02.03.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 9:41 am by George Smith
Last week the Washington Post published an extraordinary number of articles on bioterrorism. Extraordinary not because of the information they delivered, but outstanding because they were very bad. And all written by reporter Joby Warrick, seemingly synchronized to lead up to the Graham-Talent special interest group’s critique of the Obama administration on preparedness.
Today, the Post’s Fred Hiatt continues the atrocity on the editorial page.
One of last week’s particularly bad pieces of reporting concerned ex-CIA man Rolf-Mowatt Larssen’s Harvard-issued ‘study’ on al Qaeda and WMDs.
It was an example of astonishingly poor work and it was destroyed by DD here in a piece entitled The Busted Watch of US Threat Assessment.
Another copy was posted at GlobalSecurity.Org here.
The Mowatt-Larssen report — entitled Al Qaeda Weapons of Mass Destruction Threat: Hype or Reality? could not even get the simple facts concerning a policeman’s death right in the famous case of the alleged London ricin ring. And this was information published countless times in newspapers all over the United Kingdom.
That was hardly all that was wrong with the Mowatt-Larssen report. But readers can skip back to the original posts to get the details on this shabby piece of work.
One of the major problems with such poor analysis from high places is that it continues to drive opinion, more news stories and, eventually, policy. Once it is embedded in a place like the Washington Post it becomes very damaging. It actively impedes legitimate efforts to educate the public on issues and reality in the so-called war on terror. It serves only as another citation for those writing more things asserting that one needs to be very afraid.
And today, Hiatt’s opinion piece, the WaPo man cites Mowatt-Larssen right off the bat. Mowatt-Larssen, Hiatt implies, has shown we ought to still be alarmed.
“Three thousand people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” writes Hiatt. “More than 300,000 could be dead within one week after a modest attack with biological weapons.
“For most people, the thought of such an attack is an unthinkable horror. For al-Qaeda, it is a lingering dream and one that it is working diligently to achieve … Al-Qaeda is engaged in a ‘long-term, persistent and systematic approach to developing weapons to be used in mass casualty attacks,’ writes Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs …’
“Mr. Mowatt-Larssen is not the only one sounding an alarm.”
It is a textbook pathological case of argument from authority without any vetting of that authority.
And it was part of an argument Hiatt used to belt the Obama administration over the head, chiding it to act quickly to remedy the nation’s unpreparedness so that the people would be protected from deadly bioterrorism.
This is not a new song. Played literally thousands of times in the last few years it has worn out its ability to enlighten, if it ever had much of that precious quality in the first place. Now it exists only to hector and terrorize.
Jason Sigger at Armchair Generalist sees the problem clearly, too, and it’s not us or our inability to see the obvious.
He writes, in this case addressing some information concerning the Graham-Talent special interest group:
“Bad enough that Hiatt joins those who would continue overstating the actual threat of terrorists using nuclear or biological weapons to cause mass casualties. I thought newspapers were supposed to, you know, report facts. But pinning the G-T commission’s report on the Obama administration runs counter to what the commission said – that this was a report on the government’s efforts over a period of time, not within the last year …”
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07.13.09
Posted in War On Terror at 1:09 pm by George Smith
“From the point of view of an al Qaida military leader, Western intelligence agents are now ubiquitous in the lands of Islam, and their operations have been extraordinarily effective,” writes Steve Aftergood at his Secrecy Blog.
The post and accompanying al Qaeda document affords a view of the enemy not often seen in the US press — a view of a foe confused and afraid, badly hurt by the presence of American forces in their land.
It also shows ingenious use of simple printed circuits and the lowly nine volt battery.
Pictured within the al Qaeda document, they are small homing beacons, planted on al Qaeda men and in their abodes (or in the haunts of the innocent, if the intel and source on the ground is bad), for the purpose of Predator drone targeting. And it seems they have succeeded in their purpose often enough to merit significant effort to confiscate them and get warning out.
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06.29.09
Posted in Cyberterrorism, Extremism, War On Terror at 2:01 pm by George Smith
The daily dishwater on cyberwar, this time from the Times of London. “If you’re not worried, you have not been paying attention,” warns the writer.
“[Cyberwar] would be like being teleported back to the 1970s,” it is said. “Even a minor conflict could slow the global Internet to a crawl. So cyber-war is a bit like nuclear war, in that even a minor outbreak threatens everyone’s life and welfare.”
