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U.S. Congress Authorizes Offensive Use of Cyberwarfare
smitty777 writes "Congress has recently authorized the use of offensive military action in cyberspace. From the December 12th conference on the National Defense Authorization Act, it states, 'Congress affirms that the Department of Defense has the capability, and upon direction by the President may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend our Nation, Allies and interests, subject to: (1) the policy principles and legal regimes that the Department follows for kinetic capabilities, including the law of armed conflict; and (2) the War Powers Resolution.' According to the FAS, 'Debate continues on whether using the War Powers Resolution is effective as a means of assuring congressional participation in decisions that might get the United States involved in a significant military conflict.'"
may conduct offensive operations in cyberspace to defend
You see nothing wrong with this. Then you wonder why the world hates you.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The military-industry complex isn't just war profiteering and lobbying; a warmongering populace is also a critical part of the complex.
"Debate continues on whether using the War Powers Resolution is effective as a means of assuring congressional participation in decisions that might get the United States involved in a significant military conflict."
I read the War Powers Resolution is also effective as a means of assuring congressional participation in Internet censorship .
Time for the voting public to purge this misguided house of government of all its privilege and narcissism.
To the penchant for destabilising democratically elected governments and installing puppet dictators in order to acquire resources and dominate regions militarily.
Deleted
and (2) the War Powers Resolution
Let's drop the charade. If robotic aerial bombardment doesn't constitute "war", then sending strings of ones and zeros through a series of tubes certainly doesn't count as "war". There is effectively no congressional oversight because cyber-warfare does not fall under the purview of "war" according to the executive branch. There's also no way for congress to cut funding for cyber-warfare since all the computers and networks are already paid for, and there's very little operational costs to waging a cyber war.
Cyberwarfare is fiction.
Would this give the citizens of America the right to form a Cyber militia and the right to bear Cyber arms under the constitution?
Yeah, who needs SOPA when you have the US military to enforce royalty payments!
Yes, it's a new age of intellectual property imperialism! Except instead of the huge royal navies of England and France fighting pirates and collecting royalties on trade routes, we'll have the DoD DDoS attacks taking down all parties that don't pony up!
It's suiting for the US, much of whose wealth and economy is now based on imaginary assets, like patents and copyrights on, well, just about anything having to do with "popular" culture or business processes. What better way to make money for nothing than to have a piece of legal paper that says that people have to pay you money for doing ${thing}s? And then having a bunch of other people fund your military, the largest in the world, to enforce those payments?
Subjugation! Success!
"Interests" is an interesting term. We have well defined (codified in law) ideas of who our allies and what our nation is, but interests can range anywhere from democracy to oil to bombing airplane manufacturing plants in Brazil and China to protect our (civilian) areospace industry.
Diplomatic cables have already revealed that we lean pretty heavily on our allies to buy Boeing and Locheed Martin products, both civilian and defense oriented. If anyone needs a reminder, we just "convinced" Japan to buy 150+ still on the drawing board F-35 stealth fighters, (things yet to fix: major fire hazards, lack of stealth, weak airframe, buggy software, bad aerodynamics) rather than the EuroFighter earlier this week, right after Kim Jong Ill died.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II
http://www.washingtonpost.com/japan-to-pick-lockheeds-f-35-as-new-stealth-fighter/2011/12/13/gIQAbuYUrO_story.html
moox. for a new generation.
And.... the internet was supposed to be a neutral utopia for spreading ideas and knowledge.
Yet somehow we made it a battlefield.
somebody in the u.s. hasn't been reading the geneva convention. if the U.S. is hell-bent on linking the words "cyber" and "warfare", then the U.S. had better be ready for the consequences. the consequences of "declaring war" on another country are very very simple: under the Geneva Convention, a declaration of war legitimises and grants the right for any citizen of the country being attacked to immediately take offensive action, no matter where they are, against citizens and against all soil of the aggressors.
in other words, should the United States respond with physical force against another country's citizens just because a computer which was wide open to the world (with 3 letter passwords), that is an "act of war", and the citizens of the country being attacked are automatically granted the right to take immediate offensive violent action against any United States Citizens or against any United States "property" and soil.
in other words, this is an incredibly stupid thing for the United States Government to be doing. especially given that many people in the United States Military have absolutely no idea what constitutes a cyber attack, and they certainly don't understand that 3 letter passwords are an invitation to go "cooeeee! i 0wn youuu!"
madness. absolute madness.
