National Cyber Range Building Attack Tools

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... ttack.html

National Cyber Range: Building Attack Tools for Mass Destruction


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."

Given the Pentagon's proclivity to frame debates over defense and security-related issues as one of "dominating the adversary" and discovering vulnerabilities that can be "exploited" by war planners, one can hypothesize that NCR is a testing range for the creation of new offensive weapons.

Amongst the "private-sector partners" chosen by the agency to "develop, field, and test new 'leap ahead' concepts and capabilities" are:

BAE Systems, Information and Electronic Systems Integration Inc., Wayne, N.J. ($3,279,634); General Dynamics, Advanced Information Systems, San Antonio, Texas ($1,944,094); Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel Md. ($7,336,805); Lockheed Martin Corp., Simulation, Training and Support, Orlando, Fla. ($5,369,656); Northrop Grumman, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems Division, Columbia, Md. ($344,097); Science Applications International Corp., San Diego, Calif. ($2,821,725); SPARTA, Columbia, Md. ($8,603,617).

While little-known outside the defense and intelligence establishment, SPARTA describes its "core business areas" as "strategic defense and offense systems, tactical weapons systems, space systems." Its security and intelligence brief includes "intelligence production, computer network operations, and information assurance."

Investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in The Shadow Factory that SPARTA "hired Maureen Baginski, the NSA's powerful signals intelligence director, in October 2006, as president of its National Security Systems Sector." According to Bamford, the firm, like others in the netherworld of corporate spying are always on the prowl for intelligence analysts "to pursue access and exploitation of targets of interest."

Given their spooky résumé, information on SPARTA's contracts are hard to come by. Indeed, the firm claims that under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act they are exempt from providing the public with information because their products involve "the operation, or use of... intelligence activities... related to national security, command and control of military forces, equipment that is an integral part of a weapon or weapons system, or systems which are critical to the direct fulfillment of military or intelligence missions." How's that for openness and transparency! One can only hazard a guess as to the firm's role in devising DARPA's "leap-ahead" National Cyber Range.

While the initial outlay of defense funds for NCR may appear to be a substantial amount of boodle for enterprising contractors, it is merely a down payment on Phase I of the project. Melissa Hathaway, the Obama administration's director of the Joint Interagency Cyber Task Force said, "I don't believe that this is a single-year or even a multi-year investment--it's a multi-decade approach." Hathaway, a former consultant at the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation, told the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) in April,

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."

"Partners" who benefit directly from the launch of DARPA's National Cyber Range. No doubt, Hathaway's remarks are music to the ears of "beltway bandits" who reap hundreds of billions annually to fund taxpayer-fueled "national security priorities." That the Pentagon is richly rewarding INSA-connected firms with documented track records of "misconduct such as contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations," according to the Project on Government Oversight's (POGO) Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD) hardly elicits a yawn from Congress.

Among the corporations selected by the agency to construct the National Cyber Range, Lockheed Martin leads the pack in "Misconduct $ since 1995" according to POGO, having been fined $577.2 million (No. 1); Northrop Grumman, $790.4 million (No. 3); General Dynamics, $63.2 million (No. 4); BAE Systems, $1.3 million (No. 6); Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), $14.5 million (No. 9); Johns Hopkins University, $4.6 million, (No. 81)

But as disturbing as these figures are, representing corporate grifting on a massive scale, equally troubling is the nature of the project itself. As Aviation Week reports, "Devices to launch and control cyber, electronic and information attacks are being tested and refined by the U.S. military and industry in preparation for moving out of the laboratory and into the warfighter's backpack."

High-Tech Tools for Aggressive War

The American defense establishment is devising tools that can wreck havoc with a keystroke. DARPA is currently designing "future attack devices" that can be deployed across the imperialist "battlespace" by the "non-expert," that is by America's army of robosoldiers. According to Aviation Week, one such device "combines cybersleuthing, technology analysis and tracking of information flow. It then offers suggestions to the operator on how best to mount an attack and, finally, reports on success of the effort."

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.

The NCR will potentially serve as a new and improved means to bring America's rivals to their knees. Imagine the capacity for death and destruction implicit in a tool that can, for example, at the push of a button cause an adversary's chemical plant to suddenly release methyl isocynate (the Bhopal effect) on a sleeping city, or a nuclear power plant to go supercritical, releasing tens of billions of curies of radioactive death into the atmosphere?

During NATO's 1999 "liberation" of the narco-state Kosovo from the former Yugoslavia, American warplanes dropped what was described as a graphite "blackout bomb," the BLU-114/B "soft bomb" on Belgrade and other Serbian cities during its war of aggression. As the World Socialist Web Site reported at the time,

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.

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)

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,

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.

"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)

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."

Indeed, these are integrated approaches that draw from corporate management theory to create "continuous, always-on support for military operations in urban terrain," an imperialist battlespace where Wal-Mart seamlessly morphs into The Terminator.

According to Aviation Week, the device currently being field tested will "capture expert knowledge but keep humans in the loop." As a battlefield weapon, simplicity and ease of operation is the key to successfully deploying this monstrous suite of tools. And Pentagon "experts" are designing a console that will "quantify results so that the operator can put a number against a choice," "enhance execution by creating a tool for the nonexpert that puts material together and keeps track of it" and finally, "create great visuals so missions can be executed more intuitively."

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?

Additionally, DARPA sorcerers are combining "digital tools that even an inexperienced operator can bring into play. In the unclassified arena there are algorithms dubbed Mad WiFi, Air Crack and Beach. For classified work, industry developers also have a toolbox of proprietary cyberexploitation algorithms."

What has been dubbed "Air Crack" deploys "open source tools to crack the encryption key for a wireless network." Cryptoattacks on the other hand, "use more sophisticated techniques to cut through the password hash."

One means to "penetrate" an adversary's protective cyber locks is referred to as a "de-authorization capability." According to Aviation Week, the attack operator "can kick all the nodes off a network temporarily so that the attack system can watch them reconnect. This provides information needed to quickly penetrate the network." As The Register reported in January when the ink on the DARPA contracts had barely dried,

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."

Is it any wonder then, that the Russian revolutionary Lenin wrote nearly a century ago that "the civilized nations have driven themselves into the position of barbarians"?

[American Dream]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 04_pf.html

Obama Set to Create A Cybersecurity Czar With Broad Mandate
Shielding Public, Private Networks Is Goal
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 26, 2009


President Obama is expected to announce late this week that he will create a "cyber czar," a senior White House official who will have broad authority to develop strategy to protect the nation's government-run and private computer networks, according to people who have been briefed on the plan.

The adviser will have the most comprehensive mandate granted to such an official to date and will probably be a member of the National Security Council but will report to the national security adviser as well as the senior White House economic adviser, said the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations are not final.

The announcement will coincide with the long-anticipated release of a 40-page report that evaluates the government's cybersecurity initiatives and policies. The report is intended to outline a "strategic vision" and the range of issues the new adviser must handle, but it will not delve into details, administration officials told reporters last month.

Cybersecurity "is vitally important, and the government needs to be coordinated on this," a White House official said Friday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "The report give conclusions and next steps. It's trying to steer us in the right direction."

The document will not resolve the politically charged issue of what role the National Security Agency, the premier electronic surveillance agency, will have in protecting private-sector networks. The issue is a key concern in policy circles, and experts say it requires a full and open debate over legal authorities and the protection of citizens' e-mails and phone calls. The Bush administration's secrecy in handling its Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, most of which was classified, hindered such a debate, privacy advocates have said.

The White House's role will be to oversee the process, formulate policy and coordinate agencies' roles, and will not be operational, administration officials have said.

Obama was briefed a week ago and signed off on the creation of the position, the sources said. But as of Friday, discussions were continuing as to what rank and title the adviser would have. The idea is to name someone who can "pick up the phone and contact the president directly, if need be," an administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Obama pledged during his presidential campaign to elevate the issue of cybersecurity to a "top priority" and to appoint a national cybersecurity adviser "who will report directly to me."

Having the adviser report to both the national security and economic advisers suggests that the White House is seeking to ensure a balance between homeland security and economic concerns, the sources said. It also indicates an effort to quell an internal political battle in which Lawrence H. Summers, the senior White House economic adviser, is pushing for the National Economic Council to have a key role in cybersecurity to ensure that efforts to protect private networks do not unduly threaten economic growth, the sources said.

