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Should the US Go Offensive In Cyberwarfare?
The NYTimes has a piece analyzing the policy discussions in the US around the question of what should be the proper stance towards offensive cyberwarfare. This is a question that the Bush administration wrestled with, before deciding that the outgoing president didn't have the political capital left to grapple with it. The article notes two instances in which President Bush approved the use of offensive cyberattacks; but these were exceptions, and the formation of a general policy was left to the Obama administration. "Senior Pentagon and military officials also express deep concern that the laws and understanding of armed conflict have not kept current with the challenges of offensive cyberwarfare. Over the decades, a number of limits on action have been accepted — if not always practiced. One is the prohibition against assassinating government leaders. Another is avoiding attacks aimed at civilians. Yet in the cyberworld, where the most vulnerable targets are civilian, there are no such rules or understandings. If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"
What the US should do is stop connecting 'computers' to the Internet that can so easily be hijacked in phishing/malware/spam attacks.
If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"
no.
At least, not until provoked, and then only at resources demonstrably being used in actual operations against the US.
The reason is that we don't want politically motivated cybervandalism to be legitimized.
This is what I had against the whole neo-con "spread democracy" program. I'm all for spreading democracy, but it won't work unless you spread the values and institutions necessary to make democracy work. One of those is freedom of thought and expression. It makes no sense to promote democratic government in a country where you are conducting psyops campaigns and are complicit in or actually performing suppression of free speech.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As a former fed IT staffer and military specialist, our policies were always to be proactive. Resting is never a good place to be when an attack hits. Obama (and the rest of our NATO nations) need to have their own cyber-warfare military units to respond to any potential threat. With our economies being tied closer and closer each year to the internet, its now along the same lines of our need for energy and needs to be guarded as such.
Besides, I would rather these units proactively dismantle bot-nets, spynets, and spam-nets to protect our infrastructure than to constantly force the private companies to deal with the criminal and 'not-so-criminal-china-warfare' tactics going on today.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"
Seriously, if any military official takes more than two seconds to realize that it is clearly insane and has not learned one thing from our struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Alienating the populace of a nation like that has no benefit and is outright counterproductive. An attack on civilians like this works only in the context of strategic, conventional total war. We haven't fought a conventional war in 50 years. For any foreseeable conflict that U.S. could be involved in, it would be only sane to scrap the idea of attacking civilian infrastructure of any kind, information infrastructure included.
I got a catholic block.
Just because you don't read about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You seriously think the country with the worlds largest and longest established sigint program doesn't use it for offensive purposes?
Nothing prepares you for war like lots of practice.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Just as the invention of the atomic bomb changed warfare and deterrence 64 years ago, a new international race has begun to develop cyberweapons and systems to protect against them.
I agree. And just like the atomic bomb, exactly two of these might ever be used in actual warfare.
Think it through:
1) North Korea kills several power plants with cyberweapons.
2) US kills North Korea with conventional weapons.
Sure, if you're Estonia or Georgia you may have problems. You don't have one of the most powerful military forces in the world at your disposal. But here in the US we have all sorts of muscle that we use against people that we feel are misbehaving.
In fact, I doubt highly that we would prevent such an attack were the enemy foolish enough to launch one.
Stop an excuse to go to war? This nation? I think not.
And yet that's not the policy of America. That's the policy of *some* American companies.
Mostly because US workers are not worth what they cost to employ.
The solution is not a phobic restriction on offshoring (protectionism), the solution is to bring domestic wages in line with offshore wages. Ideally this is done by increasing the global standard (and cost!) of living, but at some point we might just have to realize that our ridiculous wasteful standard of life is unsustainable if we want to compete economically with the rest of the world.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
the policy of America is simply to ship programming jobs overseas
No it's not. The policy of America is to promote globalization and free trade which in the long run is thought (rightly or not) to be beneficial to the USA. If that's what you are doing then it does make it kinda hard to use legislation to stop American companies from doing what they want which is hiring labor where its cheapest. Either you are for protectionism in which case we will lose in the long run because US companies won't be able to compete, or you are for liberalization of trade (including labor) in which case US workers will have to compete for jobs on equal terms with Chinese, Indians etc
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
We will lose that offensive.
