Fwd: "Cyber War: Reality or Hype?"

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From: Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo <kklcac@earthlink.net>
Date: January 12, 2012 8:50:35 AM MST
To: DPTJC List <dptjc@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: "Cyber War: Reality or Hype?"

Dispatches From The Edge

January 10, 2012

Cyber War: Reality or Hype?

By Conn Hallinan

During his confirmation hearings this past June, U.S. Defense Secretary
Leon Panetta warned the Senate, "The next Pearl Harbor we confront could
very well be a cyber attack that cripples our grid, our security
systems, our financial systems, our governmental systems." It was
powerful imagery: a mighty fleet reduced to smoking ruin, an
expansionist Asian power at the nation's doorstep.

But is "cyber war" really a threat? Can cyber war actually "cripple"
the U.S., and who might these computer terrorists be? Or is the language
just sturm und drang spun up by a coalition of major arms manufacturers,
the Pentagon, and Internet security firms, allied with China bashers
aimed at launching a new Cold War in Asia?

The language is sobering. Former White House Security Aide Richard
Clarke, author of "Cyberwar", conjures up an apocalyptic future of
paralyzed U.S. cities, subways crashing, planes "literally falling out
of the sky," and thousands dead. Retired Admiral and Bush administration
National Intelligence Director, Mike McConnell grimly warns "The United
States is fighting a cyber war today and we are losing."

Much of this rhetoric is aimed at China. According to U.S. Rep. Mike
Rogers (R-MI), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, the Chinese
government has launched a "predatory" campaign of "cyber theft" that has
reached an "intolerable level." U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
charges that a "significant portion" of "cyber attacks" on U.S.
companies "emanate from China." Former CIA and National Security Agency
director Michael Hayden told Congress, "I stand back in awe of the
breadth, depth, sophistication, and persistence of the Chinese espionage
effort against the United States of America."

China has been accused of hacking into the Pentagon, the International
Monetary Fund, the French government, the CIA, and stealing information
from major U.S. arms maker Boeing, and the Japanese firm Mitsubishi. The
latter builds the American high performance fighter, the F-15.

The Pentagon has even developed a policy strategy that considers major
cyber attacks to be acts of war, triggering what could be a military
response. "If you shut down our power grid," one Defense official told
the Wall Street Journal, "maybe we will put a missile down one of your
smokestacks."

But consider the sources for all this scare talk: Clarke is the chair
of a firm that consults on cyber security, and McConnell is the
executive vice-president of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Both
are currently doing business with the Pentagon.

Arms giants like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing,
and other munitions manufactures are moving heavily into the cyber
security market. In 2010, Boeing snapped up Argon ST and Narus, two
cyber security firms with an estimated value of $2.4 billion. Raytheon
bought Applied Signal Technology, General Dynamics absorbed Network
Connectivity Solutions, and Britain's major arms firm, BAE, purchased
Norkom and ETI.

"There is a feeding frenzy right now to provide products and services
to meet the demands of governments, law enforcement and the military,"
says Ron Deibert, director of the Canada Center for Global Security
Studies.

There are big bucks at stake. Between the Defense Department and
Homeland Security, the U.S. will spend some $10.5 billion for cyber
security by 2015. The Pentagon's new Cyber Command is slated to have a
staff of 10,000, and according to Northrop executive Kent Schneider, the
market for cyber arms and security in the U.S. is $100 billion.

But is cyber war everything it is cracked up to be, and is the U.S.
really way behind the curve in the scramble to develop cyber weapons?

According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in his New Yorker
article "The Online Threat," the potential for cyber mayhem has "been
exaggerated" and the Defense Department and cyber security firms have
blurred the line between cyber espionage and cyber war. The former is
the kind of thing that goes on, day in and day out, between governments
and industry, except its medium is the Internet. The latter is an attack
on another country's ability to wage war, defend itself, or run its
basic infrastructure.

Most experts say the end-of-the-world scenarios drawn up by people like
Clarke are largely fiction. How could an enemy shut down the U.S.
national power grid when there is no such thing? A cyber attack would
have to disrupt more than 100 separate power systems throughout the
nation to crash the U.S. grid.

Most financial institutions are also protected. The one example of a
successful cyber attack in that area was an apparent North Korean cyber
assault this past march on the South Korean bank Nonghyup that crashed
the institution's computers. But an investigation found that the bank
had been extremely remiss in changing passwords or controlling access to
its computers. According to Peter Sommer, author of "Reducing Systems
Cybersecurity Risk," the cyber threat to banks "is a bit of nonsense."

However, given that many Americans rely on computers, cell phones,
I-Pads, smart phones and the like, any hint that an "enemy" could
disrupt access to those devices is likely to get attention. Throw in
some scary scenarios and a cunning enemy-China-and it's pretty easy to
make people nervous.

But contrary to McConnell's statement, the U.S. is more advanced in
computers than other countries in the world, and the charge that the
U.S. is behind the curve sounds suspiciously like the "bomber gap" with
the Russians in the `50s and the "missile gap" in the 1960s. Both were
illusions that had more to do with U.S. presidential elections and arms
industry lobbying than anything in the real world.

The focus on the China threat certainly fits the Obama administration's
recent "strategic pivot" toward Africa and Asia. China draws significant
resources from Africa, including oil, gas, copper, and iron ore, and
Beijing is beginning to reassert itself in south and east Asia. The U.S.
now has a separate military command for Africa-Africom-and the White
House recently excluded U.S. military forces in the Asia theatre from
any cutbacks. Washington is also deploying U.S. Marines in Australia. As
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the National Defense
University this past August, "We know we face some long-term challenges
about how we are going to cope with what the rise of China means."

But James Lewis, an expert on Chinese cyber espionage, told Hersh that
the Chinese have no intention of attacking U.S. financial services since
they own a considerable portion of them. According to Lewis, "current
Chinese officials" told him "a cyber-war attack would do as much
economic harm to us as to you." The U.S. is China's largest trading
partner and Beijing holds over a trillion dollars in U.S. securities.

There is also a certain irony to the accusations aimed at China.
According to the New York Times, the U.S.-and Israel-designed the
"Stuxnet" virus that has infected some 30,000 computers in Iran and set
back Teheran's nuclear program. The virus has also turned up in China,
Pakistan, and Indonesia. In terms of cyber war, the U.S. is ahead of the
curve, not behind.

What all this scare talk has done is allow the U.S. military to muscle
its way into cyber security in a way that could potentially allow it to
monitor virtually everything on the Internet, including personal
computers and email. In fact, the military has resisted a push to insure
cyber security through the use of encryption because that would prevent
the Pentagon from tapping into Internet traffic.

Does China really pose a threat to the U.S.? There is no question that
China-based computers have hacked into a variety of governmental
agencies and private companies (as have Russians, Israelis, Americans,
French, Taiwanese, South Koreans, etc.-in short everyone spies on
everyone), but few observers think that China has any intention of going
to war with the much more powerful U.S.

However, Beijing makes a handy bug-a-boo. One four-star admiral told
Hersh that in arguing against budget cuts, the military "needs an enemy
and it's settled on China." It would not be the first time that ploy was
used.

If the Pentagon's push is successful, it could result in an almost
total loss of privacy for most Americans, as well as the creation of a
vast and expensive new security bureaucracy. Give a government the power
to monitor the Internet, says Sommers, and it will do it. In this
electronic field of dreams, if we build it, they will use it.

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