Is that why they ask for more money for "cyber warfare"? So they can use it to start cyberwars with other countries? I thought the point was to protect Americans against attacks, not cause them themselves.
"In an era where our enemies are often digital, or terrorist organizations, more so than nation states, is our military spending oversized for what we need?"
Hawks will only hear, "we need to spend more of the military budget on cyber threats".
I am sure that spending multiples of $100M on cyber offense is providing ample justification to state-sponsored adversaries of all kinds to stage attacks of their own. Especially combined with Snowden-type revelations which makes the US look like an evil monopoly conspiring to aggressively exploit its dominance to eliminate all competition.
> I'm really starting to take an issue with declaring all this stuff as "cyber war" or "cyber warfare" (here and everywhere else in this thread). It's not a war if there is no intend of actually killing people.
Countries are owning each others' communications, power, transportation, energy, food production, etc infrastructure. Sabotaging these can cripple a nation, not to mention kill people (check out damage from the recent Great Northeast Blackout - note here that it is not known whether this was a cyber attack).
The military and defense contractors are targets of attacks as well as industry. Titan Rain, Moonlight Maze and Operation Aurora are some well know geopolitically motivated attacks that breached defense contractors (includingLockheed Martin, Sandia), US internet infrastructure (including Rackspace, Google), aerospace (including NASA) and military (including the DoD).
You may remember this year that Wall Street and JP Morgan was hacked, that the DoD was hacked, that several hundred defense contractors were hacked, and that the list of people with top secret clearance was hacked. You may remember this year that Israel's "Iron Dome" missile defense system schematics were hacked.
In the eyes of the military, these things constitute an attack. They give it the name warfare. It certainly isn't classical warfare. Maybe we need a new term. I do like the "cold" term.
I've long suspected 90% of the budgets and bills they are trying to pass is to help them offensively against other countries. And yet, 100% of their arguments in public were that they are needed for defense.
The government seems to be lying about a lot of things it's doing in your name. You may be okay with it, but just don't act surprised when the retaliation begins, which of course the US government will make it seem like they started it, and now they need even more money and you having fewer liberties to help in the "cyberwar" that they started.
And just like that the "cyberwarfare industry complex" will keep expanding just like the "military industry complex" for decades to come, if nobody wants to do anything to stop it before it can't be stopped anymore, and its budgets will keep increasing year after year, with no one daring to touch them.
> The "cyberwarfare" will be the new war on terror, 5-10 years from now.
Yes, just like the war on terror is the new war on communism.
By 1990, all the defence contractors figured out that without a boogey man to scare people with, the US government has a lot of things it would rather spend money on than billable hours.
With whom? And given that nation states have engaged in this sort of thing for years, and that the US/5-eyes/etc also engage in these activities, do you really want to turn a cyber/cold-war into a hot one?
The solution is defense-in-depth, with liability on the providers of software, which will require them to insure, which will raise prices, which will force them to address security as COGS which will force them to reduce their attack surfaces to reduce their insurance premiums.
This has confirmed all my worries. Whenever the intelligence agencies and the politicians lobby for "cyber-bills" and such, and it's almost never about "protecting US against threats", but about "attacking others".
So on one hand they keep drumming up the fear mongering about other countries attacking us through "cyberspace" and that they need "these bills" to stop that, when in fact the bills, and the bigger budgets, are all about US attacking others, and basically committing acts of war against them (their words, not mine).
If the US is really afraid of "cyber-threats", then they really need to ramp up the defense at home, not offense, and keep as much of the critical infrastructure off the Internet as possible.
Oh, and these are a couple of funny posts about the politicians' abuse of the word "cyber":
>The CIA and NSA have launched aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”
Not just "enemy" systems. But "targets'" systems, which include a lot more allies than "enemies". Then again, US seems to have a very Cold War-like mentality these days (even though Obama accused Russia of that), and sees everyone as a potential "enemy".
As Bruce Schneier said a couple of years ago, if you think "cyber-war" is imminent, then you must think war against US is imminent (which seems pretty unlikely right now, but they keep pushing the fear of cyber-war anyway, to increase their budgets).
The hacker group attacked resources considered "critical infrastructure"; this was closer to an act of war than any other cyber attack has come. The US Cyber Command responded swiftly.
> "governments take advantage of crises to gain power"
Please, elaborate? I fail to see how the US Govt is taking advantage of this crisis for more power.
The US appears to be shockingly unprepared for social cyberwar.
If you're an aggressor, you don't need to break infrastructure or blow things up. For the cost of a few troll farms, a few training classes in infowar, and maybe a mainstream news outlet or two, you can split any country along its political fault lines and encourage division, sectarianism, social unrest, "spontaneous" terrorism, and perhaps eventually civil war.
A country like the US, which has extremely deep social fault lines, is almost ridiculously vulnerable to this kind of attack.
And with the right financial and/or political incentives, there will always be potential fifth column interests who would support such an effort, as long as they gain personally.
The US has sponsored efforts like these in other countries in the past. There doesn't seem to be much understanding that it's also vulnerable to them - far more than it used to be, thanks to the amplifying effects of social media.
The article goes on to mention "Iranian hackers" and "Chinese hackers". Obviously all those enemies of the United States are up to no good and the US must raise a cyber army against them. Just for defence, of course. Like drone strikes and boots on the ground.
Cyber-terrorism is the new terrorism is the new communism is the new facism and so on. The military industrial complex works to serve itself, and it will invent or even create and support enemies if those enemies can be used against the public to push a bigger budget. (See Operation Gladio A and B)
The thing to realize though is that the threat is from hard to find potentially non-nationstate actors, and the threat is somewhat real, but it is hard to detect and creates a constant state of fear... which is great if you want to capitalize on that fear. To a certain extent it worked for a better good by bringing tons of money into America which along with the UK and Israel is one of the top arms suppliers to the world. (a great intro book on this subject is the updated The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.)
My problem is that this model of fear and money has been taken to the extreme is now eroding freedoms at home, and bankrupting us. Many republicans will rant and rave about the budget, but if you ask about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse (WFA) in DoD/Pentagon they hardly ever admit such WFA exists (even though everyone actually familiar with it knows how excessive it is, especially at the Pentagon.)
The other problem is that secretly, unbeknownst to you or the general public, in the smokey closed door places in the Beltway, the strategic thinkers have been saying we are returning to a neo-cold war, and to the tripolar world, and thats the real reason for our expansionism... used a measure of containment against our future enemies, (Russia and China) in the upcoming resource wars. Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria/Somalia/Georgia/Ukraine/The Stans, all make sense if you look at it from this perspective. Don't get me started on the petroldollar and world finance schemes.
I don't know enough to quite disagree with that justification, but my problem is that if that's the real reason, the public deserves to know, but our reps and the military brass have all just held that close to their chest and we are hemorrhaging money that gets wasted and it all ends up in VA and NY, and our constitution is being undermined, while our media is captured and corruption is rampant in all three branches of government, and the surveillance state grows so the intel agencies are more and more powerful against their own people and less and less useful abroad...
Same old military industrial complex scheme with theater pretexts.
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