[Sosfbay-discuss] Fwd: Attention Geeks and Hackers: Uncle Sam's Cyber Force Wants You!

[Drew Johnson]

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: [usgp-media] Attention Geeks and Hackers: Uncle Sam's Cyber Force
Wants You!
From:    "Nancy Allen" <nallen at prexar.com>
Date:    Fri, June 6, 2008 08:07
To:      usgp-media at lists.gp-us.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

OK..combine this with the Air Force plan for drone wars fought from US
computers and you get an idea of the nasty plans for what will constitute
the future of US military madness.
Nancy
http://www.truthout.org/article/attention-geeks-and-hackers
Attention Geeks and Hackers: Uncle Sam's Cyber Force Wants You!
Thursday 05 June 2008
by: William J. Astore, TomDispatch.com

Recently, while I was on a visit to Salon.com, my computer screen
momentarily went black. A glitch? A power surge? No, it was a pop-up ad
for the U.S. Air Force, warning me that an enemy cyber-attack could come
at any moment - with dire consequences for my ability to connect to the
Internet. It was an Outer Limits moment. Remember that eerie sci-fi show
from the early 1960s? The one that began in a blur with the message,
"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust
the picture. We are controlling transmission...." It felt a little like
that.

    And speaking of Air Force ads, there's one currently running on TV and
on the Internet that starts with a bird's eye view of the Pentagon as
a narrator intones, "This building will be attacked three million
times today. Who's going to protect it?" Two Army colleagues of mine
nearly died on September 11, 2001, when the [SNIP] crashed into the
Pentagon, so I can't say I appreciated the none-too-subtle reminder of
that day's carnage. Leaving that aside, it turns out that the ad is
referring to cyber-attacks and that the cyber protector it has in mind
is a new breed of "air" warrior, part of an entirely new Cyber Command
run by the Air Force. Using the latest technology, our cyber elite
will "shoot down" enemy hackers and saboteurs, both foreign and
domestic, thereby dominating the realm of cyberspace, just as the Air
Force is currently seeking to dominate the planet's air space - and
then space itself "to the shining stars and beyond."

    Part of the Air Force's new "above all" vision of full-spectrum
dominance, America's emerging cyber force has control fantasies that
would impress George Orwell. Working with the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Homeland Security,
and other governmental agencies, the Air Force's stated goal is to
gain access to, and control over, any and all networked computers,
anywhere on Earth, at a proposed cost to you, the American taxpayer,
of $30 billion over the first five years.

    Here, the Air Force is advancing the now familiar Bush-era idea that
the only effective defense is a dominating offense. According to Lani
Kass, previously the head of the Air Force's Cyberspace Task Force and
now a special assistant to the Air Force Chief of Staff, "If you're
defending in cyber [space], you're already too late. Cyber delivers on
the original promise of air power. If you don't dominate in cyber, you
cannot dominate in other domains."

    Such logic is commonplace in today's Air Force (as it has been for
Bush administration foreign policy). A threat is identified, our
vulnerability to it is trumpeted, and then our response is to spend
tens of billions of dollars launching a quest for total domination.
Thus, on May 12th of this year, the Air Force Research Laboratory
posted an official "request for proposal" seeking contractor bids to
begin the push to achieve "dominant cyber offensive engagement." The
desired capabilities constitute a disturbing militarization of
cyberspace:

"Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root access
to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms. Robust methodologies to
enable access to any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications
and hardware.... [T]echnology ... to maintain an active presence within
the adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected ...
[A]ny and all techniques to enable stealth and persistence capabilities
... [C]apability to stealthily exfiltrate information from any
remotely-located open or closed computer information systems ..."
    Stealthily infiltrating, stealing, and exfiltrating: Sounds like
cyber-cat burglars, or perhaps invisible cyber-SEALS, as in that U.S.
Navy "empty beach at night" commercial. This is consistent with an Air
Force-sponsored concept paper on "network-centric warfare," which
posits the deployment of so-called "cyber-craft" in cyberspace to
"disable terminals, nodes or the entire network as well as send
commands to 'fry' their hard drives." Somebody clever with acronyms
came up with D5, an all-encompassing term that embraces the ability to
deceive, deny, disrupt, degrade, and destroy an enemy's computer
information systems.

    No one, it seems, is the least bit worried that a single-minded
pursuit of cyber-"destruction" - analogous to that "crush ... kill ...
destroy" android on the 1960s TV series "Lost in Space" - could create
a new arena for that old Cold War nuclear acronym MAD (mutually
assured destruction), as America's enemies and rivals seek to D5 our
terminals, nodes, and networks.

    Here's another less-than-comforting thought: America's new Cyber Force
will most likely be widely distributed in basing terms. In fact, the
Air Force prefers a "headquarters" spread across several bases here in
the U.S., thereby cleverly tapping the political support of more than
a few members of Congress.

    Finally, if, after all this talk of the need for "information
dominance" and the five D's, you still remain skeptical, the Air Force
has prepared an online "What Do You Think?" survey and quiz (paid for,
again, by you, the taxpayer, of course) to silence naysayers and
cyberspace appeasers. It will disabuse you of the notion that the
Internet is a somewhat benign realm where cooperation of all sorts,
including the international sort, is possible. You'll learn, instead,
that we face nothing but ceaseless hostility from cyber-thugs seeking
to terrorize all of us everywhere all the time.

