Zycie samo dopisalo nastepny odcinek.
Jerzy
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.
Geeks and Hackers: Pentagon's Cyber Force Wants You!
by William J. Astore
(Tom Dispatch)
www.mathaba.net/news/?x=594409
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 third
hijacked plane 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@pct.edu.
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