Is your life threatened when you cannot log on to Twitter? Well, OK, that’s a trick question. We already know that the upper class swells on CNN and in newspaper features sections wouldn’t be able to go on with life.
OK, ok, but you’d quickly starve during an all out cyberwar. That’s for sure. The local supermarket with all the fancy signs wouldn’t sell you food and it certainly wouldn’t give you a dollar off on all those things when you punch in your telephone number. And I bet your cable digital TV and phone wouldn’t work either, just like in that movie where Bruce Willis as John McClane battles the annoying cyberterrorist who used to work for the Pentagon.
That was a good movie. The annoying cyberterrorist had a really hot chick who could kickbox as his henchwoman.
Anyway, cyberwar will be so bad you’ll have to find your own corner market, one not connected to the Internet, for your fortified wines.
So, what to do when the nuclear apocalypsecyberwar begins?
Cyber-carpet-bombing is the correct response, DD reported this weekend.
“[One expert] recounts what one of the staff told him about how NATO would react to a [new] cyber-strike,” reports the Times. “Overwhelming response: a single, gigantic counterstrike that cripples the target and warns anyone else off launching a future cyber-war. He isn’t sure what it would look like, but the show of force he envisages is so severe that the only thing he can compare it to is a nuclear attack.”
Just for amusement, DD has hit the Wayback Machine and retrieved similar quotes from 2001, when another excitable fellow — an alleged cyberwar expert by the name of
James Adams — was often in the news about total cyberwar.
“Y2K will illustrate what an attack could do… Anybody who says after January 1, 2000 that this [threat of cyber attack] is all just made up I think is an idiot.” From the University of Southern California’s Networker magazine, winter 98-99.
Pentagon hackers employed in Eligible Receiver “did more than the massed might of Saddam Hussein’s armies, than the Nazis in the Second World War.” — from Techweek, 1999.
“”One need only look at today’s headlines to recognize industry’s need for iDefense … iDefense draws upon an unparalleled understanding of the critical infrastructure and a keen awareness of the growing threats and vulnerabilities confronting industry to provide its clients a timely and truly unique service.” — from the PR Newswire, June 1999.
“Which brings us to the final rung on the escalatory ladder: the virtual equivalent of nuclear deployment. I offer as illustration Eligible Receiver.” From a speech, “The Future of War,” delivered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June 2000.
“Consider the recent LoveLetter virus … The effect? The equivalent of a modest
war … No terrorist organization in history has ever achieved such damage with a single attack. Few small wars cost so much … The LoveLetter attack was indeed the first real taste of terrible things to come.” Also from “The Future of War.”
“Estimates of the cost of [the LoveLetter virus] to the United States range from $4 billion to $15 billion — or the equivalent, in conventional war terms, of the carpet-bombing of a small American city.” From Foreign Affairs magazine, May-June 2001.
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06.26.09
Posted in Cyberterrorism, War On Terror at 4:53 pm by George Smith
Today, a collection of items again having to do with the tradition of blaming China and its mighty but hard-to-see cyberwarriors.
For example, when you want to build a cyber-attack force, blame the Chinese for starting a cyber-arms race, hacking into US utility companies, cyber-spying and installing backdoors and hidden boobytrap software switches in everything.
Since it’s a practice that has been carried out so well and for so long, the Chinese media has finally started to wise up to it.
So, this year, for the first time, DD has begun to field questions from Chinese journalists, who are returning the favors long administered by their counterparts in the western English-speaking newsmedia. That is, instead of wanting to talk about how China is menacing US cyber-interests, they want to know about the US menacing the rest of the world’s cyber-interests.
From a Q&A — in e-mail — this week:
Chinese journalist: Will US wage cyber warfare against its enemies?
DD: I doubt there will be any significant happenings of this nature. Too much potential for an exposure resulting in great embarrassment and bad publicity if caught doing such a thing. It wouldn’t look good if the US military was caught installing a worldwide zombie botnet now, would it?
Chinese journalist: US cyber security may provoke the new world arms race on the new military frontier, do you think so?
DD: The rhetoric on the subject may inspire something like this. However, it will be offset by the limited nature of what such things can accomplish in the real world.
Chinese journalist: What do you think of the cyberattacks worldwide?