Network connectivity doesn't change human nature. When you move civilization onto the internet, you don't get a utopia, you just get better data transfer.
Visit the
The Constitution does not give Congress authority to delegate their war-making powers to ANYONE else, including the President.
If this can legitimately be considered "warfare", then there is no question whatever that it is unconstitutional. The "War Powers Act" notwithstanding... it is unconstitutional, too. You can't use one unconstitutional law to justify another.
If Congress hasn't declared war, then it's not a Constitutional (legal) war. Period. And that means we haven't had a legal war in over 60 years.
The moment nations - any nations, US included - decided that the Internet was territory that could be owned rather than a virtual complex of ideas where data merely happened to reside in certain machines at certain times and where wiring merely happened to be the transport of choice for now, cyberwarfare was inevitable. That the Internet has adopted a spanning tree topology in many places, rather than a mesh topology, has worsened things. It's very easy to set up roadblocks on a spanning tree, it's much much harder to shut down a mesh.
(If you can't own it and can't prevent others using it, then you have nothing you can fight over. Ownership and conflict are only possible where resource denial is possible. Which is fine for end-points, I've no problem with end-points being owned and governed, but it should never have become fine for the backbone.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So wasn't there a Star Trek TOS episode where they fought their wars in their computers? Congress should be ashamed of stealing Prior Art.
Yep. To make the battles more "clean" (reduce collateral damage) they used "computer games" to carry out battles. Reason is they have been at war for 500 years and come to an agreement to make the war not as devastating. Program would tally up casulties and each side by agreement have to send some of their people into these tubes that vaporizes them. Capt Kirk blasted a portion of their computer system that also brought down both offense and defense computer (and probably severed the comm link with the other planet). President of the planet they were on was shocked, "Do you know what this means?!?! Other side will see it as a breach of the agreement and will think we are in for serious war!" Kirk said, "yes! and you better start building guns, bombs and another weapons!" He then said, "or an alternate is you can have peace with the other side." President didn't know anything else as they have been at war for 500 years and tradition prevails, he would not know what to do [no skills to wage peace]. A dipolmat was with the landing party at the time offered his services to help make a peace treaty.
mfwright@batnet.com
The nationalization and segmentation of Internet has begun. It was a nice place with no borders and equal for everyone. But of course, old power-greedy bastards has awoken and now want to subjugate everyone under their rule, claim "territories" that they own and build armies to fight with each other. And common folks as always are blinded with "patriotism" propaganda, while really are just used as a resource for some self-proclaimed sociopathic "leaders". Since the dawn of ages. Humanity, will you ever learn?
Hmm. The ID10Ts have finished building their cyber-command, staffed it with the *cough* best *cough* IT that the marines can offer, and they want to give it a spin. They're looking for a fight. Were I a general, I would not stop b*tch-slapping these people until my hand got tired, then I'd have one of my assistants take over for me: what kind of steroid-abusing, minimum legal IQ, closed-minded, in-bred, patriot (put charitably) goes looking to start a war during a time of relative peace? We have nothing to gain from this venture, and everything to lose.
Has the nation gone full-retard? This kind of behavior is supposed to be out of your system by the time you hit 18, cropping up only when you get a speeding ticket, had a bad day at the office, or are at home with the family for the holidays.
Don't get me wrong, if you need to protect something material, the US military is some of the best. But like Space, Cyber-Space is specifically un-militarized, with only a handful of shadow games being played by somewhat disinterested players (that the internet was started by a military project is not lost on me ^_^). It's a completely different battlefield, with completely different rules, and it's not going to be helped by this addition. The very action of trying to play war with the internet means the US military will succeed where its politicians have failed: the US will end up getting cut off from the global internet, as countries move to protect themselves. This action is the internet equivalent of parking some Soviet ICBMs in Cuba!
You know, once upon a time, the United States had a Department of War. It's job was to ensure that our country was always at war with some other country. We ditched it in favor of a Department of Defense. I am having trouble telling the difference now.
