Parody of cyber-culture - scary don't cover it
I never thought I'd ref. an episode of South Park for an example, but here it is. My savvy team of FSNCOs turned analysts basically recommended I go to you tube and watch the South Park episode entitled :
"Make Love not Warcraft" .
While I have to admit it was damn humorous, right down to the portrayal of the online bad guy as a balding, overweight guy with a carpal tunnel brace and potato chip crumbs in his beard, it was also a 21 minute tutorial into the world of online gaming, the industry that supports it, the psychology of many who play it, its vulnerabilities and its strengths (the last two require a bit of analysis).
While I laughed, I also felt the hair raise up on the back of my neck. While our system prolongs the acquisition process of useful tech (and useless tech), the bad guys are adapting the incredible pace of a commercial tech evolution that is driven by global consumerism - nothing produces technology breakthroughs like profit potential - which allows $$$ to pay the best and the brightest. The result is kind of akin to a poor man's (or 3rd World if you prefer) version of industrial espionage, except for there not stealing the actual tech to make a profit, they are using a hitch hiking/parasitic type of behavior that is highly innovative. There is little to no overhead to develop a network that is already there. Their investment is in producing people capable of using / adapting it.
Consider other industries that are going to be altered by the Internet and WWW. Why would it be far more profitable for recording industries to discard hard copy format for purely digital? It is profit driven. The only reason we've not seen it yet is because the cost benefit did not weigh out in favor yet - but it soon will. I bring this up because its indicative of where some of our attention needs to focused - we need to understand what drives the changes that alter the environment in favor of an enemy that does not have much money but is clever and innovative and will find ways to use his enemy's pride and joy against him. The Internet and WWW we so proudly hail and enjoy has become his (and criminals like him) parallel universe. It is vast and there are few rules (there are even rules in which can be manipulated to improve his terrain advantages).
The internet & by extension the WWW is fixing to get much faster - and is constantly getting bigger (the ability to crawl and inventory cannot keep pace with the growth - so nobody knows how big it really is, and since not all nodes are connected (some by design), there is no real map - again I go to the book cited by Hammes called "Linked" by Albert-Lazlo Barabasi. There are efforts to map it though, and the best chances actually come from search companies like Google - incidentally - RTK made mention about Google Earth in a thread not too long ago - here is an observation though - go to Google Earth and turn on its "show 3D buildings" - I suspect few at Google actually build terrain - they take advantage of people who accept a challenge of building it since you can download the terrain builder - then Google just has other customers QA/QC - more submissions means more refinements - the victim provides the rehearsal tools. Here is another thing to look at - take a gander at how many webcams you can access through Google Earth! You guys get the picture (intentional pun ).
What we have to do is figure out how to use it better then they do - part of that means acknowledging that their use of commercial low cost / no cost tech is in some ways better then our high price / slow to acquire and field tech that because of security requirements often isolates us from the WWW population (another FOB analogy here). The bad guy hopes you invest all of your time in ASAS (All Source Analysis System) and chastise your guys from being on the Internet. He loves that our DOIMs at post restrict every useful site where our Intel folks could troll message boards - guess what he probably has no problem shucking his puritanical views to use the porn sites to communicate. He uses our own culture and fears against us. He is dirty, and he knows we are not. He has no problem chopping off heads for a blog and knows full well that he will almost certainly be treated to 3 squares a day if interned into CF custody - he knows when he's not the media will intervene on his behalf - this is why when he goes before an Iraqi judge he says " I only kill Amerikis" and when he goes into CF hands he says with every X-fer "I've been abused". - They have been trained and conditioned to do so.
Ive got one short thing to say...
...and it is important. NMCI is evil.