    Of Ugly Babies, Icebergs, and Air Force Computer Systems

    Computers and their various networks are unquestionably vital to our
national defense - indeed, to our very way of life - and we do need to
be able to protect them from cyber attacks. In addition, striking at
an enemy's ability to command and control its forces has always been
part of warfare. But spending $6 billion a year for five years on a
mini-Manhattan Project to atomize our opponents' computer networks is
an escalatory boondoggle of the worst sort.

    Leaving aside the striking potential for the abuse of privacy, or the
potentially destabilizing responses of rivals to such aggressive
online plans, the Air Force's militarization of cyberspace is likely
to yield uncertain technical benefits at inflated prices, if my
experience working on two big Air Force computer projects counts for
anything. Admittedly, that experience is a bit dated, but keep in mind
that the wheels of procurement reform at the Department of Defense
(DoD) do turn slowly, when they turn at all.

    Two decades ago, while I was at the Space Surveillance Center in
Cheyenne Mountain, the Air Force awarded a contract to update our
computer system. The new system, known as SPADOC 4, was, as one Air
Force tester put it, the "ugly baby." Years later, and no prettier,
the baby finally came on-line, part of a Cheyenne Mountain upgrade
that was hundreds of millions of dollars over budget. One Air Force
captain described it in the following way:

"The SPADOC system was ... designed very poorly in terms of its human
machine interface ... [leading to] a lot of work arounds that make
learning the system difficult ... [Fortunately,] people are adaptable and
they can learn to operate a poorly designed machine, like SPADOC, [but the
result is] increased training time, increased stress for the operators,
increased human errors under stress and unused machine capabilities."
    My second experience came a decade ago, when I worked on the Air Force
Mission Support System or AFMSS. The idea was to enable pilots to plan
their missions using the latest tools of technology, rather than paper
charts, rulers, and calculators. A sound idea, but again botched in
execution.

    The Air Force tried to design a mission planner for every platform and
mission, from tankers to bombers. To meet such disparate needs took
time, money, and massive computing power, so the Air Force went with
Unix-based SPARC platforms, which occupied a small room. The software
itself was difficult to learn, even counter-intuitive. While the Air
Force struggled, year after year, to get AFMSS to work, competitors
came along with PC-based flight planners, which provided 80% of
AFMSS's functionality at a fraction of the cost. Naturally, pilots
began clamoring for the portable, easy-to-learn PC system.

    Fundamentally, the whole DoD procurement cycle had gone wrong - and
there lies a lesson for the present cyber-moment. The Pentagon is
fairly good at producing decent ships, tanks, and planes (never mind
the typical cost overruns, the gold-plating, and so on). After all, an
advanced ship or tank, even deployed a few years late, is normally
still an effective weapon. But a computer system a few years late?
That's a paperweight or a doorstop. That's your basic disaster. Hence
the push for the DoD to rely, whenever possible, on COTS, or
commercial-off-the-shelf, software and hardware.

    Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it's only the Pentagon that has
trouble designing, acquiring, and fielding new computer systems. Think
of it as a problem of large, by-the-book bureaucracies. Just look at
the FBI's computer debacle attempting (for years) to install new
systems that failed disastrously, or for that matter the ever more
imperial Microsoft's struggles with Vista.

    Judging by my past experience with large-scale Air Force computer
projects, that $30 billion will turn out to be just the tip of the
cyber-war procurement iceberg and, while you're at it, call those
"five years" of development 10. Shackled to a multi-year procurement
cycle of great regulatory rigidity and complexity, the Air Force is
likely to struggle but fail to keep up with the far more flexible and
creative cyber world, which almost daily sees the fielding of new
machines and applications.

    Loving Big "Cyber" Brother

    Our military is the ultimate centralized, bureaucratic, hierarchical
organization. Its tolerance for errors and risky or "deviant" behavior
is low. Its culture is designed to foster obedience, loyalty,
regularity, and predictability, all usually necessary in handling
frantic life-or-death combat situations. It is difficult to imagine a
culture more antithetical to the world of computer developers,
programmers, and hackers.

    So expect a culture clash in militarized cyberspace - and more
taxpayers' money wasted - as the Internet and the civilian computing
world continue to outpace anything the DoD can muster. If, however,
the Air Force should somehow manage to defy the odds and succeed, the
future might be even scarier.

    After all, do we really want the military to dominate cyberspace?
Let's say we answer "yes" because we love our big "Above All" cyber
brother. Now, imagine you're Chinese or Indian or Russian. Would you
really cede total cyber dominance to the United States without a
fight? Not likely. You would simply launch - or intensify - your own
cyber war efforts.

    Interestingly, a few people have surmised that the Air Force's cyber
war plans are so outlandish they must be bluster - a sort of warning
shot to competitors not to dare risk a cyber attack on the U.S.,
because they'd then face cyber obliteration.

    Yet it's more likely that the Air Force is quite sincere in promoting
its $30 billion "mini-Manhattan" cyber-war project. It has its own
private reasons for attempting to expand into a new realm (and so
create new budget authority as well). After all, as a service, it's
been somewhat marginalized in the War on Terror. Today's Air Force is
in a flat spin, its new planes so expensive that relatively few can be
purchased, its pilots increasingly diverted to "fly" Predators and
Reapers - unmanned aerial vehicles - its top command eager to ward off
the threat of future irrelevancy.

    But even in cyberspace, irrelevancy may prove the name of the game.
Judging by the results of previous U.S. military-run computer
projects, future Air Force "cyber-craft" may prove more than a day
late and billions of dollars short.

    -------

    William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), has taught at
the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School. He currently
teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. A regular
contributor to Tomdispatch, he is the author of "Hindenburg: Icon of
German Militarism" (Potomac, 2005). His email is wastore at pct.edu.


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