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Governments Prepare for Cyber Cold War
superglaze writes "ZDNet UK has an analysis piece on the growing threat of a "cyber cold war". It's got some interesting examples and it seems everyone is up to something. "...attacks are not limited to any particular countries, or by alliances between countries, according to cyberwarfare watchers. In the McAfee report, Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for research organization the Sans Internet Storm Center, said that most countries hack each other regardless of any supposed allegiances. Alan Paller, director of research at security training organization the Sans Institute, concurred. "All nations are doing it to each other. I don't know of any country not doing it," he said. "If it's not for normal espionage, it's for economic espionage. It's a very broad set of countries [involved].""
With attempted 'hacking' from other countries, we see that domestic laws prohibiting unauthorized computer access are not much use. Of course they don't deter the Chinese army or any other government agency. They do deter domestic hackers, but have unpleasant side-effects like criminalizing viewing a page on a website to make sure it's not a phishing site. And if your computer security is oriented more towards tracking down individuals and bringing them to trial, you will be relatively defenceless against foreign agencies. Children brought up in an artificially clean and disinfected environment can suffer more infections when later exposed to the real world. It might be a better idea to legalize hacking, provided no damage is done, in order to strengthen your country's immune system.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Oh, right.
And if everything wasn't fine and dandy, they'd tell that to the public.
<borat>Pause not.</borat>
When war started in Croatia some 15 years ago, there were so many bombings, air raids and so on and so forth -- yet every single time there was an engagement, our national television broadcasted minimum losses on our side (most commonly, no casualties save for one wounded) and heavy losses on the opposite side.
I was but a kid then, but even then I found it... odd.
Likewise, I'm quite certain you Americans have quite a different view of the war in Iraq than the rest of the world does.
And by "different" I mean "much more filled with propaganda".
Apply to any kind of war-like conflict. The morale must be kept high, the opposite side's agents kept in the dark and fed false information -- and the best way to make sure they're fed crap is to feed everyone crap.
Ignore this signature. By order.
I met a spy once. Well a guy who'd been a spy in the second world war, fascinating stuff.
Alas he was bcoming senile, hence why I met him, he was a client of mine (used to be a nurse you see).
What was really funny is all through the war, and right up till the mid nineties, his wife had beleved he was a truck driver with some very long postings abroad on convoy duty or somesuch. Once she thought he was up in scotland for six months when he was actually in Africa. He only talked when he started to realise his mind was going.
Great stuff I thought.
No way. It can't be lack of funds. It can only be staggering, incredible incompetence. And it's not the local burger flipper. It's the chief information security officer. The top boss in charge of keeping information safe.
Amazing.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
By your definition then, the use of a large-scale EMP "weapon" at high altitude over a country, such as the US, rendering useless all the non-hardened electrical devices in the country, would not qualify as war - after all it doesn't cross your "bright-line" requirement of widespread killing. Disregard the incredible chaos and economic loss that would follow - no one died from the pulse - other than a few unlucky pacemaker wearers.
Death that accompanies violent[1] action is incidental to a military objective[2] - whether that be the destruction of a telephone switching station being used, or even possible for use, for the passing of military command and control, or if it be the killing of a specific person who's filling a key position in an organization's structure - the fact that a person was killed or not doesn't make it an act of war - it's the intent and objective that is sought by the action that does.
[1] Violence - the use of force to coerce an otherwise involuntary action to occur.
[2] Terrorism is is generally viewed as causing indiscriminate death, or the fear of it, to invoke a change in direction.
An interesting point. I disagree, only because the "War on Drugs" has had a relatively coherent approach and consistent goals for a while now. That the militarization of the conflict has led to an unmitigated loss, and placed the "war goals", so to speak, almost completely out of reach, does not make it any less legitimate. Lost wars are still wars. The war was never against "Colombia" or "Mexico", but in the DEA office they had real targets (complete with red 'x's through the pictures of the targets that were eliminated or neutralized) and quantifiable goals.
Likewise, a "War on Invaders" seems to be eminently reasonable, if stupidly duplicative. The Westphalian system makes every country de facto at war against any territorial invader anyway, so "War on Invaders" is more of a standing international policy than it is a war on an idea.
The problem I have with using the rhetoric of 'War', whether it is associated with an actual military conflict that approaches the reality of warfare or not, is that it destroys the succinct and specific legal meaning that the word "War" had. That same international system of sovereign states depends a great deal upon the notion that only sovereign entities may declare war on sovereign entities, that such a declaration meant specific responses and held specific expectations of the parties involved, and that at least in the US it required a legislature to legitimate by vote in order to execute. Blurring the textbook definition of "War" between sovereign states with "War" that states only a goal, whether it be concrete or ephemeral one, and not a sovereign state, damages the integrity of the system that is designed to moderate the use of force internationally.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)