Finding the enemy
Who is the enemy? This is a dilemma for the US military chasing funding
in a post-Soviet era of “peace dividend”.
In Cuckoo's Egg, Clifford Stoll's dramatic account of intrigue
and interference in data networks across the US and Europe, the enemy was
the hacker. Now a textbook for the security “community”, this book describes
the efforts of the author a decade ago to alert US authorities to the fact
that hackers were attacking civilian and military sites.
Despite warning military installations that they were under attack,
Stoll found his advice ignored as he couldn't show any military or commercial
damage resulting from these attacks.
Within a few years the military had wised up, and realised that evidence
(or claims) of interference in their networks could be the source of billions
of dollars of new funding.
But the paths of the high-profile hackers are becoming predictable.
Take Captain Crunch (John T. Draper), a hacker from the early 1970s. He
publicised the fact that a Cap'n Crunch cereal box whistle could be used
to trick the US telephone network into giving free telephone calls.
Developing the early design for IBM's first personal computer word processor
while still in jail, he then moved into computer network hacking, according
to New York Times journalist John Markoff. Many years and developments
later he has now teamed up with a venture capitalist to provide security
services.
While the number of hackers who ended up in jail has been small, they
are all likely to receive attractive offers of employment on their release.
The enemy must be elsewhere.
Declan McCullagh reported in Wired News on February 9 that Admiral
Tom Wilson, head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, thinks he has found
the answer. A meeting of the Senate intelligence committee (“intelligence”
here refers to a field of work, spying, rather than a capacity to be clever)
considered the implications of exporting encryption (coding) technology,
traditionally considered munitions.
Today the computer programming code which provides unbreakable security
can be spelled out in a few lines and printed on a T-shirt (which it has
been), so banning its export is no longer a real world consideration.
Wilson told the committee that Cuba might start an “information warfare
or computer network attack” that could “disrupt” the US military. He explained:
“Cuba is, Senator, not a strong conventional military threat. But their
ability to deploy asymmetric tactics against our military superiority would
be significant. They have strong intelligence apparatus, good security
and the potential to disrupt our military through asymmetric tactics.”
“Asymmetric” in this context comes from the world of information technology
and means uneven. Asymmetric communications involve a great deal of data
coming from one direction and only a little returning. In this case it
is a US military acknowledgement that Cuban capacity for offensive military
activity against the US is minuscule.
Despite his best efforts, Wilson's testimony didn't really look like
billion dollar military funding stuff.
So where is the enemy?
For this we need to go to the Central Intelligence Agency, the expert
in global enemies. Last December the CIA announced that following a seven
month investigation it had uncovered a plot involving 160 people in a closely
guarded conspiracy spanning the previous 15 years. With decades of experience
in undermining and overthrowing governments around the world, the CIA reacted
swiftly. It kicked out four of its employees and warned another 18. This
underground group had been operating within the CIA.
According to a public CIA statement, there had been “a concerted and
sustained effort on the part of the group of individuals to create, maintain
and hide databases on the agency's computer systems”.
Apparently, the CIA's technicians had taken advantage of internet-style
networking technologies to organise some discussion groups, because they
wanted to have a sense of community with other “techies”. As with technicians
across the world they figured that since this breached company rules, the
simplest thing was to hide their activities from the boss.
There is a saying on the internet, “information wants to be free”. Here
at last we find the enemy.
BY GREG HARRIS (gregharris_greenleft@hotmail.com)