DD: It’s another day, just like many, for IT staffs.
Chinese journalist: Will the American aggressive approach to cyber-security pose a threat to privacy and civil liberties?
DD: There is already some concern about this. As to privacy, there have been agencies and parties in the US which have been involved in pushing back on encroachments and violations of privacy in cyberspace for many years. They’ve had some mixed successes and some big failures, so it’s an ongoing battle.
Next up, a partial transcript from the Ian Masters show,
a couple weeks ago. DD has edited it down to the most interesting points, and the common worked-to-death scripts re China and cyberwar.
Ian Masters, Pacifica radio host: There’s [now] an expectation hacker soldiers will be hired. The New York Times has a piece on Sunday on the frontpage, a rather skeptical piece, suggesting that this indeed may be another raid on the treasury by the military industrial complex.
DD (aka George Smith): Well, that’s been a constant. I mean, it’s not exclusive to the Obama administration. Cyberwarfare and cybersecurity have been used by the US government over the past fifteen years to, as you say, rattle the tin cup for a variety of reasons. I mean, it’s kind of like, what many people don’t realize is that the extremist views are in charge, OK? [Laughs] There really isn’t a voice of moderation. And there really never has been in the area.
IM: So, in other words, the sky’s always falling.
GS: That’s right.
IM: And the Russians are coming.
GS: Or the Chinese. The Chinese were coming ten years ago. And they’re coming again.
IM: And the terrorists are coming.
IM: In terms of cyberwarfare al Qaeda is not a player?
GS: No, they’re not a player.
IM: They do low-tech video releases. So who is the target of this new initiative by President Obama, is it Russia and China?
GS: Those are the common two. Ten years ago there were a large number of stories circulated insisting China, the dragon, was about to show its claws and fire, and it had developed a cyberwarfare capability, and in the most extreme cases could attack the United States’ oil refineries and cause explosions, war from remote, things like that. And with Barack Obama, on Friday, he includes in his speech a statement that cities in foreign countries have been blacked out by cyberattack, and that’s simply an urban legend. There’s nothing to back that up at all yet it finds its way into his cyber policy review report.
Now, why is that? [Laughs]
If you look at the footnotes of the report real carefully, this comes out of an old press release from a computer security company.
IM: So ginning up business?
GS: Well, specifically, this occured about a year ago. It was to gin up business for protection of remote control access systems. What better way to do it than to say the CIA had told [your expert business] that cities which cannot be named, in countries that cannot be named, had power companies attacked which cannot be named, causing blackouts in cities, the number of which cannot be named.
IM: Really?
GS: Yeah, well that’s it …
IM: Where is the beef then, as they once said in a political campaign? We’ve got a lot of sizzle — but there’s no steak here?
GS: Well, the real beef is that there isn’t any doubting that there are problems with cybersecurity. We’re now built on a system that’s fundamentally insecure … and when you choose to use the Internet … to build your networks upon [it], then you’re choosing to work with an insecure system and the daily problems that come with that are part of the overhead of doing business and conducting life like that. And that’s a complete separate set of issues which everyone must deal with on a daily basis.
Ah, have you had an experience with removing malware, viruses or spyware from your computer?
IM: Well now, at the risk of advertising for Apple, I have a Mac.
GS: [Laughs] Well, good for you!
IM: So everyone is attuned to these things and paying the price.
GS: And everyone has to deal with it daily and take measures or suffer the consequences … Bad actors on the Internet are not known for restraint, OK? If there was an ability to turn the United States off like a switch, it would have been done already, I think. They wouldn’t show the qualms of, perhaps, a foreign country whose leaders would say: “Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
Someone would just say: “No, we’re going to do it because I want to be famous and show the world how powerful I am.” Which is one of common motivations, among many, in people who do these kinds of things on the Internet, who are constantly knocking on your firewall door …
CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, Jamie McIntyre, was puzzled: “This term cyber warfare sounds kind of, you know — amorphous, kind of hard to get your hands around it…” (See here for the next excerpt’s original publication.)
Fifteen minutes later, Gordon Chang, author of an unintentionally hilariously entitled book called The Coming Collapse of China vaguely informed the news network, “Well, they say that two [instances] of those were really the Chinese caused blackouts in the United States, one in 2003 and the other…”
For Chang, “they” were a couple of chatterers from the press, more specifically, an article in the National Journal, a publication nobody but Congressional staffers and producers and editors of news organizations in Washington, DC, reads.