The report suggests that although it is a key government responsibility to help secure private-sector networks, regulation should be the last resort, the sources said. The report touts the concept of public-private partnerships to protect nongovernmental systems. It discusses the need to provide incentives for greater data sharing and risk management, and to use the procurement process to drive greater security, they said.

The report recommends that members be appointed to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent executive branch agency created by Congress in 2007 to ensure that privacy concerns are considered in the implementation of counterterrorism policies and laws. The report suggests that the board's mandate expressly include cybersecurity, the sources said.

The document is based on a 60-day review of cyber policies, led by Melissa Hathaway, the interim White House cybersecurity adviser and former intelligence official who is a contender for the new position. During that review, Hathaway's team had dozens of meetings with representatives from industry, academia and civil liberties groups, and received more than 100 papers.

[American Dream]

Obama's Cybersecurity Plan
Bring in the Contractors!

By Tom Burghardt

Global Research, June 4, 2009
Antifascist Calling


With billions of dollars in federal funds hanging in the balance, President Barack Obama unveiled the Cyberspace Policy Review May 29 at the White House.

During his presentation in the East Room Obama said that "America's economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cybersecurity" and that efforts to "deter, prevent, detect and defend" against malicious cyberattacks would be run from the White House.

How this debate is being framed however, has a familiar ring to it. Rather than actually educating the public about steps to prevent victimization, state prescriptions always seem to draw from the same tired playbook.

First, issue dire warnings of an imminent national catastrophe; second, manufacture a panic with lurid tales of a "digital Pearl Harbor;" third, gin-up expensive "solutions" that benefit armies of (well-paid) experts drawn from officialdom and the private sector (who generally are as interchangeable as light bulbs however dim).

As Wired magazine's "Threat Level" editor Kevin Poulsen said during a panel at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington June 3, "the threat of cyber-terrorism is 'preposterous'," arguing that "long-standing warnings" that hackers will attack the nation's power grid is so much hot-air. Poulsen contends "that calling such intrusions national security threats means information about attacks gets classified unneccessarily."

While the president claims the new office "will not include--I repeat will not include--monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic," and that his administration "will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans," the devil is in the details and when they're added together "change" once again, morphs into more of the same.

As with all things Washington, lurking wraith-like in the background, amidst bromides about "protecting America" from "cyber thieves trolling for sensitive information" are the usual class of insiders: the well-heeled corporations and their stable of retired militarists and spies who comprise the Military-Industrial-Security Complex.

Take Dale Meyerrose, for example. The former Air Force Major General served as U.S. Northern Command's Chief Information Officer. After a stint at NORTHCOM, Meyerrose became Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Information Sharing for U.S. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, the former NSA Director and ten-year executive vice president at the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm.

Last week, Meyerrose told The Wall Street Journal that "one important challenge will be finding a way to persuade private companies, especially those in price-sensitive industries, to invest more money in digital security. 'You have to figure out what motivates folks,' he said."

He should know. After serving as McConnell's cyber point man, Meyerrose plotted a new flight plan that landed him a plum job with major defense contractor, the Harris Corporation, where he currently directs the company's National Cyber Initiative.

Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the firm boasts $5.4 billion in annual revenue and clocked in at No. 13 on Washington Technology's "2008 Top 100 Government Contractors" list, with some $1.6 billion in defense-related income. Under the General Services Administration's Alliant contract worth some $50 billion, the firm is competeing with other defense giants to provide an array of IT services to various federal agencies. Major customers include the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office and Defense Department.

Let's be clear: "What motivates folks" is cold, hard cash and there's lots of it to go around courtesy of the American people. The New York Times reported May 31, "The government's urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts." According to the Times,
The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of "hacker soldiers" within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation's war planning.

Nearly all of the largest military companies--including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon--have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies. (Christopher Drew and John Markoff, "Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for the United States," The New York Times, May 31, 2009)

As Washington Technology reported June 1, Zal Azmi, CACI International's senior vice president for strategic law enforcement and national security programs, told the insider publication: "The timing is perfect. There is a lot of enthusiasm for it. "It's a very comprehensive plan. It lays out a very good strategy."

And there you have it.

A Cybersecurity Dream: Bundles of Cash

Although the position of Cybersecurity Coordinator has yet to be filled, its a sure bet whoever gets the nod will be drawn from a narrow pool of security executives, the majority of whom transit effortlessly between the Pentagon and defense corporations. That individual will oversee billions of dollars in funding for developing and coordinating the defense of computer systems that operate the global financial system as well as domestic transportation and commerce.

Under the administration's plan, the Cybersecurity Coordinator will report to the president's National Economic Council (NEC) and the National Security Council (NSC). The CSC will be a member of both NEC and NSC, Obama said in his East Room statement, "an acknowledgment that the threat is both to national security and to the economy," The Washington Post reports.

According to the Post, Obama's top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, fought for a dominant role for the NEC, ensuring that "efforts to protect private networks do not unduly threaten economic growth." This however, is unlikely to happen given the make-up of the administration's team. Which raises the question: who exactly were Obama's "private sector partners" who helped devise current state policy? The Cyberspace Policy Review sets the record straight.

The U.S. depends upon a privately owned, globally operated digital infrastructure. The review team engaged with industry to continue building the foundation of a trusted partnership. This engage ment underscored the importance of developing value propositions that are understood by both government and industry partners. It also made clear that increasing information sharing is not enough; the government must foster an environment for collaboration. The following industry groups and venues participated: the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), Business Executives for National Security (BENS), the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the Center for Strategic and International Studies' (CSIS) Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency, the Communications Sector Coordinating Council (C-SCC), the Cross-Sector Cyber Security Working Group (CSCSWG), the Defense Industrial Base Executive Committee, the Financial and Banking Information Infrastructure Committee (FBIIC), the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council (FS-SCC), the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), the Internet Security Alliance (ISA), the Information Technology Sector Coordinating Council (IT-SCC), the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC), TechAmerica, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (Cyberspace Policy Review, Appendix B: Methodology, pp. B 2-3.)


A bevy of heavy-hitters in the defense, banking, financial services, intelligence and security industries if ever there were one. And much like their predecessors in the Oval Office, the Obama administration has failed to "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the Military-Industrial-Security Complex which president Dwight. D. Eisenhower so eloquently warned against--and expanded--decades ago.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

Who then are the new peddlers of "unwarranted influence"? Let's take a look.

Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA): The Fairfax, Virginia group describes itself as a "non-profit membership association serving the military, government, industry, and academia" to advance "professional knowledge and relationships in the fields of communications, IT, intelligence and global security." AFCEA was founded at the dawn of the Cold War in 1946. It serves as an "ethical forum" where "a close cooperative relationship among government agencies, the military and industry" is fostered. With 32,000 individual and 1,700 corporate members, AFCEA was described by investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in his essential book Spies For Hire as "the largest industry association in the intelligence business." Its board of directors and executive committee are studded with players drawn from major defense and security firms such as CACI International, Booz Allen Hamilton, Science Applications International Corporation, ManTech International Corporation, QinetiQ North America, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and the spooky MITRE Corporation.

Business Executives for National Security (BENS): This self-described "nationwide, non-partisan organization" claims the mantle of functioning as "the primary channel through which senior business executives can help advance the nation's security." BENS members were leading proponents of former vice president Al Gore's defense reform initiative that handed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to BENS members in the heavily-outsourced intelligence and security industries. An advocacy group with a distinct neoconservative tilt, BENS "one special interest: to help make America safe and secure" is facilitated by executives drawn from the Pentagon. Its current Chairman and CEO is retired Air Force General Charles G. Boyd who served as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's "defense consultant." Its board of directors and executive committee include members from Biltmore Capital Group, LLC; Janus Capital Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco Systems Inc., Perot Systems Inc., Goldman Sachs and The Tupperware Corporation (!) to name but a few. BENS Advisory Council includes major war criminal Henry Kissinger, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former FBI and CIA Director William Webster, former CIA head honcho Michael V. Hayden and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace. "Non-partisan" indeed!

Business Software Alliance (BSA): BSA describes itself as "the largest and most international IT industry group" comprised on the "most innovative companies in the world." Its members are drawn from the top corporations in the computing and software industries and include Adobe, Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Siemens and Symantec. Most of these firms have extensive contractual arrangements with the Defense Department.

Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): For decades, CSIS has been a major right-wing think tank closely tied to the defense and security industries. Since its founding in 1962 by David Abshire and Admiral Arleigh Burke, CSIS has been a mouthpiece for the Defense and Intelligence Complex. Its current President and CEO, John J. Hamre was a former Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration and was hired by SAIC to work on the National Security Agency's scandal-plagued Trailblazer program. The $361 million project to build a new communications intercept system for NSA was described as a "colossal failure" by investigative journalists Donald Bartlett and James Steele in a 2007 piece in Vanity Fair. CSIS was a major behind-the-scenes force urging the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and was an apologist for the Bush administration's bogus allegation that the Iraqi government possessed "weapons of mass destruction," citing "poor intelligence" rather than political mendacity on a grand scale. In the aftermath of the invasion, Booz Allen Hamilton organized a "major conference on rebuilding Iraq that attracted hundreds of corporations eager to cash in on the billions of dollars in contracts about to be awarded by the Bush administration," according to Tim Shorrock. The closed-door event was held in the CSIS conference room and outlined the Bush regime's plans for Iraq's economic make-over--one that would sell-off state assets "in a way very conducive to foreign investment." The Obama administration's Cyberspace Policy Review has drawn extensively from CSIS' Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency report, an alarmist screed that avers that "cybersecurity is now a major national security problem for the United States." Indeed the CSIS report urges the Obama administration to "reinvent the public-private partnership" with "a focus on operational activities" that "will result in more progress on cybersecurity." How might this be accomplished? Why by regulating cyberspace, of course! CSIS avers that "voluntary action is not enough," and states "we advocate a new approach to regulation that avoids both prescriptive mandates, which could add unnecessary costs and stifle innovation, and overreliance on market forces, which are ill-equipped to meet national security and public safety requirements." But with a dubious track record dating back to the Cold War, and a board of directors manned by multinational defense grifters and neoconservative/neoliberal insiders such as former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, James R. Schlesinger and Bush crime family insider Brent Scowcroft, CSIS' cybersecurity prescriptions are anything but reliable.

Communications Sector Coordinating Council (CSCC): Created in 2005 "to represent the Communications Sector, as the principal entity for coordinating with the government in implementing the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP)," CSCC's "unique industry-government partnership" facilitates the "exchange of information among government and industry participants regarding vulnerabilities, threats, intrusions and anomalies affecting the telecommunications infrastructure." Certainly one "anomaly" not addressed by CSCC is the National Security Agency's driftnet surveillance of Americans' private communications. A major hub where telecommunications' grifters meet, CSCC members include AT&T, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Computer Sciences Corporation, Level 3, the MITRE Corporation, Motorola, the National Association of Broadcasters, Nortel, Quest, Sprint, Tyco, U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, VeriSign and Verizon. Many of the above-named entities are direct collaborators with the NSA and FBI's extensive warrantless wiretapping programs.

Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA): As Antifascist Calling reported May 26, INSA was created by and for contractors in the heavily-outsourced 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." According to an INSA paper on cybersecurity, Critical Issues for Cyber Assurance Policy Reform: An Industry Assessment, the group recommended "a single leadership position at the White House-level that aligns national cyber security responsibilities with appropriate authorities." Among other prescriptions, reflecting the group's close ties to defense firms and the Pentagon INSA calls on the Obama administration to "establish a stronger working relationship between the private sector and the U.S. Government" (!) With their members heavily-banking on an expansion of Pentagon development of cyber attack tools, the group calls on the state to "Incorporate private sector cyber threat scenarios within government cyber-related test beds (e.g., DARPA's Cyber Test Range). Government cyber-related test beds should reflect private sector operational scenarios, especially to demonstrate how similar threats are detected and deterred, as well as to demonstrate private sector concerns (e.g., exploitation of electric utility control system)." As I previously reported, INSA founding members BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and SAIC have all been awarded contracts by DARPA to build and run the National Cyber Range.

Internet Security Alliance (ISA): According to a self-promotional blurb on their website, ISA "was created to provide a forum for information sharing" and "represents corporate security interests before legislators and regulators." Amongst ISA sponsors one finds AIG (yes, that AIG!) Verizon, Raytheon, VeriSign, the National Association of Manufacturers, Nortel, Northrop Grumman, Tata, and Mellon. State partners include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Congress, and the Department of Commerce. Among ISA's recommendations for the Obama administration's Cyberspace Policy Review was its unabashed claim that "the diversity of the internet places its security inescapably in the hands of the private sector." When one considers that the development of the Internet was the result of taxpayer dollars, ISA's cheeky demand is impertinent at best, reflecting capitalism's inherent tendency to "forget" who foots the bill! In this vein, ISA believes that "government's first role ought to be to use market incentives to motivate adhering to good security practices." In other words, taxpayer-financed handouts. Considering the largess already extended to ISA "sponsor" AIG, "regulation for consumer protection" that use "government mandates" to "address cyber infrastructure issues" will be "ineffective and counter-productive both from a national security and economic perspective." Give us the money seems to be ISA's clarion call to the new "change" regime in Washington. And why not? Just ask AIG!

The Information Technology Sector Coordinating Council (IT-SCC): According to their website, the IT-SCC was established in 2006 and brought together "companies, associations, and other key IT sector participants," in a forum that "envisions a secure, resilient and protected global information infrastructure that can rapidly restore services if affected by an emergency or crisis," and may "consider the use of government resources to support appropriate tasks such as administrative, meeting logistics, specifically defined and mutually agreeable projects, and communications support (particularly in response to government requests or needs)." With some six dozen corporate members, the majority of whom are heavily-leveraged in the defense and security industries, IT-SCC affiliates include the usual suspects: Business Software Alliance, Center for Internet Security, Computer Sciences Corporation, General Dynamics, IBM, Intel, Internet Security Alliance, ITT Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Perot Systems, Raytheon and Verizon, to name but a few. One IT-SCC affiliate not likely craving public scrutiny is Electronic Warfare Associates, Inc. (EWA). According to Wired, one EWA company, the Herndon, Virginia-based EWA Government Systems, Inc., "is one of several firms that boasts of making tiny devices to help manhunters locate their prey. The company's 'Bigfoot Remote Tagging System' is a "very small, battery-operated device used to emit an RF [radio frequency] transmission [so] that the target can be located and/or tracked." Allegedly in use along the AfPak border, the devices are RFID beacons planted by local operatives "near militant safehouses," which guide CIA Predator and Reaper drones to their targets. Sounds like any number of government-sponsored "mutually agreeable projects" to me!

The National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC): As Antifascist Calling reported last year (see: "Comcast's Spooky Employment Opportunities") NSTAC is comprised of telecom executives representing the major communications, network service providers, information technology, finance and aerospace companies who provide "industry-based advice and expertise" to the President "on issues and problems relating to implementing national security and emergency preparedness communications policy," according to SourceWatch. Created in 1982 when former president Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12382, in all probability NSTAC facilitates U.S. telecommunication firms' "cooperation" with NSA and other intelligence agencies' efforts in conducting warrantless wiretapping, data-mining and other illegal surveillance programs in highly-profitable arrangements with the Bush and Obama administrations. NSTAC's current Chair is Edward A. Mueller, Chairman and CEO at Qwest. The group's Vice Chair is John T. Stankey, the President and CEO at AT&T. Additional corporate members include: The Boeing Company, Motorola, Science Applications International Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell International, Juniper Networks, the Harris Corporation, Tyco Electronics, Computer Sciences Corporation, Microsoft, Bank of America, Inc., Verizon, Raytheon and Nortel.

TechAmerica: Self-described as "the driving force behind productivity growth and jobs creation in the United States," TechAmerica represents some 1,500 member companies and "is the industry's largest advocacy organization," one that "is dedicated to helping members' top and bottom lines." Indeed, the lobby shop offered lavish praise for president Obama's Cyber Security plan. Calling the administration's Cyberspace Policy Review a "historic step in the right direction," one that will "protect America" (wait!) "from a digital 9/11."

Conclusion

The Obama administration's Cyberspace Policy Review is a corporatist boondoggle that will neither ameliorate nor frankly, even begin to address the most pertinent cybersecurity threats faced by the vast majority of Americans: hacking and spoofing attacks by criminals. Why? The wretched programs riddled with bad code and near non-existent "security" patches breeched as soon as they're written are not part of the playbook. Indeed, the corporations and software developers who've grown rich off of the Internet have no incentive to write better programs!

After all, from a business perspective its far better to terrorize the public into demanding more intrusive, and less accountable, minders who will "police" the Internet--for a hefty price.



