Seymour Hersh’srecent peep inside “ cyber warfare”possibly swan two things we sort of already knew : mass are well spooked , and there ’s plenty of money to be made by spooking them . The story , funnily , starts with some hot deep brown .
Hersh begins by recounting an old story , that is still a salutary read . In 2001 , an American EP-3E Aries II undercover agent plane was fly over the South China Sea , doing what undercover agent plane near China do best — sleuth on China . thing were going smoothly , until the EP-3E quite literally clash with a Chinese interceptor jet — the counterintelligence equivalent of bumping into your lady friend while she ’s on a date with another guy . Diplomatically clumsy to say the least , but also deadly — the Taiwanese fender was killed , and the American woodworking plane was able to just scantily crash land at — and this was less than idealistic — a Chinese air fundament .
There were 24 intelligence officeholder onboard the airplane , but their existence was secondary equate to the hardware and software system used to manipulate the plane ’s raw recon equipment — technical school worth C of meg of dollar mark . You would think there might be a sophisticated method acting of preclude this stuff from falling into alien men , but , it turns out , Pentagon communications protocol learn the crew to respond as you and your lady friend might after the above infidelity hypothetical — wildly dangle around a flaming axe and throwing scalding coffee everywhere . Actually . The hope was to damage the onboard equipment beyond use — and rearward engineering — by the Chinese . But after 11 daylight , the crew was sent back to the US , and the aeroplane stay behind , where it eventually became clear-cut that the crew had not sufficiently pan the thing .
How did we know ? The Chinese made it clear , Hersh explain , using the same communication communication channel we were using to snoop to beam their knowledge of our covert activities :
The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their bridge player . ( “ The N.S.A. would ask , ‘ Can the Chinese be that good ? ’ ” the former functionary tell me . “ My response was that they only forge gunpowder in the 10th century and built the bomb calorimeter in 1965 . I ’d say , ‘ Can you read Chinese ? ’ We do n’t even know the Taiwanese pictograph for ‘ Happy hr . ’ “ )
effect like this are n’t new . What is new is the proliferation of a unexampled care , and a new front : the “ cyber ” front . It employees tens of thousands of Americans , consume up of millions of revenue enhancement dollars , and in the main leaves everyone baffled . And it ’s based upon a myth that , at any head , a Formosan Cyber Soldier could press a push button and knock down the Chrysler Building , or cause rolled amnesia across the US . If you ’d like a vividly idiotic illustration of what cyber war cheerleaders want you to mean is potential , just learn Hersh ’s selection from “ Cyber War , ” a ballyhoo artist , OH DEAR GOD NO story of what China could do to us with cyber bazookas :
Within a quarter of an hr , 157 major metropolitan areas have been discombobulate into knots by a nationwide power blackout impinge on during surge hour . Poison gas cloud are wafting toward Wilmington and Houston . Refineries are burning up oil supplies in several city . Subways have crashed in New York , Oakland , Washington , and Los Angeles . . . . Aircraft are literally falling out of the sky as a outcome of midair hit across the country . . . . Several thousand Americans have already died .
If the Word ’s author , former White House interior - security measures aide Richard Clarke , can team up up with Michael Bay , he might have Summer 2012 ’s big mute polish off on his hand . But for now , this preposterous conniption of crashed trains and plummeting planes should guide our national security pursuit about as much as “ The Berenstain Bears chatter the Dentist , ” notes Hersh :
Clarke ’s account book , with its alarming vignette , was praise by many reader . But it meet much harsher treatment from writer in the proficient press , who point out factual errors and faulty Assumption . For deterrent example , Clarke attribute a grievous might outage in Brazil to a cyber-terrorist ; the grounds place to sooty insulators .
Before buy the farm further , it ’s deserving reflecting on the word we ’re using here : cyber . Cyber . Cyber warfare . Cyberspace . It ’s a term as antiquated and nebular as the allege “ war ” being fought upon it . It connotes cluelessness . These are terms that I imagine might come across with my female parent , who refers to her home router as “ the Comcast ” and calls me every time Word wo n’t quit . But there is no “ cyber space”—and it ’s an ambiguity exploited , it might seem , to gain both individual and government activity interests .
