Is Cyber a new warfare? Debate (catch all)

[AdamG]

WASHINGTON—The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.
The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...#ixzz1NxpKALeP

[Brett Patron]

I keep asking and it never gets an answer:

What does "cyber" mean?

If cyberspace is a domain, then we should be able to describe cogently what is meant by a cyber (sic) "war".

Wouldn't "cyber-style" attack (absent any other useful definition) be the tipper that leads to a response decision, vice a whole "war"?

[selil]

I keep asking and it never gets an answer:

What does "cyber" mean?

If cyberspace is a domain, then we should be able to describe cogently what is meant by a cyber (sic) "war".

Wouldn't "cyber-style" attack (absent any other useful definition) be the tipper that leads to a response decision, vice a whole "war"?

Cyber literally means command and control. Less literally the domain in which all of that happens. Now describe sea without self referencing it or using a synonym.

[Brett Patron]

Cyber literally means command and control. Less literally the domain in which all of that happens. Now describe sea without self referencing it or using a synonym.

No. Command and Control means "command and control". Otherwise the Air Force wouldn't have changed all their Comms folks into "Cyber Warriors".

Seriously? Literally means? Where is the "literal" part?

It's not called "the sea". It's called the "maritime domain" which is defined in JP 1-02 as "The oceans, seas, bays, estuaries, islands, coastal areas, and the
airspace above these, including the littorals."

And that is both "littoral" and "literal".

[Brett Patron]

A mentor of mine sent this to me and I thought it was worth sharing...just to keep things in perspective...

It's War!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyeKYQdYISg

[AdamG]

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama has signed executive orders that lay out how far military commanders around the globe can go in using cyberattacks and other computer-based operations against enemies and as part of routine espionage in other countries.

The orders detail when the military must seek presidential approval for a specific cyber assault on an enemy and weave cyber capabilities into U.S. war fighting strategy, defense officials and cyber security experts told The Associated Press.

Signed more than a month ago, the orders cap a two-year Pentagon effort to draft U.S. rules of the road for cyber warfare, and come as the U.S. begins to work with allies on global ground rules.

The guidelines are much like those that govern the use of other weapons of war, from nuclear bombs to missiles to secret surveillance, the officials said.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20110622/D9O0SERG0.html

[AdamG]

Should We Fire the First Shot in a Cyberwar?
Defending against an attack is so hard that some think a stronger offense is required.
http://m.technologyreview.com/web/39315/

[Brett Patron]

Should We Fire the First Shot in a Cyberwar?
Defending against an attack is so hard that some think a stronger offense is required.
http://m.technologyreview.com/web/39315/

Defense and Offense are different and simultaneous. Parallel, but interlocked efforts. That is probably what makes this a unique warfighting domain.

[AdamG]

China-Based Hacking of 760 Companies Shows Cyber Cold War

Google Inc. (GOOG) and Intel Corp. (INTC) were logical targets for China-based hackers, given the solid-gold intellectual property data stored in their computers. An attack by cyber spies on iBahn, a provider of Internet services to hotels, takes some explaining.

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/201...obal-cyber-war

[selil]

Like any of the other domains cyber has different roles that inherently suggest capabilities and also responsibilities. If you accept cyber as a defacto domain.

Computer Network Attack, Defense, and Operations are elements of nation state capability to wage war and control communications and control mechanisms.

Information (assurance) and security is about users, corporations, and non-military governmental entities protecting their information assets.

This is not an equivocation, but a realization that not all attacks rise to the level of war, and that not all capabilities are about making war. We have police forces for taking care of crime, but militaries for taking care of similar actions/behaviors that carry quite different consequences. Not all nations separate these powers, but almost all nations realize the difference when talking about terrestrial or the sea.

So hacking, low level noise, and other inelegant descriptions of the noise in a borderless cyber world is not necessarily war. No matter what people call it. It may be criminal, it may be inconvenient, but it is not war. Similarly defense by a military entity is not the same as defense by a non-military entity. Further, the element of defense in hostile operations environments will be significantly different the element of defense in normal operations.

Unfortunately such subtleties aren't in vogue or considered by the main stream media.

[Backwards Observer]

Chinese hackers deface Bloomberg 'capitalist roader' editorial section, produce non-alarmist article; cyberpocalypse slouches closer:

View: Corporate America Must Fight, and Live With, China Hackers

Chinese hackers have redefined the concept of room service: In one recent attack, they infiltrated an Internet service provider to some of the world’s leading hotels, potentially gaining access to millions of confidential messages of traveling executives, as well as to the victims’ corporate networks.

