An old proverb: You don’t defeat nations with armies, you defeat them with ideas; Its a sad state of the internet when one nation spends more money on defence than all nations on earth combined, and consider the digital realm to be their battleground.
As a term, information warfare, or IW, remains in use worldwide, in the militaries of other countries as well as in some of the U.S. military services. The Navy now has an IW officer position, which it advertises as involving “attacking, defending and exploiting networks to capitalize on vulnerabilities in the information environment” (U.S. Navy, undated)…
…Social networks, as part of the information environment, are also a part of such conflicts or struggles. As noted by LTG Michael Vane, “Army forces operate in and among human populations, facing hybrid threats that are innovative, networked, and technologically-savvy” (TRADOC, 2010a, p. i). Internet-assisted social networking is now a part of the operational environment, as events in Egypt, Moldova, Iran, and even Pittsburgh have made clear. Social networks are a growing and increasingly relevant element of the information environment…
…Harkening back to the birth of the information operations concept out of command and control warfare in the late 1990s, this doctrine aggregates the areas of electronic warfare (EW), computer network operations (CNO), psychological operations (PSYOP), military deception (MILDEC), and operations security (OPSEC) as core capabilities, despite the fact that some of these concepts are quite dissimilar. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG1100/MG1113/RAND_MG1113.pdf
As net citizens, as world citizens; we need to fight this war on ideas with bigger and better ideas. The IP is mightyer than the sword.
Being peroccupied with social commitments meant I only found about this today, but over the weekend one of the technocrati, Aaron Swzrtz had passed away–alledgedly a suicide.
Aaron Swartz co-developed the RSS standard that all us bloggers love, was a co-founder of reddit and an advocate of open information;
Somewhere in there, Aaron’s recklessness put him right in harm’s way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.
Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail. http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html
as Lessig states:
Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you. http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully
Anon have voiced their condolences on a couple of MIT websites, showing just how much this man was respected in the web community
After MIT President L. Rafael Reif issued a statement this afternoon promising a “thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present,” Anonymous targeted at least two MIT Web sites. Lacking the loose-knit group’s usual feisty language, the message posted on the Web site was a call for reform in the memory of the late Internet activist.
After calling the prosecution of Swartz “a grotesque miscarriage of justice” and “a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for,” Anonymous outlined its list of goals under a section labeled “Our wishes:”
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.
Academics are showing their respects too–by posting copy-protected joyurnal articles on twitter, which has gained momentum in the past few days; some only hearing of Swartz after his passing but still greatly supportive of his open-information initative.
The PDF campaign was born out of a desire to honor Swartz’s memory and his battle for open access to documents on the Internet, said Micah Allen, a researcher in the fields of brain plasticity, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive science.
“A fitting tribute to Aaron might be a mass protest uploading of copyright-protected research articles,” Allen wrote yesterday on Reddit. “Dump them on Gdocs, tweet the link. Think of the great blu-ray encoding protest but on a bigger scale for research articles.”
As of Sunday morning, it appeared that hundreds were participating in the protest/tribute, posting links to thousands of documents on Twitter using the hashtag #pdftribute, the creation of which Allen attributed to Eva Vivalt and Jessica Richman.
RAND released this report Crisis and Escalation in Cyberspace, which focuses on state sponsored cyberoperations…
In the past 20 years, there have been plenty of instances of cybercrime and cyberespionage. But there have been only three and a half cyberattacks that could even conceivably rise to the level of a cyberwar: the DDOS attacks against Estonia in 2007, a similar attack on Georgia in 2008, the Stuxnet worm (2009–2010), and perhaps a cyberattack on Syria radar prefatory to an Israeli air strike on a supposed nuclear reactor in 2007. 20 Of these, all but one (Stuxnet) was unaccompanied by violence, which tends to create its own tensions. In part for this reason, none of these engendered a cybercrisis of the sort discussed here. As for generalizations about computer intrusion, they are based on reported cases; they exclude unreported proprietary or classified material.http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2012/RAND_MG1215.pdf
I feel that they are ignoring a few other incidents, but it is RAND so they would be unlikley to bring up Fukishima.
The first instinct of the policymakers was to get ahead of the crisis by taking ownership of it; this they did by constantly pressing for new powers. Extraordinary powers, of course, require extraordinary circumstances to justify…
The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.
These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.
I have not read the book in entirety, so I can not make a review, but these sentiments are similar to those many of us in the internet industry hold. I look forward to receiving my copy and I really hope it presents a lot of information not already known to myself, but even in the absence of that I am optimistic that the sale price contributes to the legal fund for Assange’s eventual freedom.
I like this, it’s something missing in world leaders these days–I grew up in the Hawke era and this is how I remember what good politicians do. That and play cricket–but I dont know if the American public could handle a leader who so openly embraces such a colonial sport.
And I would have never known about this if it were not for 25,000 disgrunteled Texan’s wishing to succeed. Whitehouse Beer petition page
Human Rights Watch, an international human rights watch-dog released a report this month on the United States involvement in the torture of Libyan nationals, while in US custody. The report exposes some of the inaccuracies reported in the mainstream media by examining evidence of the Tripoli Documents and testimony from individuals released from Libyan prisons after Qaddafi’s overthrow.
