*This commentary is way too US-centric. Of course certain elements of the American security apparatus are gonna cash in on cyberwar. They always do that. But the Chinese are freakin' hitting EVERYBODY, they're raking in data everywhere they can grab it. If the American Internet had a solid Chinese Firewall a mile high, they'd still be raiding the Indians, Koreans, Australians and Europeans.
*By puffing the Electronic Pearl Harbor angle, a scenario which isn't all that plausible, this piece elides real problems. Stuxnet. Estonia. Wikileakages on massive scales. Bots and DDOSing. These aren't anklebites, they're getting severe.
*Also, if the author here had ever actually read Jules Verne, he'd know that Jules Verne was Mr. Calm Logic; Jules was the calm logic contingent to the nth degree.
http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/08/08/cyber-war-worrywarts/
(...)
"The whole debate over cyber war is getting really interesting. The ratio of scaremongers to calm logic – currently about a 2-to-1 edge in favor of the Jules Verne crowd – is reflected in a trio of major stories on the topic recently.
"This is from a recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story:
This Code War era is no superpower stare-down; it's more like Europe in 1938, when the Continent was in chaos and global conflict seemed inevitable.
"Here's the latest from Vanity Fair (which is where I always turn for the latest in balanced, relevant reporting on national-security matters):
Hackers from many countries have been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—intellectual property from American corporations and the U.S. government on a massive scale, and Chinese hackers are among the main culprits. (((I'm sure that Vanity Fair lacks the fair-and-balanced credibility of the Murdoch crime family, but this is a factual statement.)))
So it was a little like being a thirsty man stumbling into an oasis after weeks in the desert to drink the cool water provided by Michael Hirsh in National Journal:
In truth, cyberskeptics abound…These skeptics say that much of the alarm stems from a fear of the unknown rather than from concrete evidence of life-and-death threats. It is, they suggest, a 21st-century version of the medieval mapmakers who would mark the boundaries of the known world and then draw mythical beasts on the other side conveying the message: “Here, there be dragons.”…Critics worry that this fear is only going to create the biggest dragon of all: a permanent military-cyber industrial complex not unlike the one that President Eisenhower warned of at the dawn of the nuclear age...The danger is that the U.S. government will do what it has been arguably doing in spades since 9/11: overreact. Spend too much. Go overboard with surveillance. Crimp and constrain freedoms, this time involving the Internet.
By George, I think Hirsh has nailed it.
Next time there is some cyber hypester on television, pay attention to where his or her paycheck comes from. Nearly all of them work for corporations eager to use their voices as bellows to fan the flames of cyber-attack fears; others work for companies whose job it is to maximize the potential cyber threats so you will buy their software and expertise to defend against them. (((Okay, fine, but listen: I'm not in the security biz, and ignoring this issue is like ignoring AIDS or the narcotics racket. It doesn't matter if you're a sublime naif who knows nothing about the "threat." It's not that they're raiding your wallet: it's that you're a chump. Go run a virus scan on your PC immediately.)))
Read more: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/08/08/cyber-war-worrywarts/#ixzz1URmf4L2W
(((PS: Just for instance: y'think these cyberwar alarmists actually work for Lockheed-Martin?)))
