services.
Usage: America On-Line mouthpiece Tatiana Gau said a hardware glitch was responsible for the system-wide failure. Related: see computer virus.
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hacker: In this context, a young man very adept with computers and networks, possibly a pawn of Libya or North Korea.
Usage: Indeed it was good the hacker had been apprehended in his single apartment in Raleigh because the government feared he was only a step away from bringing down the entire system of international banking.
[Now since moved to China.]
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HERF weapon: Always suspected but never seen, the HERF – or High Energy Radio Frequency – gun is responsible for much nettlesome corporate computer failure nationwide, according to information warriors.
Usage: Dodson was relieved the computer security guru had been able to convince management that the corrupted data on the network was the work of an HERF weapon attack on the corporation, not the boobytrapped pornographic bit of software he had obtained from alt.sex.watersports.
[Seized the imagination of Newt Gingrich and spawned the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy.]
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information wants to be free: tired hacker slogan formerly denoting that the flow of information is empowering and cannot be restricted; now a cliche usually spouted by a variety of dolts who employ it as a rationalization for ripping off others.
Usage: “Information wants to be free,” thought Vice Miskovic, a teenager from Zadar, Croatia, as he uploaded his Make Money Fast cash pyramid scheme to the Usenet.
[Make Money Fast was a Ponzi scheme and poor Vice, that was the best of his achievements in the real world.]
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information warfare: n. In this context, everything and nothing. What hackers, Libyan agents, rogue nations, international criminals, pariah states and pan-national groups of religious fundamentalists will conduct against America in the near future.
Usage: America On-Line was besieged by a series of vexing and seemingly pointless information warfare attacks conducted by teenage hackers armed with AOL Hell, a program that automated the sending of scrofulous electronic messages to other customers.
[Believe it or not, defense industry and DoD information warfare/cyberwar guys really did think Libyans were behind things back then. Ha-ha.]
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interactive: an adjective used to adorn computer and software products that are intrinsically worthless, unusable or both.
Usage: “Our interactive Web browser — the Microsoft Internet Explorer — is the only one of its kind that can unlock the magic of the Internet, revivify your moribund sex life, order your office activities, protect your children from pedophiles, and run a Ponzi scheme on the Usenet — all at the same time,” burbled Patty Stonedchik, head of Microsoft’s Multimedia Division.
[Patty Stonedchik was a real person, named changed only slightly. Maybe she’s still around.]
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international rule of law: that which is invoked when another country not in the West defies the military, political or business interests of the United States.
Usage: The Washington Post quoted sources at the Government Accounting Office who maintained that pariah states in the Third World, their exact identities classified, had broken the international rule of law by enlisting hackers to attack U.S. networks through the Internet.
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leftist: anyone in the U.S. who dares to be critical of authority figures.
Usage: From time to time, p.r. mouthpieces in the employ of giant defense contractors or bloated software firms would write and accuse Crypt Newsletter’s editor of being a leftist.
[Now it’s socialist.]
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libertarian: once a handy political label for those who believe in free markets and personal liberty; now a handy marketing tool for those who wish to lower taxes, disarm government employees and spend large amounts of money on anything published by Wired Ventures, Inc.
Usage: The mighty publisher of WIRED magazine galvanized a phalanx of Net libertarians into sending a million electronic mails to Congress in protest of Net censorship — where they were immediately deleted, unread, by college interns.
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mentufactury: A kind of pompous term for bullshitting, especially the variety associated with flacking for your information business, hardware, software or the Internet.
Usage: In the mid-Nineties, mentufactury became the primary export of American business resulting in a startling trade deficit disaster.
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meta-data: see pseudo-data.
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mutual assured annoyance (MAA): the state that exists when U.S. Department of Defense information warriors engage in secret combat with hackers or the information warriors of other nations.
Usage: Crystal often thought about the consequences that might befall him should his Air Force superiors ever discover that the best result his team of information warriors could hope for was mutual assured annoyance of the enemy.
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mouthpiece: A paid liar employed by corporations or institutions to emit “expert” commentary for the mainstream media or press releases. In press releases, often the mouthpiece will not even have actually said what he or she is quoted as saying, the quote being copy fabricated by a more eloquent marketroid hidden within the firm. See fictive environment and expert.
Usage: Marty Levecki, a mouthpiece for a giant defense contractor, told USA Today his firm’s consultants had discovered a dangerous computer hacker roaming freely through the Pentagon.
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Netizen: formerly, a term meaning citizen of the Net; now, an overused, unintentional pejorative describing a group of annoying computing technology-obsessed, mostly white, mostly male, blowhards.
Usage: Netizen Kane stamped his foot in glee as he used his skills in PC automation to send 1,000 e-mail copies of a windy, libertarian rant to Congressmen, the President and the press, where it was subsequently deleted, unread, by college interns.
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paradigm: pattern, an example, a model; or, a word used by people who believe their own press releases. See digerati.
Usage: The pronouncements of Bill Gates were the paradigm for the impenetrable phlogiston surrounding much of home and business computing.
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phlogiston: an imaginary element formerly believed to cause combustion; or, Crypt Newsletter’s euphemism for what comes out of the south end of a northbound bull; or, a primary American export commodity (see mentufactury).
Usage: Not even the powerful American newsmedia could rival the Usenet in the dissemination of phlogiston.
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pseudo-data: text, test results, charts, bar graphs, numbers and statistics produced by the convergence of mentufactury and technoquack. Sometimes known as advertising.
Usage: The driven and deeply neurotic marketing employees of the computer industry often tyrannized consumers with fraudulent and confusing broadcasts of pseudo-data disguised as information.
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remote viewing: use of psychic means to conjure up an accurate image of something not physically observable by the “remote viewer.”
Usage: The generals of U.S. Army intelligence were very impressed when the non-lethal weapons guru described Muammar Ghaddafi sitting in a dwelling somewhere near a sandy desert, all through the science of remote viewing.
[In 2009, they made a movie about ‘remote viewers’ called The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney. It was a total failure.]
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Reuters: an international misinformation vendor.
Usage: A Reuters wire news story told of a computer virus factory discovered on the dark side of the Moon by business security consultants, Krakt & Zane.