The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=13848

[American Dream]

Cyberscares About Cyberwars Equal Cybermoney
Watching the Cybermilitary-Industrial Complex Form

June 14, 2009
By Frida Berrigan
Source: TomDispatch


As though we don't have enough to be afraid of already, what with armed lunatics mowing down military recruiters and doctors, the H1N1 flu virus, the collapse of bee populations, rising sea levels, failed and flailing states, North Korea being North Korea, al-Qaeda wannabes in New York State with terrorist aspirations, and who knows what else -- now cyberjihadis are evidently poised to steal our online identities, hack into our banks, take over our Flickr and Facebook accounts, and create havoc on the World Wide Web.

Late last year, in a 96-page report, Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) warned that "America's failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration." In a similar fashion, Dr. Dorothy Denning, a cybersecurity expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, has just described the Internet as a "powerful tool in the hands of criminals and terrorists." And they're hardly alone.

To this fear chorus, our thoughtful, slow-to-histrionics President added his voice in a May 29th East Room address:
"In today's world, acts of terror could come not only from a few extremists in suicide vests but from a few key strokes on a computer -- a weapon of mass disruption... This cyberthreat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation."

Uh-oh, and as we know, cybercrime is already on the rise. According to the president, the U.S. experienced 37,000 cyberattacks in 2007, an 800% increase from 2005. He referenced a study estimating that cybercrime has cost Americans $8 billion in the last two years. A trillion dollars worth of business information has reportedly been stolen from the corporate world.

For Barack Obama, cybercrime is personal. During his bid for the presidency, someone hacked into his campaign's secure network and gained access to sensitive strategy documents and calendars.

Last year, a malicious computer virus hit the U.S. military, infecting thousands of computers and forcing soldiers to give up their thumb drives, changing the way they share information among computers. The Pentagon claims it fended off some 360 million attempts -- yes, you read that right! -- to break into its networks last year alone, a monumental leap from a "mere" 6 million tries in 2006.

In one such attempt, cyberspies hacked into the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project, the Air Force's most advanced and, at $300 billion, most expensive jet fighter under production. According to the Wall Street Journal, they "compromised the system responsible for diagnosing a plane's maintenance problems during flight." In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told 60 Minutes' Katie Couric that the U.S. is "under cyberattack virtually all the time, every day." The Pentagon recently admitted that it spent $100 million in the past six months repairing damage caused by cyberonslaughts.

Cyberczar to the Rescue

In his speech, President Obama also insisted that help was on the way as he announced the establishment of a new Cybersecurity Office within the White House. It was, he assured Americans, meant to coordinate all government activities to protect U.S. computer networks, while promoting collaboration among a confusing landscape of federal cybergroups with "overlapping missions." Our digital infrastructure, he said, was the "backbone that underpins a prosperous economy and a strong military and an open and efficient government." As such, he proclaimed it "a strategic national asset," which meant that "protecting it is a national security priority."

All will be better, promised the Blackberry President, once his cyberczar, or "cybersecurity coordinator" is selected. "I will personally select this official," he pledged. "I'll depend on this official in all matters related to cybersecurity and this official will have my full support and regular access to me as we confront these challenges."

Keep in mind that the president is more than a little czar crazy, perhaps because the vague post of czar (of whatever) turns out not to require confirmation from a somewhat slow and balky Senate, even as it brings instant attention to some new aspect of his mega-agenda. He has already picked his Border Czar, Drug Czar, Counterterrorism Czar, Urban Affairs Czar, and Climate Czar, just to name a few. Foreign Policy counts a staggering 18 Obama czars in all. His still unnamed cyberczar will report to the National Security Council and the National Economic Council.

Many of these new czars have offices within the White House from which they can (theoretically) oversee policy, coordinate among agencies, streamline decision-making, and give a particular issue or area added weight and prominence. In reality, such appointments historically tend to put yet another cook in a chaotic kitchen, while adding a new layer of bureaucracy to already jumbled layers of the same. As Paul Light, a government professor at New York University, told the Wall Street Journal, "There've been so many czars over the last 50 years, and they've all been failures. Nobody takes them seriously anymore."

I feel better already! Except I do have a small question: How did the word "czar" morph from the title of a discredited autocrat half a world away to the description of a supposedly influential White House official? And why are all these czars jostling for power and order in a democratic government?

That aside, web-surf is up! And here's the good news: the United States is not just playing cyberdefense. Admittedly, the administration's plan for cyberoffense -- you know, to hack into networks not our own -- did not get as much news buzz as the cyberczar, but don't be fooled: the military is already on the job, mounting an invasion of a whole new territory, cyberspace!

The New Nightmare: Preparing for Cyberwar

Yes, the Pentagon sees cyberspace -- that expansive online constellation of worlds that never sleeps even when our computers are off -- as another battlefield terrain no different from the mountains of Afghanistan or the cities of Iraq (except that maybe on virtual battlefields we can actually win).

In an exhaustive 350-page look at U.S. cyberattack capabilities put out in April 2009, the National Research Council's Committee on Offensive Information Warfare concluded that "enduring unilateral dominance in cyberspace is neither realistic nor achievable by the United States." Despite that cautionary word, this very month the Pentagon has moved to establish a new Cybercommand that won't shy away from either the word "unilateral" or "dominance." CyCom, as it's already known, will "develop cyberweapons for use in responding to attacks from foreign adversaries" under the direction of Lieutenant General Keith B. Alexander, who will add another star to his three in the move from the National Security Agency to his new command.

In pursuit of the elusive, impossible dream of unilateral dominance in cyberspace, Defense Secretary Gates is looking to more than quadruple the number of cyberofficers by 2011; and though he didn't put a dollar figure on it, as the military services all rush to add "cyber" to their portfolio, the monies are going to add up fast. How much? Kevin Coleman, a consultant to the U.S. Strategic Command, which will house CyCom, estimates between $50 billion and $70 billion a year for cyberactivities in future Pentagon budgets.

Sounds good! But here's what I want to know: Can my avatar have long black hair, knee-high boots, and the pass codes to access some of those billions?

As it happens, cyberwar was a Washington preoccupation under President George W. Bush, too. Last year, his Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell warned that a cyberattack on a U.S. bank "would have an order of magnitude greater impact on the global economy" than September 11, 2001, and he compared the potential ability of cybercriminals to threaten the U.S. money supply to a nuclear weapon. How do you fact-check such scare chatter, especially now that the global economy has proved itself quite capable of imploding with devastating impact without a cyberattack in sight?

No matter. Rest assured of one thing: even before the first bot is shot, a down-and-dirty, low-intensity conflict is already well underway. Think of it as a turf war with a twist.

Cyberturf Wars

At the moment, cybersecurity activities and responsibilities are spread across the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Management and Budget, and an alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, all claiming cyberspace -- with its secret codes and captured data -- as their own. And then there are the uniformed military services: the Navy, Air Force, and Army, all worried about the budgetary future, are desperately interested in securing a large slice of the cyberpie.

When you survey the cyberlandscape, maybe President Obama is right. It could take a veritable Peter the Great of czars to impose a workable structure on the existing labyrinth of competing and proliferating cyberbureaucracies.

Among them all, the Air Force has been the most proactive and aggressive. They just established the 24th Air Force, a new numbered wing, just for the cyberwarfare mission. It will be based in San Antonio, Texas, thanks to Republican Senator Kay Hutchinson, who aggressively courted the Air Force with Texan hospitality. In a press release celebrating her acquisition, Hutchinson bragged that the move will make "San Antonio a key component of our national strategy to defeat the cyber threat."

In mid-May, Major General William Lord, the provisional head of AFCyber, played host to military-industrial representatives, telling them that the "cyber arena is filled with new business opportunities." Cyberspace is, he suggested, new territory and he called on Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and other high-tech military firms to seize the day. ("We can't do this without you.")

He needn't have said a word. Like the proliferation of competing agencies, the formation of a cybermilitary-industrial complex (made up mainly of the giant corporations already in the non-cyber version of the same) is quite predictable. In fact, it's already starting to happen. After all, the new cyberspace mission promises more than just Top Gun excitement; it will be worth billions of dollars in a quickly shifting security environment.

As early as 2005, the Air Force saw the light on this one, and losing ground to the Army, Navy, and Marines in the boom-times of the Global War on Terror, began moving into cyberspace. It's never stopped. As Lewis Page, a defense correspondent for the Register, a British online tech magazine, points out: "The Air Force's traditional business of operating expensive manned aircraft has been somewhat undercut of late by the proliferation of much cheaper flying robots often operated by the Army, Navy or Marines."