[...]

Of course, industrial espionage has been a fixture of the economic landscape for centuries. Americans have a rich history of pilfering ideas from abroad, beginning with the theft of spinning and weaving technology from the British. So one proper response to today’s techno-thieves -- be they Chinese, Russian, French, German or Israeli -- is for American companies to embrace the threat as a fact of life and step up their own vigilance, especially when their executives travel overseas.

[...]

Finally, we need to treat the threat of Chinese cyber- espionage, real as it is, in a sober, nuanced manner. Sometimes, U.S. cyber warriors talk of China in language that sounds like it comes from an old Fu Manchu movie. China isn’t a monolith: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of State Security and the People’s Liberation Army -- not to mention an army of rogue hackers -- all behave very differently.

Many Chinese recognize that China and the U.S. share a common interest in ensuring the protection of intellectual property, that foreign companies will not continue to invest in a country that is stealing their crown jewels, and that China stands to lose from undermining an economy in which it has invested hundreds of billions of dollars.

View: Corporate America Must Fight, and Live With, China Hackers - Bloomberg - Dec 16, 2011.
...

Also hacked; Council of Foreign Relations (paper tiger dept.) becomes 'PLA mouthpiece', cybergeddon looms:

Can You Hear Me Now? The U.S. Sends China a Message on Cyber Espionage

[...]

Whatever happens next, we are clearly only at the beginning. Claiming specific individuals and groups are behind the attacks is an important step forward, but where this all ends will ultimately depend on politics—how important cyber threats are compared to all the other issues in the U.S.-Sino relationship.

Can You Hear Me Now? The U.S. Sends China a Message on Cyber Espionage - Asia Unbound (CFR blog) - Dec 13, 2011.
...

Fah Lo Suee

[AdamG]

A cybersecurity think tank has published a manual studying how international law applies to conflicts in cyberspace, where the laws of conventional warfare are more difficult to apply.

The manual comes from experts working with the Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence (CCDCOE), an institute based in Tallinn, Estonia, founded in 2008 that assists NATO with technical and legal issues associated with cyberwarfare-related issues.

The centre's 215-page study, the 'Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare', is intended as a reference for legal advisers for government agencies. It examines existing international law that allows countries to legally use force against other nations, as well as laws governing the conduct of armed conflict.

http://news.techworld.com/security/3...-cyberwarfare/

[pvebber]

Given the recent manifesto by VADM's Card and Rogers in USNI Proceedings
("The Navy's Newest Warfighting Imperative") regarding the criticality of
cyberspace to the Navy's future, done in breathless metaphors to military
operations in the "other" domains, Dr. Libicki offers an important
"minority report" questioning the appropriateness of those metaphors, and
the overall philosophy behind our emerging doctrine for using cyberspace
(and information more generally) to relative advantage.

I think it unfortunate that this important essay languishes in a somewhat
obscure Law Journal, at least from the point of view of the military
audience that it could benefit. I think we are in danger of going down the
primrose path of wishful thinking we did with JV2010 in painting the
picture the good VADM's Proceedings article does about how to realize the
benefits and mitigate the risks associated with cyberspace, in terms of how
we deal with physical domains. The deja vu associated with the siren song
of "information dominance" harkens back to how the "fog of war" was going to
be lifted in JV2010 if only we interconnected everything and Metcalf's law
paid us the bonanza. Dr. Libicki makes a strong argument that leveraging
cyberspace may best be done on its own terms, and not through treating it
as another peg to be mashed into an ill-fitting doctrinal "domain" hole.

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/students/gr.../4.Libicki.pdf

Hat tip to my colleague Bob Manke for bringing this to my attention.

[Bill Moore]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...ing?CMP=twt_gu

This is what Unit 61398 really represents: not just the ambitions of a stirring China, but the growing to maturity of a new ecosystem of warfare, espionage, activism and criminality. Last week a retired CIA director, Michael Hayden, compared it to the dawning of the atomic age at Hiroshima, saying: "This has the whiff of August 1945."

[Bill Moore]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...ors_picks=true

Will 'Digital Ethnic Cleansing' Be Part of the Internet's Future?

Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, and Steve Clemons discuss the political limitations of the Internet.