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Road Ahead, The: a book for those who despise books, credited — ghost-written by some flunky, actually — to a man who also despises books. Related to and/or see “. . . for dummies.
Usage: Unable to unload the excessive printing of “The Road Ahead” in the continental United States, Bill Gates came up with the novel idea of arm-twisting Russian paupers wishful for his beneficence into purchasing copies for about 9 dollars, cash U.S.
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Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC): gigantic contractor for the Pentagon which most Americans have never heard of; or, a secret corporation that relies almost exclusively upon taxpayer dollars for profits.
Usage: “The ideal Science Applications International Corporation business project always involves classification so that outside audits, fraud investigations and meddlesome taxpayers can be side-stepped,” the SAIC vice-president patiently explained to the new hire.
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source: an anonymous lawyer, corporate salesman, Dept. of Defense consultant, employee of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), civil servant or Pentagon apparatchik employed by reporters and editors to pump up flaccid news with impressive quantities of phlogiston. See phlogiston.
Usage: By employing the clever techniques of information warfare, it will be possible to remove future dictators from power without firing a shot, said the Pentagon source to the credulous journalist.
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Sun Tzu: ancient Chinese military philosopher — but now a useful marketing tool. Also overused source of quote for information warriors who cannot think of anything original to say.
Usage: The executives of the publishing firm thought the manuscript “Sun Tzu’s Power Web Publishing” was a potential blockbuster and planned to follow it with an entire line of “Sun Tzu” computer manuals.
Usage: “Sun Tzu was the first and greatest information warrior,” said the windbag from the National Defense University during an afternoon tea at the Pentagon. See also windbag.
[Now the favorite of every US military academic whose works are only read by those paid to do so. Which means everyone in the peer group.]
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superscientists: The engineers, technicians and researchers who develop weapons for the US military under the cover of black projects. In glossy mainstream magazines they appear always omniscient and generally anonymously.
Usage: The non-lethal weapons guru at Los Alamos National Laboratory provided sage guidance for a crack team of superscientists engaged in Project Beans R-Good4Heart, an effort to build an ultra/infra-sonic cannon capable of inducing ineradicable, debilitating flatus in crowds of hostile foreigners and terrorists.
[Produced the pain ray. And made designs and computer models for nuclear-fission powered drones.]
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Symantec: formerly, a company that developed utility software but now a conglomerate of squamous lawyers interested only in emitting press releases and launching meretricious suits against rivals and alleged enemies; or, a company that features a picture of a man on its product boxes who no longer has anything to do with the firm.
Usage: Angered that his company was compelled to compete with other firms in the marketplace, the Symantec CEO summoned a platoon of lawyers and tasked them with the goal of finding a way to sue retailers and consumers for having the temerity to deal with his rivals.
More usage: The box for Symantec’s Norton Anti-virus software featured a likeness of Peter Norton, a man who no longer worked for the company and who had once insisted computer viruses were urban myths.
[Obscure but true story.]
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technoquack: an individual, e.g. a consultant or member of the Alvin Toffler Army, who specializes in mentufactury; or, the speechifying of a technoquack or someone who hasn’t quite become one yet.
Usage: The technoquack from the MIT Media Lab enjoyed annoying readers of his books with periodic declarations that Americans yearned for more advertising disguised as news, not less.
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Victor von Doom: a.k.a Dr. Doom, an arch villain in the Marvel Comics universe often portrayed handcrafting a variety of directed energy weapons — ray guns — with which to smite enemies; now used by Crypt Newsletter as a catch-all designation for computer security snake-oil salesmen and assorted crackpots spreading freaky tales of non-existent electronic death rays.
Usage: Victor von Doom, a faculty member at the University of Gobble-Wallah in Brisbane, Australia, warned frightened businessmen that a raygun capable of surreptitiously smashing networked corporate computers from a distance of half a mile could be easily fashioned from parts including a cattle prod, two potato knishes, one TV antenna and four car batteries.
[A Crypt Newsletter/DD Blog No-Prize if you know what a Gobble-Wallah is.]
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windbag: see expert, source.
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Ziff-Davis: a marketing instrument of the computing industry masquerading as a conglomerate of journalistic effort.
Usage: The Ziff-Davis managing editor assigned his favorite witless flunky to write a puff piece on one vendor’s horribly buggy software after the vendor tithed $32,000 to the Z-D advertising department.
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“I am here to whip people, and whip them I shall.”
–The Whipper in Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”
A piece that ran in the Guardian’s Comment is Free column is worth a quick superciliousness snort.
Covering Secrecy Blog’s recent release of a Sandia report on canceled plans for atom drones last week, the title is: US draws up plans for nuclear drones, by Nick Fielding.
The report, fairly obviously, states the drone technology which was the subject of design studies will never make it off the ground. And DD blog explained why here and at GlobalSecurity.Org.
The technology, although never directly named, is a propulsion energy source involving radio-decay, nuclear isotopes and fission products. And the reason Sandia boffins dropped it is because of an experience many years ago with the classified Timber Wind project, which involved nuclear propulsion in rocketry.
The bad publicity that resulted when Timber Wind was exposed by the Federation of American Scientists caused its cancellation. And while Sandia’s boffins of bad ideas couldn’t quite bring themselves to not take peeks at nuclear propulsion for drones, it’s also quite clear they recognized their projects were never going to be reality. For exactly the same reasons Timber Wind was scuttled.
Fielding’s piece for the Guardian makes no mention of any of this. It’s a big omission because it’s at the heart of the story. And, if ignored, it allows you to come to a conclusion that’s the opposite of reality but what’s conveyed in the Guardian, a much more sensational thing.
So the journalist finds someone you’ve never heard of to make a concerned noise about something that’s never going to happen:
“It’s pretty terrifying prospect,” said Chris Coles of Drone Wars UK, which campaigns against the increasing use of drones for both military and civilian purposes. “Drones are much less safe than other aircraft and tend to crash a lot. There is a major push by this industry to increase the use of drones and both the public and government are struggling to keep up with the implications …”
Using nuclear power would enable the Reaper not only to remain airborne for far longer, but to carry more missiles or surveillance equipment …
“Isn’t ‘sexed up’ the British term?” commented Steve Aftergood wryly in e-mail to DD.