In the fight for the future cyberbudget, then, the Air Force's enemies "are not so much terrorists or sinister foreign powers as the other U.S. Armed Services," writes Page. With new relevance, of course, come new funds. As a start, when the Air Force sent its $143.8 billion budget request for fiscal year 2009 to Congress, it tacked on a list of as yet unfunded budget requirements, including nearly $400 million for cyber-related equipment and activities.

The Navy is now in on the game, too. It naturally established a Naval Cyber Forces Command because, as it likes to say, "cyberspace has become the global battlespace." According to Government Executive, the Navy plans to appoint a three-star Vice Admiral to head its new cybercommand, outranking the Air Force's top cyber flyboy.

Not to be outdone, the Army has set up its own cyberoutpost: the Network Warfare Battalion. Its 2009 Posture Statement asserts that its troops are "executing cyberspace operations" against "a significant and growing cyberthreat" and concludes that, in order to "maintain our dominance in cyberspace, the Army will continue to grow our abilities to better defend our own networks and have capabilities in place to conduct network warfare against adversary networks."

The initial loser in the great cyberbattle appears to be the Department of Homeland Security, that bureaucracy for our old fears. Established in the wake of September 11, 2001, it quickly became a Frankenstein-like mess of more than 22 agencies, on which the Bush administration also downloaded responsibility for cyberoperations. Now, however, it is getting consistently low marks for cybersecurity from places like CSIS and the Government Accountability Office. "Oversight for cybersecurity must move elsewhere," is what James Lewis, senior fellow at CSIS, told Congress.

Industry Logs On

The true beneficiaries of the military's cyberturf war are sure to be the major Pentagon contractors that have been positioning themselves to absorb Washington's new cyberdollars just as they have absorbed war dollars, terror dollars, and homeland-security dollars. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics have already launched a frenzy of buying in the area, gobbling up smaller tech companies and courting cyberinnovators. In 2007, for instance, Northrop Grumman purchased the Essex Corporation, a cybertech company, which CEO Ronald Sugar says has "grown significantly" since then.

Military contractors have also been taking on hordes of "cyberninjas" to learn more about hackers. These young laborers have landed in one of the few sectors of the economy hiring these days. A recent New York Times description of their work environment should be enough to set screenwriters' pens twitching.

"At a Raytheon facility here south of the Kennedy Space Center, a hub of innovation in an earlier era, rock music blares and empty cans of Mountain Dew pile up as engineers create tools to protect the Pentagon's computers and crack into the networks of countries that could become adversaries. Prizes like cappuccino machines and stacks of cash spur them on, and a gong heralds each major breakthrough."

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is [Fill in the Blank]

Is the United States really in a hypercrisis that warrants putting the word cyber in front of everything and multibillions more in the pockets of military-industrial corporations?

If you listen to official Washington today, the answer is a resounding yes. But is the real threat any more insidious than malware and botnets? Is it really life and system threatening? Is it where we really want to invest our money?

Without a doubt, cybercrime -- and even cyberterrorism -- pose actual dangers. But listening to all the scare-talk about cyberwar, we tend to forget that the most gruesome wars today are being fought with machetes, AK-47s, and crude improvised explosive devices fashioned out of repurposed walkie-talkies. The fact is that some of the most devastating wars of the future will be fought over food, water, and land, not to speak of religion, and those engaged in their brutal, messy battles will probably never log on to a computer or download a file.

Certainly, cyberterrorism is a novel and sexy label, grist for next year's high-budget movies and summer pulp fiction. But in Washington it's likely to turn out to be little more than a new catchword in a predictable drama of contracts, turf, and corporations, of agencies and military services intent on capturing taxpayer dollars and winning or losing intra-bureaucratic wars.

The story of how politicians, the Pentagon, and contractors conspire to inflame our fears with well-hyped threats of future cataclysm and then offer high-tech, highly bureaucratic, unbelievably expensive solutions that result in lots of weapons contracts, lots of corporate/military conferences, a few blue-ribbon studies, but no significant threat reduction is really the story of our time.

And when this threat wanes, or simply starts to look more real and a lot less cataclysmic, it's time, of course, to bring out the next boogeyman.



Frida Berrigan is the Senior Program Associate at the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative. A contributing editor at In These Times and a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus, Berrigan loves the World Wide Web.


From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21686

[StarmanSkye]

I anticipate it will be increasingly difficult to tell the cyber-defender from the cyber-terrorist or cyber-criminal. More and more high-tech programs administered by private corporations will be encroaching on and 'testing'each other's defenses and vulnerabilities, providing even more 'evidence' of security breaches and weaknesses that will, it is argued, need to be 'defended against' and more pro-active offensive attack tools developed. Under the kind of compartmentalized secrecy all this big-budget snoop tech and capability will be hidden by, all the biggest, most active economic and military players and power-brokers will want their own cyber-security 'solution' for pre-emptive espionage and data-mining, surveillance and round-the-clock monitoring, etc.

What an incredible boondoggle this could well become, follwing the GWOT model.

The latest nail hammering shut the coffin of a once-great-idea, representative democracy.
-S

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Obama Set to Create A Cybersecurity Czar...

Sequel to Iron Man, presumably.

Glad you's are getting Czars as well, though. There's nothing like Royal titles, especially ones that provoked a bloody revolution, in a Republic that was founded in a bloody revolution.

It makes the whole thing worthwhile.

[norton ash]

Robert Anton Wilson said something along the lines of "We have the ways and means to make the Italian Renaissance look like a bake sale... and what do we do with it?"

Hoomans really do just go and fuck it all up. I love the Internets, but the future is worrisome.

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... tegic.html

Cyber Command Launched. U.S. Strategic Command to Oversee Offensive Military Operations


U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates signed a memorandum June 23 that announced the launch of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM). A scheme by securocrats in the works for several years, the order specifies that the new office will be a "subordinate unified command" under U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM).

According to the memorandum, CYBERCOM "will reach initial operating capability (IOC) not later than October 2009 and full operating capability (FOC) not later than October 2010."

Gates has recommended that this new Pentagon domain be led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current Director of the ultra-spooky National Security Agency (NSA). Under the proposal, Alexander would receive a fourth star and the new agency would be based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, NSA's headquarters.

Gates' memorandum specifies that CYBERCOM "must be capable of synchronizing warfighting effects across the global security environment as well as providing support to civil authorities and international partners."

Ostensibly launched to protect military networks against malicious cyberattacks, the command's offensive nature is underlined by its role as STRATCOM's operational cyber wing. In addition to a defensive brief to "harden" the "dot-mil" domain, the Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism's adversaries.

One of ten Unified Combatant Commands, STRATCOM is the successor organization to Strategic Air Command (SAC). Charged with space operations (military satellites), information warfare, missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as global strike and strategic deterrence (America's first-strike nuclear arsenal), it should be apparent that designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.

As Antifascist Calling reported in May, the Pentagon's geek squad, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently building a National Cyber Range (NCR), a test bed for developing, testing and fielding cyber weapons.

In conjunction with "private-sector partners," the agency averred in a January 2009 press release that NCR promises to deliver "'leap ahead' concepts and capabilities."

The Armed Forces Press Service reported June 24, that Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told journalists that CYBERCOM is "not some sort of new and necessarily different authorities that have been granted." Obfuscating the offensive role envisaged for the command, Morrell told reporters: "This is about trying to figure out how we, within this department, within the United States military, can better coordinate the day-to-day defense, protection and operation of the department's computer networks."

Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed, Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that.

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, "Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace," Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)

We have heard these Orwellian arguments before; one can take it for granted that when militarists pontificate on the need for a "deterrent," the bombers are preparing for take off.

As with other Pentagon schemes, the technological quick fix may prove as deadly as the alleged threat, particularly where botnets are concerned.

A botnet is a collection of widely dispersed computers controlled from one or more central nodes. Often built by cyber criminals to implant malicious programs or code, steal passwords and other encrypted data from targeted systems, botnets are the bane of the Internet.

In these endeavors, sophisticated hackers are aided and abetted by the miserable security code or lax practices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) more concerned with facilitating commerce--and the bottom line--than in providing adequate protection against criminals.

Indeed in March, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the Federal Trade Commission "to shut down Google's so-called cloud computing services, including Gmail and Google Docs, if the web giant can't ensure the safety of user data stored by these online apps," The Register reported.

