US Cybersecurity Plan Includes Offense

z4ns4stu writes "Shane Harris of the National Journal describes how the US government plans to use, and has successfully used, cyber-warfare to disrupt the communications of insurgents in Iraq. 'In a 2008 article in Armed Forces Journal, Col. Charles Williamson III, a legal adviser for the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Agency, proposed building a military "botnet," an army of centrally controlled computers to launch coordinated attacks on other machines. Williamson echoed a widely held concern among military officials that other nations are building up their cyber-forces more quickly. "America has no credible deterrent, and our adversaries prove it every day by attacking everywhere," he wrote. ... Responding to critics who say that by building up its own offensive power, the United States risks starting a new arms race, Williamson said, "We are in one, and we are losing."'"

Comments

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's perfectly fine when American "news" channels show American troops killing Afghanis or Iraqis?

You've got a filthy double standard, paco. It's hypocrisy like yours that has made America and American foreign policy a joke around the world.

A credible deterrent?

[girlintraining]

"America has no credible deterrent, and our adversaries prove it every day by attacking everywhere,"

And who's to blame for that?

The goverment allowed hundreds of thousands of IT jobs to be shipped overseas, we no longer have the labor resources to secure our domestic infrastructure. The government allowed private businesses to copyright and patent everything, there's no further incentive for innovation from the private sector in this country. We wind up spending what limited resources are available for R&D reinventing the wheel constantly. Because we've handed so much control over to multinational authorities like ICANN, we no longer can impliment policy decisions. Where is IPv6? We're facing a resource shortage, but not only that, IPv6 provides for much wider deployment of encryption, and yet here we are dragging our feet. Why is that?

If this were any kind of a priority, I think we'd see the government making an honest and sincere effort to fix some of these problems. But they aren't. Which tells me that cybersecurity "problems" are a paper tiger. There won't be any changes until a few thousand people die from a "cyber-terror" attack. Our government has always been reactive in nature -- preferring to procrastinate and delay until after the bomb explodes, and then swoop in to justify its relevance and 35% tax rates.