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

Very ironic.

[Paul Fernhout]

This is all very ironic, as I mention here:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005991.html

So, the US military, once again, in a tremendous burst of irony, is developing ways to create artificial scarcity on the network of abundance. And they are justifying this to have new ways to further harm the people upset about being harmed by the illegal and immoral US invasion of Iraq.
"Illegal, Immoral Invasion of Iraq to Carve up the Middle East"
http://www.mediamonitors.net/abdullahvawda16.html

So, one illegal and immoral act begets another. One artificial scarcity begets another. One arms race, fueled by war profits, begets another.
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

How do we resolve this seemingly intractable problem?

Mutual security?
http://www.beyondintractability.org/audio/morton_deutsch/?nid=2430

Intrinsic security?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

Humor? :-)
http://www.humorproject.com/doses/default.php?number=1

Jacque Fresco comments on some of this, as far as the problems of way being profitable, as I note here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/3b7889054e4b4317

So, after the US military gets all these shiny new cyberweapons, who are they going to use them against next? Who will be the next people labeled "insurgents"? Or goaded into it by suffering from other military-enforced artificial scarcities?

Anyway, people ask me why I don't just post to a blog, and prefer to use email, and that's part of it. All web archives and other websites may be taken out once that "arms race" really gets going and military doctrinal TINA rules: "There is no alternative (but to destroy everything)".

Generally, a core theme of what I write is the irony of post-scarcity technology like computers and robots or nuclear power in the hands of people still thinking in terms of scarcity, like fighting over products or oil instead of producing products with robots and producing energy with nuclear power or solar power made using advanced materials. Example:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005929.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005498.html

As I mention in that last one, for an example of post-scarcity thinking, I think our taxes would go *down* if as I proposed here, everyone in the USA who wanted one was given a "free" safer luxury electric car:
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
Basically, defense costs, pollution mediation costs, and medical costs would all go down enormously, thus lowering taxes.

More ironically, it turns out, it takes more electricity to make a gallon of gas than for an electric car to go the same distance, according to this:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that g