“We’ve always knows that our civilian networks, which are not protected as well as the defense ones, can be taken down, but we never really had a demonstration that it could, indeed, actually happen until a couple of years ago,” continued Chang.
The news story demonstrated one common feature of all stories on cyberwar. You can say anything you wish and not suffer a beatdown. The most remarkable, even ludicrous, things can be claimed. Once on paper, it’s fair to discuss such things as if they had the reality of a piece of granite.
Since the Chinese had been causing blackouts, Chang reasoned the US government ought to show some backbone and give them a talking to …
To spend too much time arguing details [over this] is to be drawn into the deranged world of the American way of threat description … What would the United States do [then] in retaliation? Start carpet-bombing? Carpet-bombing, in this case, means having a force of cybermen and their own vast military botnet to launch DDOS attacks.
In “Carpet-bombing in Cyberspace,” an article from the Armed Forces Journal, Col. Charles W. Williamson III writes “America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack.”
There is a carpet-bombing gap in cyberspace, it is said. “We are in [a new arms race] and we are losing,” asserts Williamson. China has the greatest capability for cyber carpet-bombing because “analysts think China has the world’s largest denial-of-service capability.”
The US can offset this by investing in its own military botnet, sort of like not allowing the Russkis to take the lead in mineshaft digging in Dr. Strangelove.
In slightly different form,
at SITREP.
Update: The daily dose of
cyberwar exaggeration. Cyberwar will throw everyone back to the Seventies. Except you won’t get to be young again.
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06.14.09
Posted in Bioterrorism, Cyberterrorism, War On Terror at 9:18 am by George Smith
An audio file of DD on the radio for Ian Masters’ Background Briefing show on FM radio is here.
There is also a stream and iPod broadcast here. Note, though, that the broadcast, which took place on May 31, is mislabeled as one with Colin Powell’s adjutant in the Bush administration, Lawrence Wilkerson, who was the primary guest a week earlier. This is coincidentally absurdly humorous, since Wilkerson is one of the high-ranking people responsible for so badly informing Powell about the ‘UK poison ring’ for his infamous UN Security Council address, a claim officially destroyed in 2005 by me.
But since Wilkerson is now a convenience to the left — someone from the Bush administration willing to regularly call Dick Cheney nuts — he was granted a get-out-of-jail-free card by the mainstream media.
I digress.
The show lasted an hour and I was on third, so if you want to skip the other hosts, advance in your player to around minute 40 and you’ll be in the general vicinity. However, the entire show is worth a listen.
Subject material was a discussion of Obama’s cybersecurity plan and other things readers of the blog will be familiar with.
Do people listen to these radio Pacifica stations? I have been told so by acquaintances. But often I have doubts.
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06.04.09
Posted in War On Terror at 9:19 am by George Smith
This morning, Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy blog at FAS.ORG removed its copy of a .pdf compiled by the US government, a declaration of nuclear sites to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The action appears to be due to increasing pressure caused by mainstream media coverage of the subject, kicked off on Wednesday by William Broad at the New York Times and Eli Lake at the Washington Times. (See here and here respectively.)
As a result, throughout the day, Aftergood and the Federation of American Scientists were often portrayed as providing a ‘roadmap’ to terrorists.
One of the more extreme reactions, patently ridiculous on its face, is shown in an item from a Missouri newspaper.
“Senator Christopher ‘Kit’ Bond (R-MO) says this is the kind of thing that can only aid terrorists,” it read.
“That is unbelievable – that is a treasure map for terrorists,” said the politician “during his weekly radio conference call.” “Communities have a right to prevent terrorists from using government information to target and attack facilities in their backyard.”
“There’s a group called the Federation of American Scientists – a far Left-wing fringe group that wants to disclose all our vulnerabilities … I don’t know what their motives are but I think they are very dangerous to our security.”
Another expert called upon to comment inflamed matters by suggesting to the Washington Post that a crime had been committed.
“It is probably not that dangerous, but it is a violation of the law,” said David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
“You don’t want this information out there, any more than you would want a thief to know the location of a vault in your house.”