I am John Hurt.
Those cutting edge Senators and Representatives have a hunch that China and others may one day consider developing such a cyberwar capacity, and want the USA to be the first to develop it.
Gently reply
And part of human nature seems to be to frame everything as a kind of "war". But this can backfire. Back in 1964, here in the US, President Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty". Quickly, millions of poor people started asking where they could go to surrender. That war was quietly shelved soon thereafter.
We just need to find as clever a way to respond to the US government declaring war on the Internet. Is there a good way to make us all look like opponents, so we can surrender and get funds for reconstruction?
Anyone got any good ways to phrase this?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Uh.. neutral utopia for spreading ideas and knowledge? I'm pretty sure that (D)ARPA had no intention of neutrality in terms of who was "supposed to" benefit from the communication.....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Agreed.
Life has been curious to me. When I was much younger, I was rabidly anti-drug, and considered the taking of one to mess with the clarity of thought. Having grown older, and been to college, I've found that it's very easy to be against something, when you've had no experience with it. Experience tends to teach us the flaws in our thinking.
As for this War on Terror, the story of the boy who cried wolf comes to mind. Quite a few people are milking the government right now with paranoid delusions of illusory enemies, offering solution after solution in bad faith, administering placebos or poison instead of medicine, congratulating each other as they plunder the public's wallet. Were I not dimly aware that I might be nearby when something truly terrible arrives, and the government is either tapped out or the populace apathetic, I might enjoy watching these people as they try to flee something unthinkable. Hopefully the weight of their ill-gotten proceeds will weigh them down, long enough for something like Mr. Market to catch up to them. Pity that karma does not have the accuracy that some of our laser-guided projectiles sport; I hate to think of how many people are suffering because of this nonsense.
I am John Hurt.
If only they'd declared a war on patenting....
Fixed it for you.
I think the term human nature is thrown about too carelessly. Human nature would imply it's in the genes. Sure, the genes allow for war and all bad things, but how about the power of culture? I think the world of today is shaped more by culture and ideas, than by genes. We are not just monkeys. We can do what we think is right.
The powerful shape the world in a way that benefits them, but humanity as a whole wouldn't want this mess, I think. It's not the genes. It's history. The history of power, money and ideas, more than it is human nature. Culture and ideas we can change. Nature, not so much.
We can overcome any genes for rape, murder an oppression with some ideas of doing the right thing. Ideas will evolve. And the Internet should help accelerate that evolution.
Aren't we in the midst of a great "evolutionary leap"? It just doesn't show in our genes. It's our collective consciousness that is getting more saturated with truth. Some powerful players are of course against all this truth, but humanity can prevail, I think.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Yeah, but we are just monkeys. Just because some people have the ability to do what they think is right has no bearing on what most people actually do. Plus, what people think is right is subjective. Do you live alone on an island, in a vacuum? I've read excellent arguments stating that rape is not a bad thing. Cite empathy and destructive repercussions all you like, but rape may have saved the human race from extinction. Good, evil, whatever... It is all subjective.
I'm pretty sure that (D)ARPA had no intention of neutrality in terms of who was "supposed to" benefit from the communication.....
It might be informative (and maybe enlightening) if we can get people to look back at what (D)ARPA actually had in mind back in the 1960s and 1970s when they were funding the development that led to the Internet. Their original documents mostly talked in terms of just the sort of "warfare" that people are getting so upset about now.
An important part of the design was multi-path routing that could be rapidly modified, as an enemy found and took out your routers. The idea was that as long as a path existed between two points, the routing system would find it and keep those two points in communication, despite the best efforts of the enemy.
Of course, in current terms, most of the Internet would consider the US government (along with various others in China, Iran, wherever) as "enemy", since people in the US government are talking openly about actively interfering with our communication without knowing or caring who we might be.
One of the major failures in the current Internet is that multi-path routing has been pretty much nixed by the ISPs. How many data paths do you have out of your home or office? 99% of us have only one, which is a blatant violation of the original design. You should try using traceroute to list the machines along the path to a remote site. Do it several times, and see if the same path comes up each time. If so, then you are a victim of single-path routing, and that path can be taken out at any time by an enemy who has access to any of those machines along the route. Or, even worse, they can make a copy of every packet between you and that site, without you knowing that they're doing this . The original ARPA/Internet design was specifically to avoid such security risks.
