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Infowar and Disinformation: from the Pentagon to the Net

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Infowar and Disinformation: from the Pentagon to the Net Infowar and Disinformation: From the Pentagon to the Net http://www.namebase.org/news11.html Infowar and Disinformation: From the Pentagon to the Net by Daniel Brandt From NameBase NewsLine, No. 11, October-December 1995 In 1967, a satire was published under the title "Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace." This analysis soberly reflected, in think-tank style, on the importance to society of waging war. Leonard Lewin, who pretended that the secret report was leaked and did not claim authorship until five years later, argued forcefully that war provides a type of social and psychological glue, without which society cannot function. "Roughly speaking," Lewin writes, "the presumed power of the 'enemy' sufficient to warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be proportionate to the size and complexity of the society. Today, of course, that power must be one of unprecedented magnitude and frightfulness."[1] Lewin's tongue-in-cheek premise is that before peace breaks out, it becomes urgent to find substitutes for war. They say that life imitates art. Almost 30 years later, Lewin's claim of authorship is lost amid the general enthusiasm over the manuscript. Dog-eared copies of "Report from Iron Mountain" are passed around by patriots and militia groups as if it were the secret plan from above.[2] This provides liberal critics of "conspiracism" a good chuckle or two. But it's not at all clear who will laugh last. As a predictor of the capacity of elites to manage public opinion, and to deal with stubborn fringe groups, populists can do worse than to study this 100-page volume. Already there's an effort underway to replace the Cold War in the hearts and minds of Middle America. The ruling class has to do something. Patriots in camo were easily managed when they had commies to kick around. After these patriots struck out "Communism" on the their enemies list, next up was "Council on Foreign Relations" and similar organizations. This is proving temporarily inconvenient for the global managers. One Cold War substitute might be Information Warfare. Novelist Tom Clancy, a hard-line conservative and close pal of Bob Woodward (media elites with spook connections transcend party politics), has the evil Japanese planting a stock-exchange software bomb in "Debt of Honor" (1994). Dain Gary, manager of the Pentagon-funded Computer Emergency Response Team in Pittsburgh, remarks at a conference sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that there are universities in Bulgaria that teach how to create more effective viruses.[3] A cover story in Time magazine touts "cyberwar," the latest Pentagon fad.[4] "Hackers are even better than communists," says one Washington activist who deals with civil rights and electronic privacy issues. Much of the Time story describes game-playing scenarios that are currently popular at military think tanks. Designed to simulate future capabilities, these games serve to identify potential vulnerabilities in U.S. communications and information systems. As soon as this issue of Time appeared, however, one reporter recommended it as confirmation of his own story (see sidebar). Until recently a senior editor at Forbes, this reporter gave up the good life in exchange for a fan club on Internet conspiracy newsgroups. His story relies on spooky sources who see infowar -- in the form of CIA hackers sucking out Swiss bank accounts -- as something that's been going on for two years now.[5] Life imitates art. Military professionals recognize that information technology is leading to new modes of warfare. One Pentagon general described the 1989 operation in Panama, when the command centers were "noisy places where a lot of people ran around and there were little sticky things that were put on acetate maps," and compared these to the Haiti operation, when commands were issued over video 1 of 11 26.9.2014 00:12 Infowar and Disinformation: From the Pentagon to the Net http://www.namebase.org/news11.html links. Between Panama and Haiti, the Gulf War's smart bombs with nose cameras popularized infowar on the battlefield. Even Tom Clancy's fans were impressed. Defense industries, feeling the squeeze of shrinking budgets, are also climbing on board. As the leader in information technology, as well as the cop on the international beat, America finds itself with a new opportunity to spend billions on defense. The hacker gap has replaced the missile gap, and operations security (OPSEC) is suddenly the hottest field for think tanks and consultants that do business with the government. The six-year-old OPSEC Professionals Society increased their membership by sixty percent in 1994. Even the U.S. Secret Service has an OPSEC department.