From the mists of time and the old archive of Crypt Newsletter material, a summary of amusing stories on electromagnetic pulse weaponry in the mainstream news. All of it over a decade old.
While it’s not for laymen, a quick read gives some historical perspective on why electromagnetic pulse weapons are the technology that’s always been coming but never quite arriving. They comprise a tech Bigfoot surrounded and nurtured by an environment of gullible fools, superstitious people, national defense paranoids, charlatans and mountebanks.
Calling Victor von Doom — published 1999
From the Josef K Guide to Tech terminology:
EMP gun: n. Always suspected but never seen, the EMP — electromagnetic pulse — weapon is the chupacabra of cyberspace. Accordingly, it is said to be responsible for much nettlesome corporate computer and bank failure, almost always in countries where such things cannot be verified.
Usage: Pelham was amused when the overly gullible newspaper reporter published his frank lies about Russian computer programmers knocking over international banks with emp guns made from stolen Radio Shack equipment.
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One of the most persistent fairy tales propagated in information warfare circles is the urban legend of the electromagnetic pulse gun. When it shows up in the mainstream media, courtesy of Reuters or the Associated Press, it looks something like this:
“Dateline BRUSSELS — Criminals can use the Internet to create powerful electromagnetic weapons that threaten society with chaos and destruction, a Latverian military officer warned Friday.
“Underground sites on the Internet contain instructions on how to put together dangerous weapons that use electromagnetic or high-energy pulses that cripple computer systems, telephone systems and alarms, according to Victor von Doom, chief engineer at the Defense Materials division of the Latverian armed forces’ electronic systems division.
“High-tech goods found everywhere in the world can be used to create powerful weapons using recipes found on the Internet,” said von Doom at a meeting of the International Association Of Quack Computer Consultants in Europe.
“The problem is spreading from Russia, von Doom said.”
Pretty scary. But sensational garbage that was actually published by one of the wire news services. Crypt News only changed the names of the parties involved.
[For a more recent example from the newsmedia, consider 20/20’s coverage of radio frequency weapons in the “Postscript.”]
Crypt News took the time to talk to some scientists at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque. Neal Singer pronounced it an interesting urban legend. Sandia, of course, is one of the national laboratories responsible for weaponization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The lab has also done extensive research into shielding against and generation of electromagnetic pulse effects.
Awareness of electromagnetic pulse effects happened in 1962 when a 1.4 megaton nuclear weapon was detonated in Test Shot Starfish. The Starfish shot was conducted 400 kilometers high above the mid-Pacific and the electromagnetic pulse from it destroyed satellite equipment and blocked high frequency radio communications across the Pacific for 30 minutes. “Strings of street lights in Oahu went out and hundreds of burglar alarms set off when the pulses overloaded their circuits,” wrote William Arkin in “S.I.O.P.: The Strategic U.S. Plan for Nuclear War.” A scientist at Lawrence Livermore, Nicholas Christofilos, had predicted this effect earlier in the rear, calculating that high energy particles from a nuclear burst high in the atmosphere would become trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field, producing a series of lightning-like pulses.
Since then, the idea of using electromagnetic effects as a death ray, of sorts, produced without a messy 1.4 megaton nuclear explosion, has become increasingly interesting to fans of the weird quack-science of non-lethality and, for some reason, computer security experts and teenage hackers. For example, Crypt Newsletter frequently receives poorly spelled advertisements put together by teenagers advertising schematics for electromagnetic computer death rays for about $5.00 cash U.S. These, along with instructions for turning the telephone handset into an electric chair, software for melting the circuitry in a PC, and recipes for poisoning enemies with arsenicals — come dirt cheap on pink photocopying paper or cheesy-looking pamphlets sold at “Survival Books” in north Hollywood.
Interestingly, Winn Schwartau did much to embed the myth of the emp weapon in the mainstream imagination with his 1994 book “Information Warfare.” In it, Schwartau wrote of secret U.S. missiles used against Iraq in the Gulf War to short circuit communications through bursts of microwaves. It was an interesting mistake based on a more prosaic reality having nothing to do with emp weapons. In the Gulf War, the Navy used a few Tomahawks containing spools of carbon filament. The filament was deployed across Iraq’s power lines and stations by the Tomahawks, causing black-outs by short circuit around Baghdad.
Since 1992 the tale of the emp gun has been seized upon by hackers rather too eager to sell gullible journalists on a pseudo-reality of imposing feats of technical legerdemain. (For example, mention of it as a hacker tool contaminates Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s “War and Anti-War,” published in 1993. The EMP gun appearances are also cyclical, many times attached every year to Winn Schwartau, Inc.’s information warfare conventions in Washington, DC. Journalists attend these types of things and report that the EMP gun has just been invented. Almost like clockwork — appearances in the media, be it 1997, 1998, 1999, even mere months apart, such reporters have almost no memory on subject — and the EMP gun is “invented” anew, rising from its own ashes, another phoenix of mystifying electronic danger that puts us all at risk. However, what is usually “invented” is little more than a glorified stun baton that can make a television screen blink or a radio speaker emit static at about ten paces.)
In another such story, “Hack Attack,” published as a cover feature in a 1996 issue of Forbes ASAP magazine, a number of “dangerous ex-hackers” played the game, “Let’s lie to the journalist.” The emp-weapon-used-against-Iraq 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.
The sticking point of the legend, according to Sandia’s Singer and others Crypt News interviewed, is the generation of militarily interesting amounts of electromagnetic pulse. To generate the effects ascribed to the notional weapon requires power fluxes that would kill everyone triggering the device and everyone in the vicinity of the detonation and target. Far easier to use Tim McVeigh’s fuel oil-soaked fertilizer truck bomb.
John Pike, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Space Policy Project puckishly commented, “[This] is sorta like Dr. Strangelove saying that a Doomsday Machine ‘would not be dificult’! It is easily within the reach of even the smallest . . . nuclear power.”
Nevertheless, the myth of electromagnetic pulse weapons remains powerful, gaining lodgment in the damndest places. Indeed, in Crypt Newsletter 42 one article discussed how a U.S. Army course on information warfare in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was instructing about them in its sub-lecture devoted to weaponry.
Now, Crypt News provides a thumbnail list of the myth’s characteristic hearsay.