If we want to keep the Internet safe from "cyber warfare", maybe we should be looking seriously at what the military people are doing with it in their private networks. And we should implement the parts of IP that have been ignored in favor of a fragile design that provides mostly single-path routes.
Then we might be safer from not just the US's perceived enemies, but also from the US government itself.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Nah; I don't think it's anything especially American. The US population is one of the most "mongrelized" on the planet. There hasn't been nearly enough time for that population to merge into any kind of self-consistent sub-population. So the behavior shown by Americans (even American politicians) is a jumble of the behaviors of all the source populations from other parts of the world.
Visually, the US population looks mostly "white", i.e., European. But the demographers tell us that this really is only skin deep, and hides a lot more mixing than most people would guess. Thus, it's estimated that some time around 1980 (give or take a few years), we reached the point where more than 50% of the US population has black African ancestry. Granted, most of those people are maybe 1/8 or 1/32 African, and look white, but most of them know that they're not "pure". I'm part of the 20-25% that has "Native-American" (the current euphemism) ancestry. I look pure white, but I'm 1/8 Ojibwa, and my father's family has a collection of stories about the treatment of the 1st and 2nd generation hybrids who looked visibly "Injun". I have a daughter who is also 1/8 Injun; her mother had a Comanche great-grandparent. The US population with Asian ancestry is around 15-20% now. And so on.
The purely European part of the US population can't be easily estimated, but may be as low as 25% now. And Europe itself has been rather mongrelized for a long time. Consider the etymology of the term "mongrelized".
So any claim to a separate "American" nature is highly bogus. They're just a jumbled mixture of humans, with all sorts of built-in (mostly culturally-derived) beliefs and behaviors. Treating them as morally superior or inferior to the rest of the world is just incorrect.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
[Y]our method for determining single-path-routing is flawed. The routing takes the "best" path, in many cases the "best" path is so much better than any other that it is essentially static. However, if that connection were to go down then other routes would start being used.
Well, yes and no. If you're only interested in speed, you're right. But I've worked on several projects that explicitly and intentionally scattered a connection's packets across as many (reasonably fast) routes as were available. This was done for several reasons. One of them is directly relevant to the topic at hand: Using multiple routes defeats attempts to intercept your packets and collect them. Many encryption-cracking schemes require large contiguous chunks of a message to succeed in decoding the content. If a message's packet is scattered across multiple routes, collecting all of the message's packets (or enough to decrypt it) becomes materially more difficult.
This is, or should be, of interest to anyone with security concerns. And it has been used in military communications. Actually, the projects I did this for had a different primary motive: They wanted to achieve a data transfer rate higher than any single route could provide. We were quite successful at this. But our code was also of interest to the security guys, who wanted it for security reasons rather than speed.
We did run into a problem similar to the famous incident in which all of New England was simultaneously disconnected from the rest of North America. The long-line providers (mostly the phone companies) sometimes managed to map all our connections to a single physical wire, reducing our speed to that wire's speed and making packet collection possible (though still a bit tricky). As usual, this is a primary example of why you don't want the lower layers strictly invisible to the upper layers. Regardless of whether you are doing this for speed or security, you want to know quickly when the physical layer has defeated your multi-routing scheme and reduced it to a single physical route. The people running the physical layer can't be trusted to maintain such separation, even when you've paid for it.
Doing such multi-routing from the application level is tricky. It's usually done by having multiple interfaces with different network numbers. But this can be easily reduced to a single path by the routing system. This can often be detected by using traceroute to report the paths. That, combined with knowledge of which machines have each of the reported addresses can determine that two (application-level) routes are actually one (physical level) route, and raising the appropriate alarm. But this approach has statistical behavior, with a time lag before merging of routes is discovered. Doing better generally requires hooks into the lower levels that most commercial libraries (and OSs) don't provide. This is yet another way in which the current commercial internet has defeated part of the original (military-funded) design of the Internet.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.