And they might ultimately engage, Cohen continued, in a kind of "digital ethnic cleansing." Traditional legal and political checks on mass criminality have been developed within and for the physical world, he noted; in the digital, however, those checks are less developed. The web is simply too new. And you could imagine autocratic regimes or other communities taking advantage of that, creating a scenario in which one group finds a way to, for example, filter another group's content from the web. Or to shut down -- or severely slow down -- their Internet access. Or to infiltrate them with malware and/or orchestrate elaborate denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. One group, in other words, could essentially annihilate the digital existence of another.

When people in the virtual community begin to misbehave, committing crimes that wouldn't be legal in the physical space, we currently have very few mechanisms for correction. As that reality plays out on the geopolitical stage, he said, you could have "this bizarre situation" in which, say, the U.S. and China have a generally good relationship in the physical world: cash flow, open communications, travel between the two countries, etc. And yet behind the scenes -- in the digital world -- those countries could be, effectively, waging war on each other through their digital infrastructure.

Their new book looks promising.

"The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business"

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Digita.../dp/0307957136

Much of it is focused on the future of States, Terrorism, War, etc., and they don't paint a rosy picture.

[bourbon]

Their new book looks promising.
"The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business"

Evgeny Morozov has become notorious for his takedowns of technology pundits and giants - he is the intellectual equivalent of a Mongol horde unleashed upon Silicon Valley. He gave no quarter Schmidt and Cohen in his review The New Digital Age:

Future Shlock - Meet the two-world hypothesis and its havoc, by Evgeny Morozov. New Republic, 27 May 2013.

Schmidt and Cohen are at their most shallow in their discussion of the radicalization of youth (which was Cohen’s bailiwick at the State Department before he discovered the glorified world of futurology). “Reaching disaffected youth through their mobile phones is the best possible goal we can have,” they announce, in the arrogant voice of technocrats, of corporate moguls who conflate the interests of their business with the interests of the world. Mobile phones! And who is “we”? Google? The United States?

The counter-radicalization strategy that Schmidt and Cohen proceed to articulate reads like a parody from The Onion. Apparently, the proper way to tame all those Yemeni kids angry about the drone strikes is to distract them with—ready?—cute cats on YouTube and Angry Birds on their phones. “The most potent antiradicalization strategy will focus on the new virtual space, providing young people with content-rich alternatives and distractions that keep them from pursuing extremism as a last resort,” write Cohen and Schmidt. For—since the technology industry

" produces video games, social networks, and mobile phones—it has perhaps the best understanding of how to distract young people of any sector, and kids are the very demographic being recruited by terror groups. The companies may not understand the nuances of radicalization or the differences between specific populations in key theaters like Yemen, Iraq, and Somalia, but they do understand young people and the toys they like to play with. Only when we have their attention can we hope to win their hearts and minds."

Note the substitution of terms here: “we” are no longer interested in creating a “sea of newly informed listeners” and providing the Yemeni kids with “facts.” Instead, “we” are trying to distract them with the kinds of trivia that Silicon Valley knows how to produce all too well. Unfortunately, Cohen and Schmidt do not discuss the story of Josh Begley, the NYU student who last year built an app that tracked American drone strikes and submitted it to Apple—only to see his app rejected. This little anecdote says more about the role of Silicon Valley in American foreign policy than all the futurology between the covers of this ridiculous book.

When someone writes a sentence that begins “if the causes of radicalization are similar everywhere,” you know that their understanding of politics is at best rudimentary. Do Cohen and Schmidt really believe that all these young people are alienated because they are simply misinformed? That their grievances can be cured with statistics? That “we” can just change this by finding the digital equivalent of “dropping propaganda flyers from an airplane”? That if we can just get those young people to talk to each other, they will figure it all out? “Outsiders don’t have to develop the content; they just need to create the space,” Schmidt and Cohen smugly remark. “Wire up the city, give people basic tools and they’ll do most of the work themselves.” Now it’s clear: the voice of the “we” is actually the voice of venture capital.

The whole review is just brutal.

[AdamG]

Even if cybersecurity isn't a subject you think about a lot, the data breach of credit card information from and customers has probably increased your level of cyber-anxiety.

In Cybersecurity And Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, P.W. Singer looks at cybersecurity issues faced by the military, government, businesses and individuals, and what happens when you try to balance security with freedom of speech and the ideals of an open Internet.

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/14/262387...s-cyberthreats