[6] Rand Corporation has their cyberwar screed posted on the Internet. In their essay, the new MTR (military technology revolution) homes in on, among other things, the problem with WMD (weapons of mass destruction). "Topsight" (seeing the big picture) is required. Colin Powell is quoted (Byte, July 1992) about how "battlespace" includes an "infosphere," and personal computers were "force multipliers" in the Gulf War.[7] Mitre Corporation, another beltway bandit, has a Web page that presents their Information Security Technical Center. They help clients with Internet and database security issues, such as "multilevel secure distributed data management, security for federations of autonomous database systems, secure object-oriented data management, and integrity protection and separation of duty." When punk hackers in Germany dialed into Mitre's computer lines in 1986 and used them to romp around other defense-related computer systems on the Internet, it cost Mitre thousands of dollars in telephone bills. Their security experts said it couldn't be true. Almost a decade later, after at least two books[8] and countless newspaper articles, we now know that if hacker hype didn't exist, it would have to be created. Every corporation should leave holes for hackers; it gives reporters something to write about and it's good for the security business. The proclamations of self-identity from OPSEC professionals seem hazy at best; without hackers, they'd have nothing at all. The Pentagon has their Defense Information Systems Agency, which spares no effort to publicize the Defense Department's vulnerability to hackers. They assign their own hackers to break into the Department's Internet computers (which carry unclassified information only), and 88 percent of the time, they get in. When they do, 96 percent of the time they are undetected. One estimate of the cost of fixing it is between $15 billion and $18 billion. And infowar stories rarely fail to mention that according to Defense officials, a group of Dutch hackers offered to help Iraq during the Gulf War, by fouling up the Pentagon's logistics communications -- 25 percent of which were uncoded and sent on the Internet.[9] The next time, rumor has it, Saddam isn't likely to refuse the offer. No one is better at getting his name into print than OPSEC consultant Winn Schwartau, author of "Terminal Compromise," an infowar novel that isn't worth the cost of a free download from CompuServe. Schwartau also wrote "Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway" (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1994), described by a reviewer as 400 pages in which the author "tells us what he's going to tell us, tells us, and then tells us what he's told us."[10] At a conference in September 1995, Schwartau told of American hackers he had met, who for patriotic reasons were upset over French economic spying. Schwartau said that they planned to hack into the Paris subway and big French companies in retaliation, but then were scared off by the FBI. Schwartau goes on to claim that he installs offensive, as well as defensive, information weapon systems. "They're indispensable. Installing an offensive system is the only way to get to know the aggressive methods that you need to protect yourself against."[11] This must be what the experts call a cybernetic feedback loop. Or perhaps it's just one consultant's gravy train. Despite the hype, there are important historical trends behind the interest in information warfare. 2 of 11 26.9.2014 00:12 Infowar and Disinformation: From the Pentagon to the Net http://www.namebase.org/news11.html French military authorities, for example, suspect that unidentified hackers broke into their navy system in July and, according to Reuters on September 20, "tapped into the data on the acoustic signatures of hundreds of French and allied ships." President Jacques Chirac ordered a major investigation. While American and British liaison officers, who provided information on their own vessels, were furious at the French and suspected the Russians, some French officers suspect that the Americans were testing French security. The electronic transfer of funds is another area that highlights our growing dependency on high-tech. "We're more vulnerable than any other nation on earth," the director of the National Security Agency, John McConnell, told a seminar in June. He pointed to banks, global financial markets, and the Federal Reserve.[12] Citibank, which electronically transfers some $500 billion daily, recently worked with the FBI and authorities in several other countries to sting a group of Russian hackers. Before they were caught, they managed to transfer $400,000 from Citibank to accounts in the U.S., Finland, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, and Switzerland.[13] Outgoing CIA deputy director William Studeman recently told another conference that "massive networking makes the U.S. the world's most vulnerable target for information warfare," and said that our systems could be targeted by drug traffickers, organized crime, computer vandals, disgruntled employees, or paid professionals.
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