1. The EMP gun is always seen in remote places, as in “Boris Badenov, a computer security consultant, said criminal hooligans had destroyed a bank network in Dvinsk with an emp gun and escaped with 8 millions rubles in blackmail money.”
2. The EMP gun is always developed by adjunct professors, fringe military reservists, or hackers. For example: “Glip Popple, an adjunct professor of information warfare at the Technical University of Gobble-Wallah in Australia, said he had built a working emp gun for $2,000,” or “Uber-Fiend, a hacker for a group calling itself Karn Evil 9, told Reuters correspondents he had built a 12 gigaJoule electromagnetic pulse projector.”
3. EMP guns are always secret, protected by classification, as in, “W. E. van Azathoth, a computer scientist genius working for the northern Virginia company Nefari US Electronics, had written a working paper on constructing emp weapons from four bags of sour cream and onion potato chips, a roll of aluminum foil and a positronic hammer — it was immediately seized and classified by the National Security Agency.
4. Sometimes only unnamed “experts” talk about EMP guns, as in: “Experts have revealed to Associated Press reporters that U.S. banks lost $90 billion due to electromagnetic pulse attacks in 1996 — the assaults untraceable, the perpetrators — unknown.”
5. Illicit EMP gun blueprints are on the Internet. Usage: “This reporter was told by a very highly placed Pentagon consultant that plans for EMP guns were on the Internet and that teen hooligans and criminal gangsters had obtained them.”
6. Infrequently, an “EMP gun” — more accurately, anything that can emulate the electromagnetic emissions of a large, unshielded electric motor — will be demonstrated on assorted pieces of electronic equipment at conversational range. Results will be trivial or unremarkable and the demonstrator, often someone with a cargo cult-like devotion to the memory and work of Nikola Tesla, will dress them up as quite the opposite. Invariably, the demonstrations are conducted by people or agencies who just “coincidentally” happen to offer consulting services to defend against EMP guns.
Indeed, it must be considered that in a country where a googly-eyed eunuch can persuade a large group of educated adults to poison themselves in preparation for hitching a ride on a flying saucer and a significant portion of the citizenry cannot be convinced that aliens didn’t land at Roswell, the EMP gun must be a lead pipe cinch to sell.
Postscript: Interestingly, an EMP gun inventor, David Schriner, showed up on ABC’s 20/20 in mid-February 1999 to demonstrate the effects of it for an overawed Diane Sawyer. After donning fancy protective suits and unusual-looking copper mesh headgear, Schriner tested his weapon on Sawyer’s corvette and a white limousine. At a range of about 5-10 feet and with the weapon pointed directly into the automobiles’ open engine compartment, Schriner’s electromagnetic pulse gun made Sawyer’s idling corvette . . . run roughly. [Crypt News notes it can make any car’s engine stop permanently, not just hesitate, at a range of five feet with a sledgehammer aimed directly into an open engine compartment.] Once, said Sawyer, the electric locks in her car’s doors went up and down, too. While Sawyer stood well away from her car, farther away from it than Schriner’s contraption, electronic videocameras inside the car continued to work during the firing of the “weapon.”
During the segment, Sawyer claimed “results” of testing of electromagnetic pulse on a Cobra helicopter at Junction Ranch in China Lake were “classified.” Curiously, Crypt Newsletter covered the results of this test which were published on the Web over a year ago by the government.
Besides David Schriner’s demonstration of a short range microwave’s ability to occasionally stall an idling, parked car at extremely close range, Sawyer’s story — like all Crypt News has seen on the subject, relied a great deal upon hearsay.
Now, here comes the tricky part.
Sawyer also claimed on 20/20: “Russian criminals have used an RF weapon, we’re told, to disarm security and rob a bank.”
Crypt Newsletter repeats from the top of the story:
“Pelham was amused when the overly gullible newspaper reporter published his frank lies about Russian computer programmers knocking over international banks with emp guns made from stolen Radio Shack equipment.”
And:
“Boris Badenov, a computer security consultant, said criminal hooligans had destroyed a bank network in Dvinsk with an emp gun and escaped with 8 millions rubles in blackmail money.”
Read carefully: Crypt Newsletter made these statements up in 1997 as humorous examples — jokes — to be used as material for this article. In the context of this piece, they are amusing fictions.
Apparently, Crypt Newsletter’s jokes about EMP guns have traveled sufficiently far away from their original source to wind up gulling Diane Sawyer on 20/20 in 1999.
Update: March 03, 1998: One of Diane Sawyer’s sources for the 20/20 broadcast was Victor Sheymov, a KGB defector who advertised himself as a communications expert. Sheymov told Sawyer the KGB has used a microwave weapon to start a fire in the U.S. embassy in 1997 for the purposes of annoyance and in hope that firemen would be summoned. Using the firemen as cover, the idea was to plant listening devices in the embassy.
Sheymov said the same thing before the House Joint Economic in February 1999, describing what can only be characterized as trivial effects of alleged Russian EMP gun use:
Sheymov: Another example of a [EMP] attack was the KGB’s manipulation of the United States Embassy security system in Moscow in the mid-80s. This was done in the course of the KGB operation against the Embassy which targeted the U.S. marines there. The security system alarm was repeatedly falsely triggered by the KGB’s induced [radio frequency] interference several times during the night. This was an attempt to annoy and fatigue the marines [sic] and to cause the turning of the “malfunctioning” system off.
Woo – a ringing alarm and, next, an alleged minor fire — pretty scary stuff. Surely the cloth a national emergency is woven from.
Sheymov: Additional example of an [EMP] attack was when the KGB used it to induce fire in one of the equipment rooms in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1977. A malfunction was forced on a piece of equipment. It caught fire, which spread over a sensitive area of the Embassy. The KGB tried to infiltrate its bugging technicians into the sensitive area under the cover of the firefighters who arrived immediately after the fire started.
Subsequent to his appearance on 20/20, Sheymov was placed on the payroll of the National Security Agency where what was unclassified trivial testimony for TV reporters is, apparently, now classified. [Crypt Newsletter asks the question: How does one measure the incentive for alleged KGB defectors to embroider their stories for American handlers in hopes they will be put on a taxpayer-derived salary?]
