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)