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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.
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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 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.
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
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
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?