[Many years ago Sheymov also started a trivial computer security firm, very little of which actually appears to exist.
“A security firm headed by a former KGB agent has come under fire for claims its forthcoming products provide the ultimate solution to computer security problems,” reads a short news piece from 2001.]
Update — March 23, 1999: Yellow Peril — The EMP gun hallucination is now intermingled with the hysteria over Chinese spying.
In a mid-March Newsweek story on alleged Chinese penetration of the U.S. network of nuclear bomb-making national laboratories, magazine reporters write:
“[The Chinese] may also have stolen secrets about U.S. efforts [emphasis added] to devise a nuclear weapon tailored to create an electromagnetic pulse; a man-made lightning bolt that would short out anything in an enemy nation that uses electricity.”
By the 19th, the Newsweek rumor had quickly mutated into a tale of stolen electromagnetic pulse guns, courtesy of the New York Times.
Initially, during a White House press conference, President Clinton was asked by a Fox News reporter:
“Mr. President, you said just a short while ago that no one has reported to you they suspect Chinese espionage at U.S. nuclear labs during your administration, sir. But sources tell Fox News, and we are reporting this evening, that China stole the technology for electromagnetic pulse weapons from several nuclear labs during your first term in office, sir, and that the Chinese have successfully tested these weapons in China. And the sources also say that the administration, at least, was aware of this.
“Can you tell us, sir, were you not personally aware? Are you concerned about this? And what will be your administration’s response to the report?”
This raises an interesting question. How can the President determine if a weapon is stolen if it is not known to exist?
Ambushed by phlogiston, the President nevertheless gamely tried to answer:
President Clinton: “Well, you didn’t say what the source of what they sold was. You say they ‘stole, is that the word you used?”
Fox reporter: “Yes, sir, the technology for EMP weapons, from four of the 11 nuclear labs.”
The President susbsequently said he knew nothing of the matter and that he forgot little of what went on during national security briefings.
By Saturday, the New York Times had picked it up. This time, the statements on EMP guns, not nuclear weapons tuned for EMP broadcast, was attributed to the standard EMP red herring, the anonymous government source.
The reader will notice the confusion and chronic abuse of anonymous sourcing common to all of these stories.
From the New York Times: “When asked by a reporter from Fox News about whether China stole information from the labs about a nuclear device called an electromagnetic pulse warhead, during his tenure, the president said he knew nothing about that.”
“A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Friday night that intelligence reports show that China is satisfied that it has obtained the technology to develop a so-called electromagnetic gun. That gun, the official said, shoots an electromagnetic pulse.”
“It is not a nuclear weapon, however,” continued the Times, “and is different from the electromagnetic pulse warhead in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.”
In June 1997, the House Joint Economic Committee entertained testimony from a retired general, Robert Schweitzer, who claimed China was attempting to obtain EMP gun technology from Russia. During the same hearing, a great deal of effort was spent in bloviation about the Red Chinese peril.
In early 1999, a KGB-defector named Victor Sheymov claimed on national television that the KGB had used EMP guns to attack the U.S. embassy in Moscow, causing an alarm system to ring and the instigation of a minor fire. As a result, Sheymov was hired as a consultant to the National Security Agency.
One month later, amidst more Yellow Peril hysteria, the Chinese are accused of stealing not only the plans for a standard nuclear weapon, but also electromagnetic pulse guns, which have not been demonstrated to exist, and — maybe — plans for a nuclear weapon-tuned to create maximum EMP. [Perhaps the NSA should be paying “the national labs” for consultation?]
The reader may notice how none of these rumors, or news reports, appear to be on the same page.
Update — April 11, 1999: The war against Yugoslavia has spawned its own EMP weapon chupacabras.
Rumors of new weaponry in use by the US Air Force floating around the Usenet and in and out of mainstream news organizations which should know better appear to stem from a brief article of extremely suspect credibility originally published by the Moscow ITAR-TASS news service on March 29.
In “US Uses [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] as Test Site for New Bomb,” reporter Anatoly Yurkin writes:
“The USA is using Yugoslavia as a testing ground for its latest secret offensive weapons. The ITAR-TASS correspondent was told today at the Defence Ministry that, besides cluster bombs, which are extensively being used during the air strikes, the American bomber crews are using experimental samples of the latest aircraft bombs, the specifications of which differ considerably from those of conventional offensive weapons.
“This aircraft bomb was developed in secret laboratories in Los Alamos, where the first American nuclear bomb was created. The new weapon is designed to disrupt the enemy’s radio-electronic equipment. When it explodes, it generates an electric impulse, similar to the electromagnetic waves during a nuclear explosion. In its military specifications this bomb is a cross between a conventional weapon and a nuclear one, which provides grounds for regarding it as a weapon of mass destruction.
“It is reported that the US air force is using two strategic B-2 bombers, developed with the ‘Stealth’ technology, to test the latest American aircraft bomb.”
Crypt Newsletter reminds its readers that “official Russian news agencies” like ITAR-TASS have much in common with editorial practices at tabloids like the Weekly World News and National Enquirer. Traditionally, intelligence analysts have regarded it as a good source of fairy tales.
For example, on December 16, Komsomolskaya Pravda, like ITAR-TASS, one of “Russia’s largest circulation and most outspoken dailies,” published a feature entitled: “Electronic ‘Hiroshima’ Already Hidden in Moscow; 21st Century Wars Will Be Like Computer Horror Games.”
An interesting and rather amusing myth passed on by the Russian news agency was framed around the appearance of Richard Pryce, one of two British hackers who broke into the Department of Defense’s Rome Labs installation at Griffiss Air Force Base in 1994. Pryce and his [accomplice], claimed the Russian article, launched a “[space] shuttle” remotely and switched all of “New York’s traffic lights to green.”
In the same piece, the EMP weapon chupacrabras is invoked.
However, instead of U.S. bombers using it over Yugoslavia, the situation is quite the opposite: The Russian military will use EMP bombs, which it calls “beer cans,” to destroy U.S. “supercomputers.”
One hallmark of the EMP weapon chupacabras is its extreme flexibility.
One month it can be your secret weapon; the next it can be your enemy’s.