These were simplistic arguments, immediately deploying a fear card which has been seen many times since 9/11: Terrorists are everywhere, just waiting to get their hands on stuff telling them where dangerous things are in this country. (And where are the dangerous things? Everywhere, in this manner of speaking.)
Over the intervening period, use of this timorous illogic has spawned a host of control orders and policies, many of which have been vigorously opposed.
By example, at various times these have manifested in attempts to obfuscate the location of chemical plants and spills, inventory and strictly regulate most chemical reagents at research institutions, and the removal of cesium sources used in radiation therapy because they might potentially be used to make dirty bombs.
Using the reasoning of Kit Bond, and many others, Americans have no need to know about things like, say, Westinghouse research projects on Beulah Rd. in Pittsburgh for the “[for] the design of small break [loss of coolant accident facilities] that … also allow investigation of other accident scenarios.” (This is found near the top of the ‘nuke list’ doc.)
This is because the information is, as the meme goes, thought to be of aid to terrorists.
Employing this reasoning on a regular basis, one can rationalize the erasure of entire categories of information, anything deemed dangerous and potentially useful to terrorists (who are everywhere): hazardous waste sites, chemical spills, places where outbreaks of infectious disease have been reported, college science research facilities, mining facilities, the CDC, Fort Detrick, Three Mile Island, Hanford, Pantex and so on.
There is, literally, no end to it.
“The list details the existence of nuclear facilities at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and a Westinghouse research facility in Pittsburgh, among others,” reported the Wall Street Journal. Then it added: “Those facilities are internationally known.”
Some news agencies were egregious in their manipulation of the story. And CNN’s Lou Dobbs furnished a good example.
Dobbs, who regularly excoriates the US government for being stupid and sticking it to average Americans, predictably advertised the document as an aid to terrorism. (“[There] are concerns that the information would be of help to terrorists obtaining nuclear material,” he said.)
Dobbs and his producers also included brief comments from Steven Aftergood, comments which seemed to have been edited from a longer interview. The result was a seeming misrepresentation of Aftergood’s actual position yesterday, which was that the information in the document was not sensitive.
“I reviewed the document and did not find any sensitive technological information, or any sensitive security-related information,” wrote Aftergood in the comments section of the Secrecy blog yesterday. “Therefore I see no reason to remove the document.”
Aftergood also made this clear in comments to the Associated Press: “I regret that some people are painting it as a roadmap for terrorists, because that’s not what it is … This is not a disclosure of sensitive nuclear technologies or of facility security procedures. It is simply a listing of the numerous nuclear research sites and the programs that are underway.”
In any case, if you knew this, the Dobbs segment was confusing and contradictory as it did not explain why Aftergood and FAS would have posted the document in the first place. The obvious reason is that the posting of documents from the US government is one of its primary functions, which is to furnish transparency in our democracy, something which is often in short supply.
“The Federation of American Scientists was surprised to spot it, replete with detailed information, including floor plans, on the government printing office Web site as of May 22nd and moved on to post it on their own Web site,” said reporter Louis Schiavone to Dobbs. “Scientists familiar with the subject matter say information about the location of dozens of nuclear related sites is generally available with lots of research and in that sense it may not be catastrophic, but it does belie a worrisome sloppiness about nuclear security.”
Aftergood: “That is the one thing that is troubling about this whole episode. When the president says in early May that this is a sensitive document that should not be released and two weeks later it winds up on a government Web site, that’s a problem.”
All told, it has been another good example of how to provoke a crowd into a stampede with a story manufactured to play up fears of terrorism. Even though we’re no more at threat today than yesterday.
While FAS has removed its copy of the US government’s nuke list doc, every story failed to mention the omnipresence of such information on the web. And the fact that is had already been mirrored elsewhere. (See here and here at Cryptome.)
At Sitrep.
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06.03.09
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 2:47 pm by George Smith
Al Qaeda men continue to show ignorance on even simple things while trying to scare us into believing they’re ready to launch bioterror strikes. The wishful thinking doesn’t fool people in the know. But it does give some news agencies material to keep their boogeyman stories fresh.
“U.S. counterterrorism officials have authenticated a video by an al Qaeda recruiter [named ‘Abdullah al-Nafisi’] threatening to smuggle a biological weapon into the United States via tunnels under the Mexico border, the latest sign of the terrorist group’s determination to stage another mass-casualty attack on the U.S. homeland,” reported the Washington Times today. (Caveat emptor: This is another website that tries to put your browser in a high bandwidth full nelson.)
