The document looks at the potential damage cyber terrorism could cause. It has been quite an inspirational and interesting read in terms of narrative development and story ideas. Ive picked out some of the interesting qoutes and parts of the documents.
Url: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/netizen.html
information technology is undermining most of the world's accumulated knowledge about armed conflict - since Sun Tzu, anyway.
"After the Gulf War, when everyone was looking forward to eternal peace, a new military revolution emerged. This revolution is essentially a transformation from the mechanized warfare of the industrial age to the information warfare of the information age. Information warfare is a war of decisions and control, a war of knowledge, and a war of intellect. The aim of information warfare will be gradually changed from 'preserving oneself and wiping out the enemy' to 'preserving oneself and controlling the opponent.' Information warfare includes electronic warfare, tactical deception, strategic deterrence, propaganda warfare, psychological warfare, network warfare, and structural sabotage.- From Chinese army newspaper, Jiefangjun Bao
Under today's technological conditions," the summary continues, "the 'all conquering stratagems' of Sun Tzu more than two millennia ago - 'vanquishing the enemy without fighting' and subduing the enemy by 'soft strike' or 'soft destruction' - could finally be truly realized."
The object is to vanquish, conquer, destroy - as deviously and pervasively as possible.
That's one of the factors that makes I-war discussions so fraught: Like the technology that makes it possible, the landscape is vast, hard to visualize, and infinitely flexible. I-war can be the kind of neat, conceptually contained electronic Pearl Harbor scenario that Washington strategists like - collapsing power grids, a stock market software bomb (Tom Clancy's been there already), an electromagnetic pulse that takes the phone system out. Or it could be something completely different: An unreachable, maybe even unknown, foe. Grinding you down. Messing with your collective mind. Driving you slowly, gently nuts. Turning around your high-powered, fully wired expeditionary force in Somalia with a single, 30-second videoclip of one of your boys being dragged behind a jeep. Weaponry by CNN.
Nobody wants to get near it, because it's being presented in such humongous terms." And because jumping in requires wrestling with some of the most contentious issues around, from civil liberties and cryptography to the size of the Pentagon budget - not to mention heavy doses of what still remains, for most of area code 202, mind-bendingly impenetrable technology.
Looking at I-war through the conventional military prism is scarcely more inspiring. No weapons to stockpile. No US$50 billion panacea programs. No Ho Chi Minh Trails to bomb. No missiles to monitor. No rear bases - possibly no immediately definable enemy at all. The I-war threat is, by definition, so overwhelmingly unstructured that any attempt at a top heavy response could actually be worse than doing nothing. Nor will expensive new toys help: as the NSA's and the FBI's crypto warriors are already finding out, most of the technology involved is simply software - easy to duplicate, hard to restrict, and often frustratingly dual-use, civilian or military. It doesn't take a nice, fat sitting duck of a factory to manufacture software bombs; any PC anywhere will do.
"We've created a technology over a period of 20 or 30 years. It's going to take 10, 20 years to create an alternative technology that allows us a more sophisticated set of defenses."
...this is cutting-edge stuff, grounded in the latest theories of ecological computing - digital versions of genetic variation and immune response. "There are naturally occurring models of survivable systems provided by biological organisms, populations, and societies," declares Darpa's request for proposals. "This research program uses these examples for metaphors and guidance about how to design survivable information systems.
Steele argues for what he calls "SmartNation," a sort of electronic Neighborhood Watch in which "each individual node - each individual citizen - is educated, responsible, alert, and able to join in a networked security chain."
Pentagon adviser John Arquilla has a name for low tech responses to high tech warfare: netwar. And he believes that future conflicts will be dominated not by superpowers and nation-states but by small, distributed groups - ranging from criminal gangs to rebels like those in Chechnya and Chiapas - who can exploit information technology.
What's so new about that?
It's all-channel interconnectivity that distinguishes the true modern network - each node can connect quite directly with any other. What's fascinating is that smugglers, pirates, other forms of criminals, revolutionaries, and terrorists have always organized along networked lines. Now they are marrying up with the information revolution, and it's giving them vast new capabilities.
We're also going to see more netwar because one can wage this kind of conflict without large field armies - and indeed without sophisticated technologies. In the wake of the Gulf War, it doesn't make a great deal of sense to challenge the United States directly or conventionally. Only a few armies - quite advanced ones - will engage in the high tech wars of the future. Instead, there will be a profusion of challenges to American interests. And it's this kind of conflict for which we are not prepared.
What stands in the way of serious change?
Militaries that change are usually militaries that have been defeated. And so this is a very difficult time for the United States. We have a formula that has worked. We won the Cold War. We won the Gulf War. Doing things this way is costly - a quarter of a trillion dollars spent on defense each year. Do we want to take a chance on a new way of fighting solely because it may mean we'll be able to do it less expensively? I would say that we must, because we have economic constraints to which we must respond. But we also have to decentralize our military for the same reasons that businesses are decentralizing.
How will this affect the global power structure?
There's been a long debate about whether information technologies tend toward good or evil. My greatest fear is the rising capabilities of states and nonstate actors who would use information technology to spread traditional forms of influence and power. A kind of information-supported imperialism may emerge. And a form of criminal mercantilism may be enabled, practiced by various pirate organizations around the world.
That doesn't sound particularly cheerful.
The darkest possibility is that states, realizing the power of networks, will align themselves with transnational criminal organizations, which will serve as their proxies as they wage an unending low-intensity netwar.
But there's another hypothesis: Because free flows of information vastly increase the costs of repression, authoritarian and totalitarian states will find themselves having greater and greater difficulty maintaining control. My greatest hope is that the information revolution raises the possibility of globally disseminating a set of common values and agreements about the nature of human rights. Interconnectivity - and the social, political, and sometimes military capabilities that come with this interconnectedness - can help to break the chains of those around the world who remain under authoritarian control. It is possible that new information technologies portend the rise of a global civil society that will be self-governing and more peaceful.
No comments:
Post a Comment