Updated — September 9, 1999: Schwartau, Inc’s. annual information warfare convention in Washington, DC., rolled out the same electromagnetic pulse gun demonstration David Schriner deployed for Diane Sawyer on 20/20 in February 1999. The primary difference was if you had a television and could tune to Sawyer in February, the demo was free, but if you went to Schwartau, Inc. in September it cost you $1000 or so. (Oops, better hope your boss who gave you use of the company credit card for it isn’t reading this.)
Schwartau, Inc’s. blurb for its $1000-buck-a-seat infowar convention read: “On Sept. 9 at InfowarCon-99, the first ever (Crypt News emphasis added) public conference demonstrations of an 1870 technology developed by Heindrich Hertz [sic] generates powerful electromagnetic effects on modern technology.”
First ever, Crypt Newsletter adds, only since an identical dog-and-pony show in February 1999 on primetime network TV.
From the 20/20 transcript of Diane Sawyer’s piece on David Schriner’s Tesla ray in February of 1999:
DIANE SAWYER (voice over) But will it work? We take precautions with our cables and computerized cameras by enclosing them in copper shielding. [David] Schriner and his assistant use copper mesh masks to protect their eyes and face.
DAVID SCHRINER: Ray one is ready for testing.
DIANE SAWYER: The first target, two computers. The objective — to crash them.
DAVID SCHRINER: Going hot!
DIANE SAWYER : Every short burst has the energy of 100 radio stations, a million watts. Watch the computer on the left. In just three seconds, it crashes. And a few seconds later, so does the other one.
Pants-wetting stuff: “first ever” crashing of a PC at about ten paces and guys in funny-looking copper wire hats. Add this to KGB officer Victor Sheymov’s claims (made in the same Diane Sawyer 20/20 broadcast in February) about the same “first ever” technology being used to set off a burglar alarm and start a small fire at the US embassy in Moscow a couple decades ago — still surely the whole cloth national security emergencies are woven from.
The Cult of EMP Crazy, DefCon 1999. Virtually unwatchable, no matter how much booze you’ve consumed.
Today Steve Aftergood at Secrecy Blog posts a .pdf from the national labs explaining that special secret drone propulsion systems/technology has been canceled due to “poltical conditions.”
A certain technology that could extend the mission duration and capabilities of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) was favorably assessed last year by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation. But they concluded regretfully that “current political conditions will not allow use of the results.???
The assessment was carried out to explore the feasibility of next generation UAVs. The objective was “to increase UAV sortie duration from days to months while increasing available electrical power at least two-fold,??? according to a June 2011 Sandia project summary.
Although the the developers of this new potential drone propulsion power system do not specifically name it in the .pdf from Sandia, the technology and studies most probably stem from use of nuclear materials — radioisotopes and the power-generating processes of fission and radio-decay.
This triggers recall of the secret Timber Wind project of the Nineties, ideas and hardware for use of nuclear reactors in rocket propulsion, born of the same lab featured in today’s announcement.
Aftergood and FAS blew the lid off Timber Wind and the resulting sunlight caused it to wither and die. Global concern over potential US tests and flying of nuclear reactor run rockets did not count as good publicity.
The discovery of the hyper-classified Timber Wind program was an inspiration for the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, since we considered it a compelling instance of classification abuse … Timber Wind was canceled shortly after it became public, and other nuclear rocket initiatives likewise faded away in the 1990s, as the effort to develop nuclear rocketry for military or civilian applications surged and then collapsed, leaving behind only a bunch of good stories.
Today’s post at Secrecy blog also shows that even the boffins of bad ideas are occasionally compelled to admit the atrocious quality of some of the things they come up with preclude them ever being implemented.
Yes, news or even rumors of killer drones loaded with radioisotopes and fission products for purposes of propulsion over the impoverished regions of the world to hunt terrorists and civilians who are in the wrong place — that would really generate the good will. Even moreso than now.
Today I’m reprinting material from many years back, a piece I wrote for the Wall Street Journal, and a bit from Rob Slade’s old Springer-Verlag book on computer viruses.
This in an add-on to the Voice of America blog post on cyberwar and Iran falling prey to the now over twenty year old joke.
Indeed, the editors and reporter Doug Bernard at Voice of America could have avoided the entire thing.
In e-mail yesterday, one of the sources for the story — it’s not too hard to figure out who (look for the “cyber doom” quote) — remarked in e-mail he would have warned VOA’s journalist about it if it had been mentioned in interview — but it wasn’t.)
VOA News did not respond to two of my notifications to them on the matter.
The Gulf War virus hoax story remains relevant, even though I wish it didn’t, simply because the nature of it plays so well to mainstream discussions on cyberwar. Almost all these greatly rely on exaggeration, fantastic claims and the painting of apocalyptic scenarios which make the alleged discombobulation of an Iraqi air defense system in 1991 seem quaint.
Again, since the Gulf War virus hoax writings are now so old, you can’t find the originals on the web. (Well, you can find some material but it’s not at the fingertips.)
Reprints begin below.
Truth is the first casualty of cyberwar by George Smith, Wall Street Journal, September 8, 1998.
Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal c 1998. Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Concern is growing in many quarters that society’s reliance on computers has made it extremely vulnerable to attack via keyboard. Journalist James Adams has written a new book, “The Next World War,” which claims that information warfare will be the battleground of the future. At the Pentagon, military theorists ponder how to defend America against hackers in the employ of a foreign power who might use the Internet to turn off the electricity, paralyze the armed forces, cause corporations to crumble and write dirty words on your Web site.
Before you run screaming from your computer and haul the old manual typewriter out of the closet, look closely at the source of these cyber-scares. It turns out that many of them are information-age ghost stories that get spookier with every telling.
Mr. Adams’s book passes along a couple of hoary tales. The first revolves around the idea that the National Security Agency developed a computer virus for use in the Gulf War. Supposedly secreted in the hardware of computer equipment destined for Iraq–printers, in the most popular variation–the virus was somehow designed to bushwhack Iraqi air defense computers hooked to the same network. This is implausible on its face: A printer has neither the hardware space nor the capability to spontaneously transmit programs, which is what computer viruses are, to other computers on a network.