EPIC's petition in part, was sparked "by a Google snafu that saw the company inadvertently share certain Google Docs files with users unauthorized to view them. Google estimates that the breach hit about 0.05 per cent of the documents stored by the service," according to The Register.

Infected computers are referred to as "zombies" that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by "master" machines. Unwary users are often "spoofed" by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into "cooperating" with the installation of malicious code.

While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.

As many commentators have warned, the best defense is to write better security programs and exercise a modicum of common sense when using the Internet. The Pentagon however, has something else in mind.

Col. Williamson proposes to transform the Air Force's high-speed intrusion-detection systems into an offensive botnet by enabling "the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find." In other words, creating thousands of zombie machines.

"After that," Col. Williamson avers, "the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines."

Underscoring the risks posed by out-of-control military hackers to hold America's, or any other nations' communications infrastructure hostage to a militarized state, Williamson suggests that in order to "generate the right amount of power for offense, all the available computers must be under the control of a single commander, even if he provides the capability for multiple theaters. While it cannot be segmented like an orange for individual theater commanders, it can certainly be placed under their tactical control." (emphasis added)

In other words, should an "individual theatre commander" desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation's electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead! A proposal such as this, should it ever be implemented, would in essence, be a first-strike weapon.

Other plans for "defending" Pentagon computer networks are even more extreme.

STRATCOM commander Gen. Kevin Chilton has even suggested that "the White House retains the option to respond with physical force--potentially even using nuclear weapons--if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks," according to a disturbing report published by Global Security Newswire. During a Defense Writers Group breakfast in May, Chilton told journalists:

"I think you don't take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?" ...

Should the breaches evolve into more serious computer attacks against the United States, Chilton said he could not rule out the possibility of a military salvo against a nation like China, even though Beijing has nuclear arms. He rejected the idea that such a conflict would necessarily risk going nuclear.

"I don't think that's true," Chilton said.

At the same time, the general insisted that all strike options, including nuclear, would remain available to the commander in chief in defending the nation from cyber strikes.

"I think that's been our policy on any attack on the United States of America," Chilton said. "And I don't see any reason to treat cyber any differently. I mean, why would we tie the president's hands? I can't. It's up to the president to decide." (Elaine M. Grossman, "U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack," Global Security Newswire, May 12, 2009)

While Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The New York Times that CYBERCOM's launch "is not about the militarization of cyber," how else can it be characterized?

Indeed, Whitman went on to say that CYBERCOM "is focused only on military networks to better consolidate and streamline Department of Defense capabilities into a single command."

How then, should one interpret moves by the Pentagon to "consolidate and streamline" DoD "capabilities" under the purview of STRATCOM? Obviously, an entity defined as a "Unified Combatant Command" as clearly stated by General Chilton's avowal to "leave all options on the table," would combine cyber "defense" with STRATCOM's global strike mission.

Antifascist Calling revealed last year, citing a U.S. Air Force planning document, that preparations are already underway to transform cyberspace into an offensive military domain. Indeed, Air Force theorists averred:

Cyberspace favors offensive operations. These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. Cyberspace offensive operations ensure friendly freedom of action in cyberspace while denying that same freedom to our adversaries. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations. Targets include the adversary's terrestrial, airborne, and space networks, electronic attack and network attack systems, and the adversary itself. As an adversary becomes more dependent on cyberspace, cyberspace offensive operations have the potential to produce greater effects. (Air Force Cyber Command, "Strategic Vision," no date, emphasis added)

Echoing Air Force strategy, SecDef Gates memo clearly states, since "cyberspace and its associated technologies ... are vital to our nation's security," the United States will "secure freedom of action in cyberspace" by standing-up a unified command "that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations."

Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.

Under NSA's Operational Control

Meanwhile in the heimat, CYBERCOM will effectively be under the day-to-day control of the National Security Agency. This is hardly good news when it comes to civil liberties.

Leaving aside considerations of bureaucratic trench warfare with the Department of Homeland Security, charged with defending the state's .gov and .com domains, the unprecedented power of CYBERCOM to conduct offensive military and surveillance operations within the United States itself is underlined by the preeminent role NSA will assume.

Authorized by the criminal Bush regime to carry out massive electronic surveillance of Americans' private communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, various driftnet spying operations continue under Obama's purported "change" administration. As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, the only "change" that's come to the White House has been the color of the drapes hanging in the Oval Office.

The New York Times revealed June 17, that the "National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged." According to the Times, "The agency's monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said."

I take issue with the Times' characterization that such a breach of constitutional norms merely represent "logistical difficulties." As with a Times' report in April which alleged that NSA's driftnet spying under Obama was simply a problem of "overcollection," far from being mere technical issues, first and foremost, these violations represent political decisions made at the highest levels of the national security state itself.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency's ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress," The New York Times, June 17, 2009)

Last year, congressional Democrats, including Senator now President, Obama, handed the NSA virtually unchecked power to spy on the private communications of Americans. In addition to granting retroactive immunity to telecom grifters who profited from their conspiracy to illegally spy on citizens for the state, the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FIA) gave NSA the legal cover to intercept Americans' communications "so long as it was done only as the incidental byproduct of investigating individuals 'reasonably believed' to be overseas," as the Times delicately put it.

CYBERCOM's brief, and its deployment inside NSA with full access to the agency's powerful computing assets, and with a mission to conduct global Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) at the behest of their STRATCOM masters, mean that despite bromides about "privacy concerns," the Pentagon will most assuredly be interested in developing an attack matrix that can just as easily be turned inward. After all as General Chilton asserts, "it's up to the president to decide."

"One thing that is pretty clear," Wired reports, "NSA will be leading this emerging command." Indeed, NSA "may also come to dominate the wider government cyber defense effort, as well." As The Wall Street Journal revealed, the Defense Department's 2010 budget "envisions training and graduating more than 200 cyber-security officers annually." In contradistinction to DoD, "the Department of Homeland Security has 100 employees dedicated to civilian cyber security, with plans to reach 260 next year," the Journal reports.

In other words, right from the get-go NSA will be assuming operational control of CYBERCOM. This is driven home by the fact that the Pentagon is already receiving the vast majority of appropriations for state cybersecurity initiatives and have thousands of cyberwarriors across all branches of the military, including outsourced private contractors who labor for DoD, ready, willing and able to staff the new command.

As Antifascist Calling revealed in April, with billions of dollars already spent on a score of top secret cyber initiatives, including those hidden within Pentagon Special Access or black programs, the issue of oversight is already a moot point.

Defense analyst William M. Arkin in his essential book, Code Names, described some three dozen cyberwar programs and/or exercises, currently being pursued by the Pentagon. Since the book's 2005 publication, many others undoubtedly have come on-line.

While NSA Director Alexander has explicitly stated that he does "not want [NSA] to run cybersecurity for the United States government," CYBERCOM's stand-up, and Alexander's near certain appointment as commander, all but guarantees that the agency will be a ubiquitous and silent gatekeeper answerable to no one.

[§ê¢rꆧ]

...America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, "Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace," Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)

Yeah, that's just what we need. A crappy zombie botnet; join the war effort, donate your spare computer cycles to shutting down the Chinese goverment websites!

I think we should just officially change the name of the Internet to NSAnet and be clear about what this means.

[American Dream]

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... under.html

Pervasive Surveillance Continuing Under Obama. New DHS-NSA-AT&T "Cybersecurity" Partnership

Under the rubric of cybersecurity, the Obama administration is moving forward with a Bush regime program to screen state computer traffic on private-sector networks, including those connecting people to the Internet, The Washington Post revealed July 3.

That project, code-named "Einstein," may very well be related to the much-larger, ongoing and highly illegal National Security Agency (NSA) communications intercept program known as "Stellar Wind," disclosed in 2005 by The New York Times.

There are several components to Stellar Wind, one of which is a massive data-mining project run by the agency. As USA Today revealed in 2006, the "National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth."

Under the current program, Einstein will be tied directly into giant NSA data bases that contain the trace signatures left behind by cyberattacks; these immense electronic warehouses will be be fed by information streamed to the agency by the nation's telecommunications providers.

AT&T, in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the NSA will spearhead the aggressive new initiative to detect malicious attacks launched against government web sites--by continuing to monitor the electronic communications of Americans.

This contradicts President Obama's pledge announcing his administration's cybersecurity program on May 29. During White House remarks Obama said that the government will not continue Bush-era surveillance practices or include "monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic."