We are the ones who come up with copy protections and it takes some kid in Scandanavia a few hours to crack it.
We will quickly be destroyed by the cyber armies of 13 year olds with 22 hours of sunlight and Mountain Dew in their grasp.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Moral questions aren't a luxury, unless you're playing a zero sum game. Most nations aren't, they're a necessity, if only out of self-interest. If a nation proves it's rabidly amoral, doesn't follow the rules of war that have developed over the past few hundred years, they also better hope they don't need allies.
Or did everyone already forget ECHELON? Or does it only count if you actively break into other systems, rather than only intercept everyone's personal, business and political Internet communications?
And it would really surprise me if they didn't break into other systems yet. It's not like they first asked for public approval for ECHELON before starting to set up and use it.
Donate free food here
There have already been incidents where offshore foreign workers were bribed to provide account information on bank customers.
The reality is that major American system may have already been compromised by bribes to offshore foreign workers to insert malicious code into the American systems where they have direct access.
Do you honestly think American workers don't do the same? It's almost as if your argument is that American workers are inherently more ethical than foreign ones and that therefore offshoring is a bad thing.
I think it's naive to believe we're NOT on the offensive, though I've got to admit our nation's recent incompetence in dealing with IT (defunct air force initiative, losing engineering plans to the F35) gives me a little more doubt.
But we INVENTED a lot of this stuff. What does the NSA do, exactly? Yeah, they intercept international communications and develop systems to do this, but is that really all they do... really?
I sure as hell hope not...
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
DoD developed BSD under DARPA for Public Network Safety
Then ignored or wasted the development research
and used microsoft.
Start by dumping microsoft.
Former DoD Systems Engineer
We did ALOT!
We gave craploads of money to teachers unions and then made high school easy to pass without learning anything so the teachers did't look to bad
We passed onerous environmental and labor laws encouraging companies to abandon the US.
We ran around and screamed and yelled that everyone should be coddled and no one should be fired.
We did alot. We are getting exactly what we paid for.
We have strong unions getting massive benefits at the cost of the consumer and the citizen. Because smartly, the businesses pass on the true costs of what we wanted right back to us. If you don't like what you got, then look at us. Not "Evil big business".
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
...it's also the deterioration of the quality of k-12 education in the US - especially in math.
While your deterioration theory is interesting, and math education is inadequate, I'm fairly sure you're hearkening back to a past that never was.
I seem to remember that inadequate math education was offered as "proof" as to why the Soviets beat the US into space with Sputnik.
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to the Internet.
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to the telephone network?
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to radio receivers?
And so on.
You gotta communicate with 'em SOMEHOW. Are you proposing the banking system, the hospitals, and the military all SEPARATELY (and each individual organization within each group SEPARATELY as well) dig up the country and run their own private network? (And harden it against manhole-divers with bolt cutters while they're at it?)
"The Internet" and other networks sharing infrastructure (and potential vulnerabilities) is the current communication utility. It's time to stop wringing hands about how foolish it is to actually use it and join those working on how to do so safely and reliably.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"We passed onerous environmental and labor laws encouraging companies to abandon the US."
Nonsense. We passed sensible environmental laws, which just about everybody in the developed world today finally recognizes are necessary. The developing countries have environmental policies that they know are not long-term viable, which they allow in the name of industrialization. But it is generally acknowledged that they are creating a global problem.
"We ran around and screamed and yelled that everyone should be coddled and no one should be fired."
Again, where do you get this "WE" shit? I, and most people I know, were against this trend.
"We did alot. We are getting exactly what we paid for."
No... if you are including yourself in that "WE", then I am paying for a lot of crap that YOU did. I am not and was not part of this "we"!!!