The printer-virus story is very similar to an April Fool’s joke published in a 1991 issue of Infoworld magazine. The story was subsequently picked up in “Triumph Without Victory,” U.S. News & World Report’s book on the Gulf War. Many have fallen for it besides Mr. Adams. In 1997, a Hudson Institute researcher gave it credence in an analysis of “Russian Views on Electronic and Information Warfare.”
The second beguiling myth perpetuated by Mr. Adams and many others is that of the electromagnetic pulse gun. Since at least 1992, teenage hackers desperate for media attention have been spinning elaborate tales about this exotic weapon, usually said to be cobbled together out of a few hundred dollars worth of electronic trinkets, radio antennae, bailing wire and automobile batteries. This electronic rifle is allegedly capable of destroying computers by firing an assortment of electromagnetic waves. Mr. Adams reprints part of a 1996 interview in Forbes ASAP in which a hacker insists these are the “poor man’s nuke.” At a hackers’ convention in Las Vegas, one participant– appropriately named “Ph0n-E”–even showed off a bogus contraption that he claimed was a pulse gun.
Obviously, the genesis of this idea lies in a 1962 nuclear test whose electromagnetic pulses famously blocked radio communications. But no one has been able to overcome the basic physics problem of packing these pulses into a gun: Any such weapon would have an effective range of only a few feet while requiring a power supply so large it would severely burn, if not kill, whoever fired the weapon.
Indeed, no genuine pulse gun has ever been produced for examination. But that hasn’t stopped Congress’s Joint Economic Committee from holding two unintentionally amusing hearings, in June 1997 and February 1998, on the matter. Apocryphal claims have even spread that unnamed British financial institutions have had their computers electrocuted by such weapons.
Some other cyberwar myths making the rounds:
In 1997, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s commission on reducing government secrecy issued a report containing a chapter devoted to computer security. In a boxed-out quote, the commission uncritically reported: “One company whose officials met with the Commission warned its employees against reading an e-mail entitled Penpal. . . . Although the message appeared to be a friendly letter, it contained a virus that could infect the hard drive and destroy all data present.” Actually Penpal is a notorious Internet hoax. In this instance, the pranksters took in a commission whose members included former intelligence agency chiefs John Deutch and Martin Faga. The spring issue of the U.S. Army War College’s scholarly journal, Parameters, contained an article by Lt. Col. Timothy L. Thomas that soberly mentioned a computer virus called Russian Virus 666 allegedly capable of putting computer users into a trance in which they could be made to suffer from arrhythmia of the heart. The virus’s satanic name should have been a tip-off. Yet while no one would give credence to a military publication that wrote about, say, salvaging weapons technology from UFOs, readers seem to leave logic behind when the subject is computers. In the December 1996 issue of the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin, two academics, Andra Katz of Wichita State University and David Carter of Michigan State, discuss the “Clinton virus” which was “designed to infect programs, but . . . eradicates itself when it cannot decide which program to infect.” To the chagrin of the authors, the indecisive “Clinton virus” was revealed to be another Internet joke.
Oh well, look at the bright side: Cyberwar is cheap. Dueling jokes, myths and hoaxes cost almost nothing to produce and even less to spread.
Mr. Smith is the editor of The Crypt Newsletter, an Internet publication about computer crime and information warfare.
Computer security and virus expert Rob Slade also addressed the Gulf War virus hoax in his book, forthrightly entitled “Rob Slade’s Guide to Computer Viruses,” published by Springer in 1995.
In a section on virus myths:
In early 1992, there were reports of a virus that shut down Iraq’s air defense system during Desert Shield/Storm. This seems to have started in Triumph Without Victory … and the serialization of the book by US News and World Report. The articles were rerun in many papers … and the article on the virus that ran in my local paper is specifically credited to US News & World Report. The bare bones of the article are that a French printer was to be smuggled into Iraq through Jordan; that US agents intercepted the printer and replaced a microchip in the printer with one reprogrammed by the NSA; and that a virus on the reprogrammed chip invaded the air defense network to which the printer was connected and erased information on display screens when “windows” were opened for additional information on aircraft.
[Longer technical discussion omitted.]
There is … a much more telling piece of evidence supporting the mythical status of what became known as the Desert Storm virus. Infoworld (April 1991) carried an article reporting a computer virus that US authorities had used to shut down Iraqi computer systems. The Infoworld article, to careful readers, an obvious April Fool’s joke (supported by the name of the virus, AF/91). The article ended with the warning that the virus was out of control and was now spreading through system in the Western world. It was a spoof of the new Windows 3 program, the popularity of which was startling industry analysts.
Although the Triumph Without Victory story was confirmed by sources in the Pentagon, the similarities to the Infoworld AF/91 prank article are simply too great. This is obviously a case of official “sources” taking their own information from gossip that had mutated from reports of the joke …
One of the other rules of thumb in thinking critically on these matters: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not just someone’s say so.
Voice of America has opened up a new blog called Digital Frontiers.
Reads the banner: “This is the first of a series of Digital Frontiers features, exploring how international tensions translate to the online world.”
That’s nice.
VOA journalist Doug Bernard, writing from Washington, DC, in the first post from Digital Frontiers, leads with:
On January 17th, 1991, as the 34-nation coalition of Operation Desert Storm prepared for its first aerial bombardment of targets in Iraq, the U.S. military sprung a surprise.
Iraqi radar screens suddenly blinked and went dark, momentarily blinding Saddam Hussein’s military. The “Kari??? radar control system had been infected with a computer virus, planted and controlled by the Pentagon. “It was a French system,??? notes intelligence historian Matthew Aid of the Iraqi radar control. “They gave us the schematics and we found a way to insert some buggies into their system as the first wave of American bombers streaked toward Baghdad.???
It worked brilliantly. Iraq’s defenses were paralyzed, allied bombers faced no serious opposition, and the U.S. became the first-ever nation to launch a documented cyber-attack.
In a post entitled, “The Coming Cyberwar with Iran?” the piece goes on to muse about what is and what is not real about cyberwar.
Yes, there is some irony in the hard stone that the very first example of a real cyberattack used is a now notorious joke in computer security circles.
Did U.S. infowar commandos smuggle a deadly computer virus into Iraq inside a printer? Of course not. So why does it keep getting reported?
“ Many have been enthralled by the Gulf War virus’ siren call, almost all in efforts to hold up some proof of the magical power of information warfare. ???