The story continued to explain that al Qaeda is apparently interested in alliances with ‘white militia groups’ — which only shows the pitiful nature of the intelligence. The second thought that occurs: Why are anonymous US intelligence officials gossiping about this with a newspaper?
“The officials, who spoke only on the condition they not be named because of the sensitive nature of their work, stressed that there is no credible information that al Qaeda has acquired the capabilities to carry out a mass biological attack although its members have clearly sought the expertise,” continued the piece.
“Four pounds of anthrax — in a suitcase this big — carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the U.S. are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour if it is properly spread in population centers there,” the al Qaeda recruiter is said to have said.
Three hundred thirty thousand in one hour, eh? DD guesses they’ve managed a revolution in weaponry and bypassed the normal disease process.
“Symptoms of [anthrax disease] vary depending on how the disease was contracted, but symptoms usually occur within 7 days,” states the CDC. Guess we’ll have to change that.
Bootnote: The al Qaeda man’s claim re anthrax does show that the US government’s hyping of the threat of bioterrorism has had effect: Al Qaeda takes its ‘statistics’ and wishful beliefs almost directly from our official utterances.
“Milton Leitenberg, a biological arms expert who has been regularly critical of the fear agenda, addressed two [Richard Danzig]-penned position papers in 1997 and 1999,” DD wrote for el Reg a number of months ago. “In these, a kilogram of anthrax was said to able to kill hundreds of thousands.”
“[100 kilograms] of weaponized anthrax dropped on D.C. under good weather conditions, is likely to cause about the same number of casualties as a one megaton bomb dropped on the city” — a quote from Tara O’Toole, the recent Obama nominee for head scientist at the Dept. of Homeland Security, delivered in congressional testimony in 2007.
These statements, and many others like them emitted by government officials or experts wishing to shape government policy, have indeed shaped and inspired al Qaeda perceptions about bioterrorism.
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06.02.09
Posted in Cyberterrorism, War On Terror at 1:54 pm by George Smith
“Negative reactions are coming in to President Obama’s cybersecurity proposals,” writes a blog at PC Mag. “The reasons vary, but many are arguing that the proposals resemble earlier, less publicized efforts from the Bush administration, and that the proposed National Cybersecurity Coordinator will lack sufficient
authority.”
DD makes an appearance, again calling the story about unnamed cities in other countries being blacked out by cyberattack an urban legend. It was delivered by President Obama on Friday, and he presumably read it in the Cyberspace Policy Review, were it merits a footnote — citing a p.r. sheet issued by a computer security vendor.
The rule of thumb for such claims needs to be this, particulary when an ‘item’ is to be delivered by the President: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary and substantial evidence to back them up.
And the regular circular slogan during the days of WMD’s in Iraq: “Absence of proof does not mean proof of absence,” just doesn’t cut it.
A stake needs to be driven through this type of thing as it’s part-and-parcel of the regular slew of ghost stories which come with news about menaces from cyberspace. Its use functionally puts the Obama administration at a disadvantage, making it no better than previous administrations. Therefore, those who wrote the report, or insisted upon the item’s inclusion, need to be taken aside and put on a very short leash.
I’ve made this part of the discussion with reporters in the past week because these fact-free rumors get around only because the viewpoints of extremists have become the common currency in the national debate on cybersecurity.
When including such things in policy reports, by nature, they hinder careful and deliberative thought. And they distract from a discussion in which security is discussed in a sophisticated and nuanced matter, conflating it into one big grab-bag issue with the forbidding, even numbing, theme: The nation is at risk.
And “[where did Obama’s] $1 trillion dollar guesstimate come from?” asked Rob Rosenberger over the weekend.
“It’s been estimated that last year alone cyber criminals stole intellectual property from businesses worldwide worth up to $1 trillion,” said the president last Friday.
Answer: It came from a McAfee Associates press release. Really.
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05.30.09
Posted in Cyberterrorism, War On Terror at 1:47 pm by George Smith
Your host will be a guest on Ian Masters’ ‘Background Briefing’ on KPFK, 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, tomorrow morning at 11:40 PST. Logically, it will be to discuss and place in historical context the Obama administration’s cybersecurity initiative.
