Tech War

Schachtman at Danger Room has two interesting posts up on technology and war. In the first, he notes the development of U.S. Cyber Command. Key quotes……

“One thing that is pretty clear: NSA will be leading this emerging command. Gates is recommending that NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander also become the head of the new network force — and get a fourth star. Gates is also suggests that the command set up its headquarters somewhere mighty convenient for Alexander: Ft. Meade, Marlyand, home of the NSA.

The clandestine agency — renown in the military for its geeky skills, and infamous among civil libertarians for its widespread monitoring of Americans’ communications — may also come to dominate the wider government cyber defense effort, as well. Under the president’s recently-announced (and also pretty vague) network protection plan, the Department of Homeland Security is theoretically responsible for coordinating the network defense of the civilian government, and of the country’s critical infrastructure. But DHS doesn’t have nearly the technical brains or the financial brawn of the Defense Department and the NSA. Just look at the two departments’ budgets for next year. As the Wall Street Journal notes, the Pentagon is planning to train “more than 200 cyber-security officers annually. By comparison, the Department of Homeland Security has 100 employees dedicated to civilian cyber security, with plans to reach 260 next year.”

This is a new command that Gates is setting up. Its responsibilities and roles are yet to be determined. One can immediately see that there are a lot of potential problems. Existing agencies in the military branches will defend their turf. How will it integrate with other agencies? What is the potential for interference in civilian affairs?

Even given the potential problems, I think Gates is making the correct decision. In the wars we are fighting, and the conflicts we are likely to be engaged in for the foreseeable future, cyber attacks and intel gathering are likely to be of paramount importance. For the most part, the jihadists are relatively young. They have ben brought up in the digital age. They have generally used the web more effectively than we have in their information operations. While we worry about nukes and dirty bombs, I find it just as, maybe more, likely that in our asymmetrical conflicts, we could suffer a debilitating internet attack. So much of our business is now conducted via the web in some form or another. Email, ordering, information storage are just a few areas that could shut down our economy if successfully attacked. More insidious attacks could include altering data or transferring monies. To date, most hacking has been done by individuals or small groups of hackers. If a concerted effort is made by any large, well financed group, we will need the resources to stop or avoid such attacks.

Next, Schachtman points out how the net giveth and the net taketh away. Key quotes……..

“One of those projects: design the Firefox Web browser to embed the TOR network. That’s the “onion router” anonymous surfing service, which throws off the Supreme Leader’s online goons by “distributing your transactions over several places on the Internet, so no single point can link you to your destination,” the project’s site explains. “The idea is similar to using a twisty, hard-to-follow route in order to throw off somebody who is tailing you — and then periodically erasing your footprints. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it’s going.”

“There are plenty of programs political dissidents can use to route their Internet traffic through third parties and escape censorship and avoid monitoring,” one know-it-all blogger tells Lake. “But TOR is different because it is an encrypted network of node after node, each one unlocking encryption to the next node. And because of this, it is all but impossible for governments to track Web sites a TOR user is visiting. TOR is a great way to give Ahmadinejad’s Web censors headaches.”

I think Lynn alluded to this in one of her earlier posts. This was set up, as noted earlier in the post, specifically so that Iranian activists could not easily get shut down. So far, it seems to be working. But, the web has downsides in a revolution also.

“Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, on the other hand, thinks all this tech has actually made it easier for the regime to repress the activists. “On Wednesday, a reader alerted the Lede to an Iranian government Web site called Gerdab.ir, where authorities had posted pictures of protesters and were asking citizens for help in identifying the activists. That’s right—the regime is now using crowd-sourcing, one of the most-hyped aspects of Web 2.0 organizing, against its opponents. If you think about it, that’s no surprise. Who said that only the good guys get to use the power of the Web to their advantage?”

Bummer.