Cyber Warfare: Building Attack Tools for Mass Destruction
by Tom Burghardt via Kismo - Antifascist Calling... Thursday, May 28 2009, 10:25am
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A quintessential hallmark of an authoritarian regime, particularly one that operates within highly-militarized, though nominally democratic states such as ours, is the maintenance of a system of internal control; a seamless panopticon where dissent is equated with criminality and the rule of law derided as a luxury ill-afforded "during a time of war."
In this context, the deployment of new offensive technologies which can wreck havoc on human populations deemed expendable by the state, are always couched in a defensive rhetoric by militarist aggressors and their apologists.
While the al-Qaeda brand may no longer elicit a compelling response in terms of mobilizing the population for new imperial adventures, novel threats--and panics--are required to marshal public support for the upward transfer of wealth into the corporate trough. Today, "cyber terror" functions as the "new Osama."
And with Congress poised to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, an Orwellian bill that would give the president the power to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security" of course, the spaces left for the free flow of information--and meaningful dissent--slowly contract.
DARPA--and Cybersecurity Grifters--to the Rescue
But protecting critical infrastructure from hackers, criminals and terrorists isn't the only game in town. The Pentagon is planning to kick-start a new office, Cyber Command, armed with the capacity to launch devastating attacks against any nation or group deemed an official enemy by Washington.
As Antifascist Calling reported last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's "geek squad," is building a National Cyber Range (NCR). As Cyber Command's research arm, the agency's Strategic Technology Office (STO) describes NCR as
DARPA's contribution to the new federal Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative (CNCI), providing a "test bed" to produce qualitative and quantitative assessments of the Nation's cyber research and development technologies. Leveraging DARPA's history of cutting-edge research, the NCR will revolutionize the state of the art for large-scale cyber testing. Ultimately, the NCR will provide a revolutionary, safe, fully automated and instrumented environment for our national cyber security research organizations to evaluate leap-ahead research, accelerate technology transition, and enable a place for experimentation of iterative and new research directions. ("National Cyber Range," Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Strategic Technology Office, no date)According to a January 2009 press release, the agency announced that NCR "will accelerate government research and development in high-risk, high-return areas and work in close cooperation with private-sector partners to jump-start technical cyber transformation."
Building toward the architecture of the future requires research and development that focuses on game-changing technologies that could enhance the security, reliability, resilience and trustworthiness of our digital infrastructure. We need to be mindful of how we, government and industry together, can optimize our collective research and development dollars and work together to improve market incentives for secure and resilient hardware and software products, new security innovation, and secure managed services. ("Remarks by Melissa E. Hathaway, Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils," INSA, April 30, 2009)That Hathaway chose INSA as a forum is hardly surprising. Describing itself as a "non-profit professional association created to improve our nation's security through an alliance of intelligence and national security leaders in the private and public sectors," INSA was created by and for contractors in the heavily-outsourced shadow world of U.S. intelligence. Founded by BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Computer Sciences Corporation, General Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, ManTech International, Microsoft, the Potomac Institute and Science Applications International Corporation, The Washington Post characterized INSA as "a gathering place for spies and their business associates."
The heart of this attack device is its ability to tap into satellite communications, voice over Internet, proprietary Scada networks--virtually any wireless network. Scada (supervisory control and data acquisition) is of particular interest since it is used to automatically control processes at high-value targets for terrorists such as nuclear facilities, power grids, waterworks, chemical plants and pipelines. The cyberattack device would test these supposedly inviolate networks for vulnerabilities to wireless penetration. (David A. Fulghum, "Network Attack Weapons Emerge," Aviation Week, May 21, 2009)As can be expected, the Pentagon's rhetorical mise-en-scène is always a purely "defensive" response to future depredations by nefarious and shadowy forces threatening the heimat. In fact, the United States has systematically employed battlefield tactics that target civilian infrastructure as a means of breaking the enemy's will to fight. Stretching across the decades, from Southeast Asia to Iraq to Yugoslavia, imperialist strategists have committed war crimes by targeting the electrical grid, water supply and transportation- and manufacturing infrastructure of their adversaries.
A particularly dangerous consequence of the long-term power blackout is the damage to the water systems in many Yugoslav cities, which are dependent on pumping stations run by electrical power. Novi Sad, a city of 300,000 which is the capital of the Vojvodina province of Serbia, has been without running water for eight days, according to residents. Families have been compelled to get water from the Danube river to wash and operate the toilet, and a handful of wells to provide drinking water.With technological advances courtesy of DARPA's National Cyber Range and their "private-sector partners," the potential for utterly devastating societies ripe for resource extraction by American corporatist war criminals will increase exponentially. As Wired reported,
Sewage treatment plants have also been shut down, with the result that raw, untreated sewage has begun to flow into the network of rivers that feed into the Danube, central Europe's most important waterway. (Marty McLaughlin, "Wall Street celebrates stepped-up bombing of Serbia," World Socialist Web Site, May 5, 1999)
Comparisons between nuclear and cyberweapons might seem strained, but there's at least one commonality. Scholars exploring the ethics of wielding logic bombs, Trojan horses, worms and bots in wartime often find themselves treading on ground tilled by an earlier generation of Cold War nuclear gamesmen.Initiatives such as the National Cyber Range are fully theorized as one facet of "network-centric warfare," the Rumsfeldian "Revolution in Military Affairs." Durham University geographer Stephen Graham describes the Pentagon notion that dominance can be achieved through "increasingly omnipotent surveillance and 'situational awareness', devastating and precisely-targeted aerial firepower, and the suppression and degradation of the communications and fighting ability of any opposing forces."
"There are lots of unknowns with a cyberattack," says Neil Rowe, a professor at the Center for Information Security Research at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, who rejects cyberattacks as a legitimate tool of war. "The potential for collateral damage is worse than nuclear technology.... With cyber, it can spread through the civilian infrastructure and affect far more civilians." (Marty Graham, "Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA," Wired, February 11, 2008)
A touch-screen dashboard beneath the network schematic display looks like the sound mixing console at a recording studio. The left side lists cyberattack mission attributes such as speed, covertness, attribution and collateral damage. Next to each attribute is the image of a sliding lever on a long scale. These can be moved, for example, to increase the speed of attack or decrease collateral damage. (Aviation Week, op. cit.)A tunable device for increased destructive capabilities; what are these if not a prescription for mass murder on a post-industrial scale?
Thus the planned Cyber Range must be able to simulate not just large computer networks teeming with nodes, but also the people operating and using these interlocked networks. These software sim-people--users, sysadmins, innocent network bystanders and passers-by--are referred to in the Range plans as "replicants". It seems clear that they won't know that they are merely simulated pawns in a virtual network wargame designed to test the efficiency of America's new cyber arsenal. They will merely have to live in a terrible Groundhog Day electronic armageddon, where the weapons and players change but destruction and suffering remain eternal. (Lewis Page, "Deals inked on DARPA's Matrix cyber VR," The Register, January 5, 2009)Rance Walleston, the head of BAE's cyber warfare division told Aviation Week in late 2008, "We want to change cyber attack from an art to a science." And as The Register averred, the Pentagon's "simulated cyber warzone" should be up and running next year, "ready to pass under the harrow of BAE's new electronic pestilences, digital megabombs and tailored computer plagues."
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