"We have strong unions getting massive benefits at the cost of the consumer and the citizen."
Since when? Are you stuck in the 70s? Name a union that hasn't suffered a lot in the last couple of decades. States have passed "right to work" laws, and most of the industries that were strongly unionized are sucking hind tit right now. Get with the times, man.
"If you don't like what you got, then look at us. Not "Evil big business"."
Nope. I made my point and I'm sticking by it. I was not part of this "we". Nor were most people I know. Union reps, maybe. CEOs, maybe. Not me. Not my friends. And I wrote my congresscritters to express my displeasure at laws that contributed to the problem. So once again... there is no "we". You, maybe.
"The American economy pressured them to do it. They reduced costs for goods sold to American consumers*, because their consumers demanded it, and they returned increased profits to their (primarily) American investors."
That's not "the American economy". That's corporate greed. The economy per se did not change, but corporate policies (and the laws governing them) did. QED. "The problem with free trade is that its benefits are disparate and hard to quantify (e.g. an extra 0.5% on GDP annually, slightly lower inflation), while its downsides are specific and easy to see (a closed factory)."
Nonsense. The overall benefits and downsides are fairly easy to measure: how is our economy doing? (I am not referring to the financial markets here.) Trade deficits continued and increased; costs of goods (lumber, for just one obvious example) affected by "free trade" actually increased, which means inflation actually increased; lost jobs were not adequately compensated for by equivalent cash inflow; intangible costs (global pollution, etc.) has increased, which adds to our cost, and so on. While individual effects may be hard to measure, it is easy to see that the "free trade" agreements have had an overall adverse effect on our economy.
None of this was necessary. U.S. corporations were doing just fine, in general, before the outsourcing and "free trade" began. As evidence of this, keep in mind that if the corporations had not been doing relatively well, they would not have been big enough to take their manufacturing elsewhere, anyway!
There are always some troubles; this is not a perfect world. But "free trade" was one of the biggest economic debacles of the century, and (as I described in another post above), "we" did not cause it.
WWII destroyed the British Empire, ruined all of Eastern Europe, and devastated Japan. You want to fight another one like that? Are you nuts? I suppose that telling Americans that war is not a good idea is a waste of effort: They never had to fight a real war on their soil. But let's agree for the sake of argument that killing people because they live somewhere is wrong. Let's agree that raping people is wrong. Let's agree that starving people is wrong. If you don't want to fight a war under those rules, you probably shouldn't start one. Furthermore water and electricity are most certainly not military targets, nor are ports or factories not related to military industries.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
You show such a misunderstanding of global politics and history that it's not surprising you think war is inevitable.
What you seem to be saying is: Russia and China don't need to build up an army, because they have no reason to be afraid of us. On the other hand we DO need to be afraid of them, because they have a history of being imperialists and aggressors.
The truth is the good old USA has a long history of being imperialist and an aggressor. How do you think we got Florida? Or Texas, or California, Hawaii, the Philippines, etc. There is enough historical precedent for China and Russia to be afraid.
Fortunately the tides are turning against war. It is an inefficient mechanism for conflict resolution, and in general painful to both sides involved. If the US fought China, for example, both sides would lose. War is expensive, deadly, and miserable when in reality we can gain much more by cooperating. Most people don't even want war, do you? And yet you talk as if the Chinese want war. Well, I've been to China, and I've talked to people about war, and they don't want it any more than Americans.
You say war is inevitable, but the historical trend is against it. Count the number of wars going on now, and those going on 10 years ago and those going on 25 years ago, and you will see a definite trend to less and less war. It's just not a very useful tool.
War is not inevitable, any more than feudalism or slavery is inevitable. Until men's hatred for each other surpasses their own desire for safety, war will not be inevitable.
Qxe4
People believe movies too much. I have complete faith that the government is 15years behind the ball. We are talking about people that use fax still. I certainly don't expect them to be doing crazy high end cutting edge hacks.
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