Called the "flagship system" in the national security state's cyber defense arsenal, The Wall Street Journal reports that Einstein is "designed to protect the U.S. government's computer networks from cyberspies." In addition to cost overruns and mismanagement by outsourced contractors, the system "is being stymied by technical limitations and privacy concerns." According to the Journal, Einstein is being developed in three stages:

Einstein 1: Monitors Internet traffic flowing in and out of federal civilian networks. Detects abnormalities that might be cyber attacks. Is unable to block attacks.

Einstein 2: In addition to looking for abnormalities, detects viruses and other indicators of attacks based on signatures of known incidents, and alerts analysts immediately. Also can't block attacks.

Einstein 3: Under development. Based on technology developed for a National Security Agency program called Tutelage, it detects and deflects security breaches. Its filtering technology can read the content of email and other communications. (Siobhan Gorman, "Troubles Plague Cyberspy Defense," The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009)

As readers of Antifascist Calling are well aware, like other telecom grifters, AT&T is a private-sector partner of NSA and continues to be a key player in the agency's driftnet spying on Americans' electronic communications. In 2006, AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in a sworn affidavit, that the firm's Internet traffic that runs through fiber-optic cables at the company's Folsom Street facility in San Francisco was routinely provided to the National Security Agency.

Using a device known as a splitter, a complete copy of Internet traffic that AT&T receives--email, web browsing requests and other electronic communications sent by AT&T customers, was diverted onto a separate fiber-optic cable connected to the company's SG-3 room, controlled by the agency. Only personnel with NSA clearances--either working for, or on behalf of the agency--have access to this room.

Klein and other critics of the program, including investigative journalist James Bamford who reported in his book, The Shadow Factory, believe that some 15-30 identical NSA-controlled rooms exist at AT&T facilities scattered across the country.

Einstein: You Don't Have to Be a Genius to Know They're Lying

But what happens next, after the data is processed and catalogued by the agency is little understood. Programs such as Einstein will provide NSA with the ability to read and decipher the content of email messages, any and all messages in real-time.

While DHS claims that "the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems," the Post reports that a debate has been sparked within the agency over "uncertainty about whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency's involvement in warrantless wiretapping during George W. Bush's presidency would draw controversy."

A "Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for EINSTEIN 2" issued by DHS in May 2008, claims the system is interested in "malicious activity" and not personally identifiable information flowing into federal networks.

While DHS claims that "the risk associated with the use of this computer network security intrusion detection system is actually lower than the risk generated by using a commercially available intrusion detection system," this assertion is undercut when the agency states, "Internet users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from address of their messages or the IP addresses of the sites they visit."

When Einstein 3 is eventually rolled-out, Internet users similarly will "have no expectation of privacy" when it comes to the content of their communications.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters, "we absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones, that NSA has." Seeking to deflect criticism from civil libertarians, Napolitano claims "they will be guided, led and in a sense directed by the people we have at the Department of Homeland Security."

Despite protests to the contrary by securocrats, like other Bush and Obama "cybersecurity" initiatives the Einstein program is a backdoor for pervasive state surveillance. Government Computer News reported in December 2008 that Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said that "the misuse or exposure of sensitive data from such a program [Einstein] could undermine the security arguments for surveillance."

And with Internet Service Providers routinely deploying deep packet inspection tools to "siphon off requested traffic for law enforcement," tools with the ability to "inspect and shape every single packet--in real time--for nearly a million simultaneous connections" as Ars Technica reported, to assume that ISPs will protect Americans' privacy rights from out-of-control state agencies is a foolhardy supposition at best.

The latest version of the system will not be rolled-out for at least 18 months. But like the Stellar Wind driftnet surveillance program, communications intercepted by Einstein 3 will be routed through a "monitoring box" controlled by NSA and their civilian contractors.

Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the plan called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block computer codes designed to penetrate or otherwise compromise networks. (Ellen Nakashima, "Cybersecurity Plan to Involve NSA, Telecoms," The Washington Post, July 3, 2009)

However, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reported last September "that the Bush administration has authorized massive surveillance of the Internet using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the 'Einstein' program."

While some researchers (including this one) question Madsen's overreliance on anonymous sources and undisclosed documents, in fairness it should be pointed out that nine months before The New York Times described the NSA's secret e-mail collection database known as Pinwale, Madsen had already identified and broken the story. According to Madsen,

The classified technology being used for Einstein was developed for the NSA in conducting signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations on email networks in Russia. Code-named PINWHEEL, the NSA email surveillance system targets Russian government, military, diplomatic, and commercial email traffic and burrows into the text portions of the email to search for particular words and phrases of interest to NSA eavesdroppers. According to NSA documents obtained by WMR, there is an NSA system code-named "PINWALE."

The DNI and NSA also plan to move Einstein into the private sector by claiming the nation's critical infrastructure, by nature, overlaps into the commercial sector. There are classified plans, already budgeted in so-called "black" projects, to extend Einstein surveillance into the dot (.) com, dot (.) edu, dot (.) int, and dot (.) org, as well as other Internet domains. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has budgeted $5.4 billion for Einstein in his department's FY2009 information technology budget. However, this amount does not take into account the "black" budgets for Einstein proliferation throughout the U.S. telecommunications network contained in the budgets for NSA and DNI. (Wayne Madsen, "'Einstein' replaces 'Big Brother' in Internet Surveillance," Online Journal, September 19, 2008)

A follow-up article published in February, identified the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm as the developer of Pinwale, an illegal program for the interception of text communications. According to Madsen, "the system is linked to a number of meta-databases that contain e-mail, faxes, and text messages of hundreds of millions of people around the world and in the United States."

In other words both classified programs, Pinwale and Einstein, are sophisticated electronic communications surveillance projects that most certainly will train the agency's formidable intelligence assets on the American people "using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the 'Einstein' program," as Madsen reported.

AT&T: "No Comment"

An AT&T spokesman refused to comment on the proposals and is seeking legal protection from the state that it will not be sued for privacy breaches as a result of its participation in the new program. "Legal certification" the Post reports, "has been held up for several months as DHS prepares a contract."

NSA's involvement is critical proponents claim, because the agency has a readily-accessible database of computer codes, or signatures "that have been linked to cyberattacks or known adversaries. The NSA has compiled the cache by, for example, electronically observing hackers trying to gain access to U.S. military systems," the Post averred.

Calling NSA's cache "the secret sauce...it's the stuff they have that the private sector doesn't," is what raises alarms for privacy and civil liberties' advocates. Known as Tutelage, NSA's classified program can detect and automatically decide how to deal with malicious intrusions, "to block them or watch them closely to better assess the threat," according to the Post. "The database for the program would also contain feeds from commercial firms and DHS's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, administration officials said."

Jeff Mohan, AT&T's executive director for Einstein, was more forthcoming earlier this year. He told Federal News Radio: "With these services, we will provide a secure portal from the agency's infrastructure, or Intranet to the public internet. There is a technical aspect, which is routers, firewalls and that sort of thing that applies these security capabilities across that portal and looks a Internet traffic that comes from public Internet to Intranet and vice versa."

The "technical aspect" will also provide federal agencies the ability to capture, sort, read and then store Americans' private communications in huge data bases run by NSA.

Mohan said that AT&T will provide the state with "optional services such as scanning e-mail and placing filters on agency networks to keep malicious e-mail off the network as well as forensic and storage capabilities also are available through MTIPS [Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services]."

In addition to AT&T, other private partners awarded contracts under the General Services Administration's MTIPS which has a built-in "Einstein enclave" include: Sprint, L3 Communications, Qwest, MCI, General Dynamics and Verizon, according to multiple reports published by Federal Computer Week.

Claiming that the state is "looking for malicious content, not a love note to someone with a dot-gov e-mail address," a former unnamed "senior Bush administration official" told the Post "what we're interested in is finding the code, the thing that will do the network harm, not reading the e-mail itself."

Try selling that to the tens of millions of Americans whose private communications have been illegally spied upon by the Bush and Obama administrations or leftist dissidents singled-out for "special handling" by the national security state's public-private surveillance partnership!

An Electronic Spider's Web

As the "global war on terror" morphs into an endless war on our democratic rights, the NSA is expanding domestic operations by "decentralizing its massive computer hubs," The Salt Lake Tribune revealed.

The agency "will build a 1-million-square-foot data center at Utah's Camp Williams," the newspaper disclosed July 1. The new facility would be NSA's third major data center. In 2007, the agency announced plans to build a second data center in San Antonio, Texas after the Baltimore Sun reported that NSA had "maxed out" the electric capacity of the Baltimore area's power grid.

