BioWarfare and Cyber Warfare a new Kind Of War: Biowarfare And Info warfare

8.3The New Villian

8.3.1CV Please

For professional intelligence services, their primary goal is, and will remain, the acquisition of information, not murder. Oleg Tsarev, a retired officer of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate and author, accurately stated that “intelligence stops when you pick up a gun”.

Instead of eliminating key specialists, it can be equally advantageous to lure away the specialists of a nation. Former Soviet scientists are known to have emigrated, possibly to well-funded terrorist groups. In the dilapidated economy after the collapse of the U.S.S.R., government funding fell sharply, and impoverished researchers fled overseas in a massive brain drain The U.S., being in an economically advantageous position, has been the most fortunate beneficiary, not only from the U.S.S.R., but also from many other countries such as Germany after World War II, Hungary in the 1960s, China after the Tien Anmen incident of 1989.

8.3.2911, Help Please

Imagine, if 911 is in trouble, who are they going to call for help? 911?

The telephone system is far more complicated than it used to be. It has a lot of nodes that are programmable and databases that can be hacked. Also, the deregulation of the telephone and power industries has created another Achilles heel. To stay competitive and cut costs, companies have reduced spare capacity, leaving them more vulnerable to outages and disruptions in service. Still another flaw is the domination of the telecommunications system by phone companies and Internet service providers (ISPs) that compete fiercely and do not trust each other. As a result, the systems do not mesh seamlessly and are vulnerable to failures and disruptions. There is almost no way to organize systems built on mutual suspicion. Subtly changing the underpinnings of the system and not changing the way these systems are built will keep creating cracks for hacking.

8.3.3Power Grid

Though remote, an intruder could use the Internet to leapfrog into the computers that control switches, relays, and breakers. This could lead to slow or freeze operations, destabilizing the grid and causing outages.

There is another concern. With deregulation, there is an increasing interest in energy futures trades at the commodities exchange on Wall Street. Hackers might use social engineering techniques to obtain passwords to computers with access to the networks containing sensitive information from these sources.³³ Social engineering is a technique used to obtain key information, such as passwords, just by talking to employees.

8.3.4Psychological Warfare

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  operations against troops,
  
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  operations against opposing commanders,
  
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  operations against the national will, and
  
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  operations designed to impose a particular culture upon another nation.
  

Using the media as a weapon of information warfare is nothing new. The attempt to influence the human element in a conflict is an old tactic. Armies have always tried to make their forces seem stronger or weaker than they are, or to convince enemy soldiers that they have no escape but to surrender peacefully. The only difference is the means have changed. Recently, to this component in the military arsenal has been added a relatively new technique of mass information transfer. Now psychological warfare includes the endeavor to manipulate the populace of an enemy country to oppose the war effort, or to depose the reigning government. The means to this end reside in the mass media, and more recently in the Internet. Examples abound.

For example, in the 2001 U.S.-Afghanistan confrontation in the wake of the September 11 incident, the U.S. used the media to sway public opinion and dropped leaflets in Afghanistan to persuade the local population that it was a friendly force to try to depose off an unpopular regime. Under the guise of humanitarian aids, the U.S. delivered food with messages in packages, clearly labeled “The United States of America”. There were even attempts to drop radios so that the local people could tune in. Concurrently, the U.S. counterintelligence services also scan the Internet to rid off any undesirable messages.

Similarly, Osama bin Laden’s videotaped address, aired shortly after the U.S. strikes, aims to incite Muslims in a holy war. As a countermeasure, the U.S. authorities urged and banned the media, very successfully, not to broadcast the videotaped messages.

Psychological warfare through the media has also been used with success by the U.S. in the Gulf War of 1990-91. The Iraqis were led by media reports to believe that the air war was to be a short-term strike, followed by an immediate ground war, in which they felt themselves to have the advantage of numbers and territorial dominance. They were also kept busy along the Kuwaiti coasts, by means of disinformation pointing to an imminent American coastal offensive.

Another example of psychological warfare was the American propaganda war in Haiti. The Pentagon launched a sophisticated psychological operation campaign against Haiti’s military regime to restore depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Using market-research surveys, the Army’s 4^th Psychological Operations Group divided Haiti’s population into 20 target groups and bombarded them with hundreds of thousands of pro-Aristide leaflets appealing to their particular affinities. Before U.S. intervention, the CIA made anonymous phone calls to Haitian soldiers, urging them to surrender, and sent ominous email messages to some members of Haiti’s oligarchy who had personal computers.

With CNN and BBC beamed into almost all countries in the world, the U.S. has a great advantage over any other nations in the netwar. But America has not always been on the winning side in psychological warfare. Democracies, by their very nature, are acutely sensitive to public opinion, making them vulnerable to manipulation through the media. American troops left Somalia after the loss of just nineteen American Rangers in a conflict with the forces of Somali leader Mohammed Aideed. That conflict reportedly cost Aideed about fifteen times that number, roughly a third of his forces. And yet it was the Americans who conceded defeat. Why? Photographs of jeering Somalis dragging corpses of U.S. soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu transmitted by CNN to the United States led to souring of TV audiences at home on staying in Somalia. U.S. forces left, and Aideed, in essence, won the information war.³⁵

It is thus not surprising that the U.S. authorities carefully monitored news media coverage of the recent U.S. air strikes on Afghanistan. There were a number of misfires and casualties. Most of the general populace were not aware of these mishaps because of a lack of news coverage.

There are many other examples. These examples suffice to show mass psychology can be manipulated to one’s end in a war.