From the page #6:
Al-Libi’s case is significant, among other reasons, because the United States relied on statements obtained through his interrogation while in CIA custody to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Al-Libi died in a Libyan prison in 2009—a suicide, according to Libyan authorities at the time—so it is difficult to obtain information about him today. But by talking to family members and others detained with him in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Libya, Human Rights Watch has pieced together some new details about al-Libi’s time in CIA custody and circumstances
surrounding his death. Human Rights Watch also observed photos of al-Libi that Libyan prison officials appear to have taken on the morning of his death which allegedly depict him in the manner he was found in his cell. The photos show bruising on parts of his body.
Im lost for comment, thats why this has been sitting in the drafts for so long. I decided to publish after checking WT…
The idea that remote control planes are attacking civilian targets worries me, the idea that they are attacking anything worries me. So you can only guess my reaction when I read this in wired:
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
what really worries me on reading the article is that the USAF dont seem to be that concerned about it and that they are relying on instructions found on Kaspersky’s website. Surely one of the most hi-tech organisations would have better tech support than that?
So is it a harmless keylogger virus or is there something more sinister at play here? What groups would have an interest in this kind of information (well that list is a long one) and whould have the skillset to perform such an attack on a closed system? Given that Kaspersky was mentioned in the article; would it be Russian hackers working for…? one can only speculate.
but given this breach, it would also be wise if the USAF grounded their drone fleet. infact even without the breach they should ground those birds..
READERS NOTE: This was originally posted on my nolonger active Murdoch blog on May 2nd, 2010
Governments around the world all have sensitive information they would like kept out of the public record, this is of no surprise to anyone (tho the nature of some of that information most likely will!). Not all information governments suppress is related to military activities, however when strategic military information is “leaked” the governments respond to minimize the impact of the leak, this process is most likely to differ from nation to nation depending on the persuasion of the current regime.
However not all military information is of strategic importance. On april 5 of this year (2010) Wikileaks, a not-for-profit website specializing in distributing leaked “intel” from both private and government sources, posted a video online that they have labled “Collateral Murder”. The video is decrypted US military footage and has been confirmed as authentic, shot from on board a US military helicopter gunship.
The victims of this event are alleged to include two Reuters employees, Photo-journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had been trying to obtain a copy of the incident under the United States FOI (Freedom of Information) Act without sucsess. The video was leaked to wikileaks by sources within the US military.
There are a few issues here i would like to explore:
If the video was “classified” sensitive by the department of defense, then it would automatically be exempt from any FOI application, therefore anyone implicated in leaking the video is committing treason. Forget for a moment about the human toll and the fact that the occupation of Iraq was based on non-existent WMD’s, imagine this footage as if it were any other strategic intel–Is leaking classified military data a concern for the government, the answer: Absolutely. There are government departments whos sole task it is to make sure classified data does not enter the public domain.
This brings me to my next point; Accountability and transparency in the classification of sensitive material. This video was classified as sensitive, but by whom and for what reason? if it was classified for reasons that it might have a negative impact on the public’s perception of the military (or the Iraq conflict itself) then should governments be allowed to use their means to suppress said video? I dont think it should. If it were classified for reasons it might escalate tensions in the middle east resulting in more bloodshed?, the answer is less clear. Perhaps the video was classified because it highlighted the US military s poor level of combat training, and could be viewed by hostile forces wishing to learn weaknesses in air-to-ground combat situations? Surely if this were the reason it would be justified in its classification? there must be some transparency in this decision making process.
Due Process. If the alleged crime–which traditional media would have to call it as conviction had yet been handed down, was committed does its distribution to the world have any impact on the future court proceedings resulting?. Could defendants claim to not be given a fair trial because of how it were reported in the media, ie: wikileaks?. In criminal cases in Western Australia journalists have to adhere to certain rules so to not bias any possible jury selection. If this were a civilian killing another civilian the use of the URL using the word murder would be cause for possible mistrial. This case involves military combatants, who traditionally operate within their own legal framework. Perhaps the role of the military in this situation are in an illegal occupation, and therefore there may be criminal cases lodged on the soldiers at a later date?. If this is the case, has the incident made it impossible for the defendants to seek fair trial in such a case?.
You don’t conquer empires with army’s, you conquer them with ideas
On the other side of the coin is the humanitarian point of view. The video shows the killing of unarmed civilians by military combatants, a clear human rights abuse and war crime. Dont we need to make such human rights abuses public so to achieve justice for the victims and their families? Should all war footage be made available to a public so they can scrutinize the government? Is this a democratic “checks and balances” that we must have access to information regarding human rights abuses, so we can vote out culpable governments?.
Or has this incident highlighted that the role of governments must change now that we are a global communications village, sowing us that an un-just industrial-military machine has failed yet again and that the whole idea of armys and wars and governmnets are becoming obsolete in this digital age.
Byron Levene - working title 