BioWarfare and Cyber Warfare a new Kind Of War: Biowarfare And Info warfare
|
|  Yüklə 211.5 Kb.
|
8.4He who Lives in Glass Houses Should Throw No StonesWhile all this seems to point to an increasing advantage of technologically advanced nations over those less advanced, there is a certain catch to this war game. American strategists are very leery of the prospects of using the more malicious forms of information warfare, for the same reason that American policy forbids the assassination of foreign leaders. We can assassinate a foreign leader, they can easily do what we do upon them. Similarly, the more technologically advanced a nation is, the more vulnerable it is itself to the techniques of information warfare. No nation is more dependent upon the information infrastructure as the U.S. So it is not surprising that American policy makers are quick to point out that infowar scenarios are being studied at present mostly with an eye toward defense rather than offense. The U.S. is living in a glass house of information. It should avoid throwing any stone. Compounding to the wariness of the American strategists is the fact that it is the civilian sectors that are most vulnerable, with consequences in both the military and the political sphere. Military infrastructure relies for the most part on civilian infrastructure. Nearly every aspect of the military industry, from basic research and development to paying personnel depends on civilian information networks. Indeed, over 95 percent of military communications use the civilian network. Military bases depend on the national electric power grid. Soldiers travel by means of the national bus cooperative. There is no way that the military can protect all of these networks from a focused infowar attack. Government sites are not better protected. They are riddled with weaknesses, ranging from failure to rotate computer passwords to unauthorized software installation by IT managers. The Department of Defense (DoD) is more secure. Still it has weaknesses. For example, its computers most likely run a standard operating system such as Microsoft operating system. The network has an electronic mail link to the outside. While an emailed virus is not likely to bring hijack to the DoD systems, it could bring down the network or corrupt the data.
8.5Friend or Foe?The traditional Cold War alignment of the East versus West is gone forever. At the height of Cold War solidarity, the slogan was “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Superpowers collected intelligence and attacked the ciphers or codes of friends as well as enemies. The national interests of former friends and foes are now being redefined in terms of competing economic interests. Cultural and historic friendships between nations will continue to fade as they are replaced by trading partnerships and other interdependent economic relationships. For example, Premier Zhu Rongji of China, together with his counterparts in the Association of Southeast Asia Nations, agreed during the week prior to China and Taipei joining the WTO on November 12, 2001 to establish, within a decade, a 10+1 free trade zone. With 1.7 billion people, this will be the largest free trade zone in the world. It also has sparked the discussion of building a bullet train from Singapore to Kunmin, China. The new slogan is “the friend of my enemy may also be my friend”, if the price is right. For example, in 1991 Gulf War, George H. Bush forfeited the $7 billion loan to Egypt so that the U.S. could use Egypt as an air base to strike Iraq. A decade later, the son, George W. Bush when he first moved into the White House in early 2001, accused the Russians of exercising atrocities against the Chechens. After the September 11 incident and in an effort to court the Russians into supporting the U.S. attack on Afghanistan, the same president, in the same year, and speaking from the same White House, applauded the Russian’s attack on Chechnya for the latter supposedly harbored Al Qaeda operations. The U.S. benefited greatly from Jordan in its efforts against Al Qaeda operations. Close intelligence cooperation between the United States and Jordan dates back to 1990 when the late King Hussein warned U.S. leaders about the emergence of a network in Afghanistan headed by bin Laden. This close ties have continued under the reign of King Hussein’s son, King Abdullah, who ascended to the throne after King Hussein died in 1999. “The unsung heroes in intelligence terms are the Jordanians,” said terrorism expert professor Magnus Ransdorp of St. Andrews University. “The Jordanian track record, given the size of the country, is mammoth, in terms of the contribution to our understanding of the al Qaeda network.”36 The U.S. carefully coordinated its attacks on Afghanistan in 2001. Goaded by sentiment to punish the perpetrators who had attacked the World Trade Center Towers, the U.S. exercised diplomacy to court supports to form a coalition, performed intelligence gathering such as working with King Abdullah of Jordan37 and consulting President Eduard Shevardnardze of Republic of Georgia who was involved in the Soviet-Afgan conflict of the 1980s, and worked with news media on psychology to avoid possible anti-war sentiment domestically. The Soviet-Afghan conflict of two decades earlier, on the other hand, was a stark different brawny arms-and-tank all-out attack. The December 1979 New Year eve Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the most violent of power move by the Kremlin to ward off the developing urge of change and to alienate the generation of the 1980s.38 As we know now, the conflict leads to an unpopular long drawn-out war that eventually resulted in the Soviet withdrawal in 1991.
9What Is In Store?Former CIA Director James Woolsey stated that with the end of the Cold War, the great Soviet dragon was slain. He wryly noted, however, that in its place the intelligence services of the United States are facing a “bewildering variety of poisonous snakes that have been let loose in a dark jungle; it may have been easier to watch the dragon”. The single greatest threat to world peace in the early part of this new century is the utilization of weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical, biological and digital - by fundamentalist terrorist organizations. These groups are already using the Internet to:
The CIA and other intelligence services must operate with shrinking budgets and manpower - the CIA will shrink 25 percent from its peak - but confront an array of new threats to national interests in different parts of the globe. To meet these challenges, all intelligence services will be forced to rely on digital solutions, massive computers and artificial intelligence in linked computer networks and databases to compensate for the reduction of people and resources. The traditional world of spies such as James Bond exists now only in fiction. New intelligence services that most effectively identify, develop and implement the tools and techniques of the “cyber spy” will provide their citizens with an incalculable advantage in the new century. Terrorism is an excellent example of how the focus of war has shifted toward civilian populations. For example, the September 11, 2001 horrendous attacks on the World Trade Center Towers. The aim of terrorism is not to destroy the enemy’s armed might, but to undermine its will to fight. Terrorists seek to disrupt the daily life of their target nation by striking at the most vulnerable points in the society. Such vulnerable areas included transportation networks and public events, which insure good media coverage. By hitting the citizen just where the nation thinks is safest, the terrorists cause the greatest confusion and loss of morale. Today, almost every aspect of our lives is dependent on information networks, terrorists have a whole new field of action. And while the technology to operate and protect these networks is quite costly, the means required to attack them are relatively cheap. In the simplest case, one needs only a computer, a modem, and a willing hacker. According to Alvin Toffler, “It’s the great equalizer. You don’t have to be big and rich to apply the kind of judo you need in information warfare, That’s why poor countries are going to go for this faster than technologically advanced countries.”39 According to Time Magazine,40 the Defense Science Board at the Pentagon warned that annoying hackers trying to crack the Pentagon’s computers were not the only things the defense strategists have to worry about. This threat arises from terrorist groups or nation-states, and is far more subtle and difficult to counter than the more unstructured but growing problem caused by hackers. A large, structured attack with strategic intent against the U.S. could be prepared and exercised under the guise of unstructured ‘hacker’ activities. There is no nationally coordinated capability to counter or even detect a structured threat.
|