Scaring the American public into thinking it ’s engaged in a unexampled war is profitable . It save unnumberable consulting firm flush — like Booz Allen Hamilton , which bring down a $ 34 million Pentagon declaration after its executive vice president attest before congress . “ Hello , Congress . You have X. I have decade pills . They will cost you $ 34 million . Thanks ! ” It also keep government entity awash in cash , like the Pentagon ’s Cyber Command , or the NSA , which employes a sand trap full of its own hackers in a secret compound outside Baltimore . ( This is the same National Security Agency , it should be mention , that Hersh says learn foreign agents to seal their USB ports with liquid cement to preclude attack by malicious flash driving ) .
A US Navy admiral confessed the following to Hersh , almost depressing as it is unfeigned :
The U.S. Navy , worried about budget stinger , “ needs an enemy , and it ’s settled on China , ” and that “ using what your foeman is building to apologise your budget is not a new game . ”
This Johnny Cash does n’t make anyone safer , however , because there is n’t much of a menace to start with . At least not the one being sell in confab lily-white papers and on the flooring of Congress . No matter how much the day of reckoning novelists and budget - hungry officers might want you to think of your dog , blast hydrant , and Lower Manhattan as ready to explode with the water tap of a Taiwanese spacebar , China would n’t even if it could : “ Current Chinese official have told me that we ’re not go to attack Wall Street , because we essentially own it , ” says one of Hersh ’s sources . Now that ’s a reality more frightening than any Tron - esque visual modality of cyber warriors fox cyber - javelins at each other .
That is n’t to say that internet - ground hostilities between land do n’t subsist . They do , and they ’re worth taking seriously . Many signs support speculation that the late Stuxnet worm was a deliberate attempt by Israel ( and perhaps other parties ) to sabotage Iran ’s atomic plan . If true , an human activity of overt aggressiveness , to be trusted . And , had such a worm succeeded in permanently impairing or disabling entirely the nuclear - vigor industrial plant of another country , by most definition this would be fightin ’ words , not mere hacking — an act of war . But learn such risks in earnest does not a warfare make . And , as Hersh betoken out , if what actually went down is cyber “ warfare , ” then war ai n’t what it used to be :
If Stuxnet was aimed specifically at Bushehr , it demo one of the failing of cyber onrush : they are difficult to target and also to take . India and China were both rack up harder than Iran , and the computer virus could easily have distribute in a different direction , and shoot Israel itself . Again , the very receptivity of the Internet do as a deterrent against the use of cyber weapons .
The “ cyber ” nature of “ cyber ” war might , in the end , be ego - nullifying . So if there ’s not open fighting in any traditional common sense of the word , what is there ? Hersh explains that for the most part , a luck of onetime fashioned bothersome asshole hacking and pre - internet corporate espionage have been folded under this corny , mislead cape of cyber - whatever . Says another germ , a think tank fellow and former staffer at the Departments of State and Commerce during the Clinton Administration :
“ Some of it is economic espionage that we lie with and understand . Some of it is like the Wild West . Everybody is pirate from everybody else . The U.S. ’s problem is what to do about it . I conceive we have to set out by think about it”-the Taiwanese cyber threat-“as a trade issue that we have not dealt with . ”
They do it . We do it . We ’ve both been doing it . At best , maybe this is just wasteful — though it does keep a lot of Beltway character in wise Dockers . But at bad , this obfuscating Maypole dance of bureaucratism and individual consulting keep our heads in the ( CYBER ! ) clouds , and not pointed at anything that will keep the world safe . It ’ll be of the furthest grandness to keep from mistaking trade tensions and dirty economic competition with outright warfare — a word not to be expend or appropriated lightly . Hersh resolve with perhaps the article ’s most head - shaking bit , an explanation of why that American recon planer crashed in the first home : the military was so worried about losing its jobs on the even of the 2000 election that nobody was compensate attention to our undercover agent commission .
There was no leadership in the Defense Department , as both Democrats and Republicans waited for the Supreme Court to decide the fate of the Presidency . The predictable resolution was an increase in provocative behavior by Chinese fighter pilot who were assigned to monitor and shadow the reconnaissance flights . This evolved into a blueprint of harassment in which a Formosan jet would manoeuvre a few dozen yards in front of the slow , pad EP-3E , and of a sudden boom on its afterburner , soar away and leaving behind a blow wave that severely rock the American aircraft . On April 1 , 2001 , the Chinese pilot film miscalculated the distance between his plane and the American aircraft .
Is the same setup creditworthy for a fuck - up of that magnitude suddenly going rule the cyberspace with sword eyes and iron fist , only because we put on a terminal figure to their endeavor that belongs in a Windows 95 game ? Start brewing the coffee . [ The New Yorker ]
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