A creepy enthusiasm for tales of weird weapons rises as war approaches … In this environment, where everyone charges full speed ahead for the hot scoop or astonishing apocrypha, even the oldest hoaxes can return for one more bow.
In a February piece for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a retired air force man mused on the subject of information warfare and how it might be used to strike Iraq down. Dabbling in a little history, the author recounted how in Gulf War I the U.S. drew up plans to take down an Iraqi anti-aircraft system with “specially designed computer viruses [to] infect the system from within. Agents inserted the virus in a printer shipped to an Iraqi air defense site.”
Special Forces men were also said to have infiltrated Iraq, where they dug up a fiber-optic cable and jammed a computer virus into it. “It remained dormant until the opening moments of the air war, when it went active…” wrote the columnist. Iraq’s air defense system was vanquished.
Frankly, this is a great story. It’s amusing to remember how it kicked up a storm in 1991 after its initial appearance as an April Fool’s joke in Infoworld magazine.
The gag asserted the National Security Agency had developed the computer virus to disable Iraqi air defense computers by eating windows — “gobbling them at the edges…” The virus, called AF/91, was smuggled into Iraq through Jordan, hidden in a chip in a printer — the latter being a distinguishing feature of many subsequent appearances of the hoax.
Chat board gossip on it echoed for days, not only from people who thought the joke quite funny, but also those who missed the original citation and engaged in laborious discussion on the imagined technology of the virus.
Inevitably, a large media organization got wind of the story and pounced without bothering to track down the tale’s provenance.
U.S. News & World Report published news of the Gulf War virus in its coverage of the war, a narrative that also found its way into “Triumph Without Victory,” the magazine’s subsequent book on Desert Storm.
The Gulf War virus, wrote U.S. News, attacked Saddam’s defenses by “devouring windows” Iraqi defenders used to check on aspects of their air defense system. “Each time a technician opened a window … the window would disappear and the information would vanish.” The virus was “smuggled to Baghdad through Amman, Jordan” in chips inside a printer.
From there, the bogus story was reported by the Associated Press, CNN, ABC Nightline, and newspapers across the country.
When queried about the tale’s uncanny resemblance to the Infoworld joke, Brian Duffy, the primary author of the U.S. News article (and now executive editor of the magazine) stubbornly defended his sources — “senior officials” all. In a follow-up Associated Press article outlining the imbroglio, Duffy maintained he had “no doubt” that U.S. intelligence agents had carried out the Gulf War virus attack, but admitted similarities to the Infoworld joke were “obviously troubling.” Duffy’s sources, were, of course, anonymous.
Many have been enthralled by the Gulf War virus’ siren call through the decade, almost all in efforts to hold up some proof of the magical power of information warfare.
In the March 1999 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, in a piece on cyberwar, the publication wrote: “In the days following the Gulf War, stories circulated that [cyber] weapons had been unleashed on the Iraqi air defense system.” The nefarious printers were again used containing “chips [with] programs designed to infect and disrupt…”
A Hudson Institute analyst peddling a paper on Russian thoughts on cyberwar fell for it and when confronted aggressively argued that it was true because, well, just because. [As a result, she fell into disrepute and never published much again.]
Other appearances include an allegedly seminal book on computer combat entitled “The Next World War.” In this instance, the miraculous Gulf War virus failed to do its job because the U.S. Air Force accidentally bombed the building where Iraq stored the virus-laden printers. The author went on to found an infosecurity firm known for its publicity-happy hyperbolic proclamations on cyberwar. [The firm eventually declared bankruptcy.]
Why was the hoax so successful?
The easy answer is to simply call everyone who falls for the joke a momentary idiot. But the Gulf War virus plays to a uniquely American trait: a child-like belief in gadgets and technology and the people who make them as answers to everything. Secret National Security Agency computer scientists made viruses that hobbled Saddam’s anti-air defense without firing a shot! Or maybe it didn’t work but it sure was a good plan!
In this respect, the joke is ageless. People are just as able to nebulously theorize about the tech of it and its implications in 2003 as they were in 1991. Will an updated version of the nonexistent AF/91 virus be used against unwired Iraq? Stay tuned… April 1st is less than a month away.
Now over two decades old you can still find uninformed US military men, who’ve read about the alleged thing in some “authoritative” source that passed it on years ago, passing it on while adding their own measure of brio.
In the same way myths and apocryphal stories pick up additional dander over time: “They gave us the schematics and we found a way to insert some buggies into their system as the first wave of American bombers streaked toward Baghdad.”
Thrilling!
“The term cyberwar is really just a marketing gimmick,” says the same man, peddling a book “considered the definitive history of the super-secret National Security Agency, or NSA.”
Today the Post ran a piece on development, or the lack of it, of cyberweapons by the US military. The US government still spends way more on cyberdefense.
“To affect a system, you have to have access to it, and we have not perfected the capability of reaching out and accessing a system at will that is not connected to the Internet,??? said Joel Harding, an independent consultant who is a former military officer and former director of the Information Operations Institute.
Even if an operator gains access, he said, “unless you already have custom-written code for a system, chances are we don’t have a weapon for that because each system has different software and updates.???
The reporter runs down a small list of incidents from wars in last few years which may have involved cyberweapons, all with iffy, virtually non-existent or mixed results. Almost all the sources are anonymous.
“Some experts believe that Israel may have used a cyberweapon to blind Syrian radar before bombing a suspected nuclear facility in September 2007, but several former U.S. officials say that the technique more likely used was conventional electronic warfare or radar jamming using signals emitted from an airplane,” reads the Post.
However, in many circles, belief in a magical quality for cyberweapons remains strong. It has to do with American society, and I summarized it in 2003 when writing about the longevity of belief in the Gulf War virus hoax:
[The] Gulf War virus [played] to a uniquely American trait: a child-like belief in gadgets and technology and the people who make them as answers to everything.
Automated bad publicity. I like it. So I still want to know when they’ll be put out to pasture so they can get back to burning ants with magnifying glasses and engineering applications to pull the wings off flies.
As told Sunday here, the military non-lethal weapons directorate rolled this out for journalists in yet another attempt to fellate the dead dog back to life.