You can stream it on the web here or pick it up as a download at ianmasters.org here.
And
here’s a piece, pre-Obama administration, again illustrating the point that any claim, no matter how extreme or unspupported, can take the stage in talks about cyberattacks on the US.
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05.29.09
Posted in Cyberterrorism, War On Terror at 10:52 am by George Smith
“President Obama announced a sweeping new initiative to beef up the nation’s defenses against attacks on the nation’s increasingly important computer networks, including a plan to put a cyber-security chief in the White House,” reported USA Today, along with many others.
“Cyber-space is real and so are the risks that come with it,” President Obama told the nation.
It was familiar.
Over the past decade, a great many US government officials have uttered similarly pleasing sounds. Obama administration officials and advisors are no different. For an earful and eyeful from the current line-up, view the Whitehouse’s entirely unremarkable video on the subject.
“The national dialogue on cybersecurity must begin today,” states the Obama administration’s recent cyberspace policy review.
“People cannot value security without first understanding how much is at risk. Therefore the Federal government should initiate a national public awareness and education campaign informed by previous successful campaigns.”
These are statements which sound good, but only superficially. Instead, they tend to really insult the intelligence of anyone who has followed US government campaigns to educate the public over risks from cyberspace in the past eight years.
Fundamentally, the US government’s ‘education’ on the issue has always boiled down to employing a small army of officials, as well as experts from the private sector, to convey dire messages: The country is so dependent on the networks, it can be turned off like a switch by a variety of enemies who choose to attack through cyberspace. The enemies can be nations we don’t like, teenagers, disgruntled insiders, organized crime, or just crazy people.
The famous meme on turning the country off like a floor lamp was originally called “electronic Pearl Harbor,” later modified to “digital Pearl Harbor.” An authoritative collection of government outreach educational statements on the threat from cyberspace in the press, collected from 1994-2000, can be read here.
A more recent sighting of government officials, often anonymously, educating the public on the dangers of not defending the nation’s infrastructure in cyberspace is here — on cyberspies from China said to be installing software boobytraps in important systems. And a critical summary of ten common red-herrings used to ‘educate’ the public on the issue over the past could years is here in “10 easy steps to writing the scariest cyberwarfare article ever.”
“I’ve written on computer security hysteria for twenty years and I can tell you this: the U.S. federal bureaucracy has never produced a good economic figure for computer security damages,” wrote one of this author’s colleagues, Rob Rosenberger on his Vmyths computer security and opinion site, in February. “It’s all about hype, not accuracy.”
Rosenberger was addressing the claims of various government officials on the scope of damage the country was thought to be suffering from cyberattacks. He was comparing the statements from Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, on the threat of cybercrime in 2009, with those from Richard Clarke, the country’s cybersecurity czar in 2002.
“Okay, so now along comes Barack Obama with his ‘open’ government,” continues Rosenberger. “[Dennis Blair] all but admits the entire U.S. intelligence community lacks data concerning one of the five most important threats America now faces … [it] can do nothing more than quote wild dollar values spouted by two companies — one of them not even involved in economic assessments.”
The problem is not that there hasn’t been a discussion with the American public on cybersecurity. There has. And it’s been entirely monochromatic, larded with scenarios, claims and frightful rumors meant to incite action, and allied with experts chosen from companies in the private sector who always stand to gain richly from further spending on cybersecurity. Danger, danger! We’re losing billions of dollars a year! China or someone other nation will turn off the water and power!
Empirically, this manner of nonsense — which has been shoveled for years — has been a turn-off, the exact opposite of what the Obama administration wants. Many people when confronted with stories about lurking cyber disasters, ignore them. They already have too much experience with removing, or getting someone else to remove, spyware and viruses from their home computer. And while they are probably aware that malicious knocks on the firewall running on their Internet-connected PCs occur every few minutes, they are somewhat less concerned about menaces said to be threatening the day-to-day economic health and safety of the nation.
So when Barack Obama reverts to citing figures on dollar losses due to cyberspace, these repeat a general practice of fudging. And when he stated today that in other countries, “cyberattacks have plunged entire cities into darkness,” he is repeating unconfirmed rumors.
It is not the best start.
At Sitrep.
Follow-up: News article at Popular Science.
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