War #5? Pentagon Ramps up for Cyber Warfare

Topher Morrison
PurpleSerf.com

Image Source: EcoFriend.com

Yesterday Reuters ran the headline "Pentagon to treat cyberspace as 'operational domain'", you have to love GovSpeak!  What "operational domain" really means is that the Pentagon has authorized itself to do what it essentially does now in the physical world, attack whenever and most importantly wherever.


For the last decade the US intelligence community and defense chiefs have suspected traditional state actors, most notably China and Russia, of conducting digital espionage, however, since the rise of transnational organizations like Anonymous and now defunct LulzSec the game has changed significantly according to Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn:


"They have few or no assets to hold at risk and a greater willingness to provoke.  They are thus harder to deter.  If a terrorist group gains disruptive or destructive cyber tools, we have to assume they will strike with little hesitation."


It is with this simple weak analogy and obvious red hearing the Pentagon can now justify an offensive cyberspace posture.  By conflating a decentralized internet meme bent on transparency and free flow of information with legitimate state-sponsored hackers, but which have together circumvented the security systems of not only the Pentagon, CIA, and FBI, but also defense-related contractors like HB Gary Federal, Lockheed Martin, and EMC, the US government has created another boogeyman, a perfect pretext to take back by force what it created, the internet.  To the untrained mind the Pentagon has created a convincing argument.  


To be fair the threat of cyber warfare is quantifiable as over the last decade it has been estimated, albeit according to the Pentagon, to cost the United States untold terabytes of sensitive information and trillions of dollars worth of system damage, loss of intellectual property, and diminished competitiveness.


The ol' phrase "the best offense is a good defense" is evidently not something the Pentagon wishes to hear any longer. "We've got to change the calculus" says General Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from 90 percent focus on better firewalls and 10 percent on preventing hackers from attacking, or as Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn refers to it as, "denying them the benefit of attack."  This can really only mean one thing, preemptive attack, informed by what Reuters reports as plans for "...sensors, software and signatures to detect malicious code before it effects US operations."  The only way for the Pentagon to accomplish this is through monitoring all telecommunications.  When it comes to intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) our government has shown no problem circumventing established law in order to accomplish this task.  


Mr. Lynn claims he "wanted to avoid militarizing cyberspace."  With coffee running down my nose his statement seems somewhat dubious considering in January the US government broke ground on a $1.5 billion cyber-security center under the unsurprisingly innocuous title "Utah Data Center."  Senator Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah admitted it is "the largest military construction project in recent memory" and there is little doubt its construction has been planned for years.  Moreover, with the tacit admission by the US government of their involvement in the Stuxnet virus, which successfully postponed the nuclear ambitions of Iran, Mr. Lynn's "reluctance" carries little weight.