The San Antonio Current reported in December, that the NSA's Texas Cryptology Center will cost "upwards of $130 million." The 470,000 square-foot-facility is adjacent to a similar center constructed by software giant Microsoft. Investigative journalist James Bamford told the Current that under current law "NSA could gain access to Microsoft's stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable."

A follow-up article by The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the facility will cost upwards of $2 billion dollars and that funds have already been appropriated by the Obama administration for NSA's new data center and listening post.

The secretive agency released a statement Thursday acknowledging the selection of Camp Williams as a site for the new center and describing it as "a specialized facility that houses computer systems and supporting equipment."

Budget documents provide a more detailed picture of the facility and its mission. The supercomputers in the center will be part of the NSA's signal intelligence program, which seeks to "gain a decisive information advantage for the nation and our allies under all circumstances" according to the documents. (Matthew D. LaPlante, "New NSA Center Unveiled in Budget Documents," The Salt Lake Tribune, July 2, 2009)

Not everyone is pleased with the announcement. Steve Erickson, the director of the antiwar Citizens Education Project told the Tribune, "Finally, the Patriot Act has a home."

While the total cost of rolling-out the Einstein 3 system is classified, The Wall Street Journal reports that "the price tag was expected to exceed $2 billion." And as with other national security state initiatives, it is the American people who are footing the bill for the destruction of our democratic rights.

[beeline]

wasn't sure to file this here or in the N Korea thread, anyway...

http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation/washington/20090708_ap_governmentwebsitesattackednkoreasuspected.html

Posted on Wed, Jul. 8, 2009


Government Web sites attacked; N. Korea suspected

LOLITA C. BALDOR

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A widespread computer attack that began July 4 knocked out the Web sites of the Treasury Department, the Secret Service and other U.S. agencies, and South Korean government sites also came under assault.

South Korean intelligence officials believe the attacks were carried out by North Korean or pro-Pyongyang forces. U.S. officials so far have refused to publicly discuss details of the attack or where it might have originated.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that its own Web site was among several commercial sites also hit.

The U.S. government sites, which included those of the Federal Trade Commission and the Transportation Department, were all down at varying points over the holiday weekend and into this week. South Korean Internet sites began experiencing problems Tuesday.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service, the nation's main spy agency, told a group of South Korean lawmakers Wednesday it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers in the South were behind the attacks, according to an aide to one of the lawmakers briefed on the information.

The aide spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the information. The National Intelligence Service , South Korea's main spy agency , said it couldn't immediately confirm the report, but it said it was cooperating with American authorities.

Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the agency's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a notice to federal departments and other partner organizations about the problems and "advised them of steps to take to help mitigate against such attacks."

Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack.

Attacks on federal computer networks are common, ranging from nuisance hacking to more serious assaults, sometimes blamed on China. U.S. security officials also worry about cyber attacks from al-Qaida or other terrorists.

This time, two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their Internet service provider to resolve the problem. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.

Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.

According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was "100 percent down" for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.

Web sites of major South Korean government agencies, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, and some banking sites were paralyzed Tuesday. An initial investigation found that many personal computers were infected with a virus ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korea Information Security Agency official Shin Hwa-su said.

[beeline]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090708/ap_on_go_ot/us_us_cyber_attack

White House among targets of sweeping cyber attack

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press Writer – 1 min ago

WASHINGTON – The powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized, also targeting the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange.

Other targets of the attack included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post, according to an early analysis of the malicious software used in the attacks. Many of the organizations appeared to successfully blunt the sustained computer assaults.

The Associated Press obtained the target list from security experts analyzing the attacks. It was not immediately clear who might be responsible or what their motives were. South Korean intelligence officials believe the attacks were carried out by North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces.

The attack was remarkably successful in limiting public access to victim Web sites, but internal e-mail systems are typically unaffected in such attacks. Some government Web sites — such as the Treasury Department, Federal Trade Commission and Secret Service — were still reporting problems days after the attack started during the July 4 holiday. South Korean Internet sites began experiencing problems Tuesday.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service, the nation's principal spy agency, told a group of South Korean lawmakers Wednesday it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers in the South were behind the attacks, according to an aide to one of the lawmakers briefed on the information.

The aide spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the information. The National Intelligence Service — South Korea's main spy agency — said it couldn't immediately confirm the report, but it said it was cooperating with American authorities.

The attacks will be difficult to trace, said Professor Peter Sommer, an expert on cyberterrorism at the London School of Economics. "Even if you are right about the fact of being attacked, initial diagnoses are often wrong," he said Wednesday.

Amy Kudwa, spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said the agency's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a notice to federal departments and other partner organizations about the problems and "advised them of steps to take to help mitigate against such attacks."

New York Stock Exchange spokesman Ray Pellecchia could not confirm the attack, saying the company does not comment on security issues.

Attacks on federal computer networks are common, ranging from nuisance hacking to more serious assaults, sometimes blamed on China. U.S. security officials also worry about cyber attacks from al-Qaida or other terrorists.

This time, two government officials acknowledged that the Treasury and Secret Service sites were brought down, and said the agencies were working with their Internet service provider to resolve the problem. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.

Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.

According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was "100 percent down" for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.

Web sites of major South Korean government agencies, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, and some banking sites were paralyzed Tuesday. An initial investigation found that many personal computers were infected with a virus ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time, Korea Information Security Agency official Shin Hwa-su said.

___

Associated Press writers Hyung-Jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea; Andrew Vanacore in New York; and Pan Pylas in London contributed to this report.

[operator kos]

I guess they realized they couldn't scare even church nebishes anymore with this...

[Canadian_watcher]

DARPA is one of the scariest outfits on Earth.

apologies if this has been posted already but it's too eerie not to bring to the board's attention for those who haven't seen it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

[Penguin]

Didnt know North Korea had PCs newer than Commodore 64s...

Or that they had a massive cyber attack budget, or a sophisticated hacker army. Like, the US Cyber Command, NSA, CIA, DARPA etc...
Are they sure theyre spending that money right...

And when someone gets down to it, it is vandals, of course:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10216151-94.html

Vandals blamed for phone and Internet outage
by Marguerite Reardon

Update 2:58 p.m. PDT: This story has been updated with information about what caused the massive phone and Internet outage in Silicon Valley on Thursday. Comments from Sprint Nextel have also been added.

Vandals are to blame for the massive phone and Internet outage in Silicon Valley on Thursday, an AT&T representative has confirmed.


A story published by the San Francisco Chronicle and carried on SFGate.com first reported that police confirmed the phone and Internet outage that has left thousands of customers in the San Jose, Calif., area without phone or broadband Internet service was caused by vandals who had cut fiber-optic cables.

Police told the newspaper that four AT&T fiber-optic cables were severed shortly before 1:30 a.m. PDT along Monterey Highway north of Blossom Hill Road in South San Jose. A cable in San Carlos, Calif., owned by Sprint Nextel was also cut about two hours later, Crystal Davis, a Sprint spokeswoman confirmed.

Davis said that a manhole cover had been lifted, and the fiber underground had been cut. She confirmed that the Sprint fiber that was cut also appeared to be the work of vandals. But she explained that fiber cuts happen all the time, typically due to an accident.

"Fiber cuts happen more often than people think," she said. "Usually it happens accidentally when someone is drilling in the ground, landscaping a lawn or repairing some other infrastructure in the ground. We know this happens all the time, so we're ready to reroute traffic whenever we have to."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/blackline/

Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line’
By Kim Zetter June 1, 2009 | 1:14 pm | Categories: Breaches, Spooks Gone Wild, Surveillance


A Verizon lineman grips the strands contained in a fiber optic cable in Massapequa Park, N.Y. on May 11, 2006. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

A construction crew working on an office building in Virginia in 2000 severed a fiber optic cable that wasn’t on anyone’s map. Apparently it was a ‘black line’ used for carrying secret intelligence data, according to sources who spoke recently with the Washington Post.

Within minutes of cutting the cable, three black SUV’s pulled up carrying men in suits who complained that their line was severed.

“The construction manager was shocked,” a worker told the Washington Post. “He had never seen a line get cut and people show up within seconds. Usually you’ve got to figure out whose line it is. To garner that kind of response that quickly was amazing.”

AT&T crews arrived the same day to fix the line, an unusually prompt response. When AT&T tried to bill the construction company $300,000, the company balked and the charges “just disappeared.”

Tax dineros at work.