Worldwide Concern over Information Warfare
The Russian defence and intelligence community
has fears about the future of information warfare. They see it as threatening
and likely to cause a new arms race between the major powers. They seem
to agree with the point of view that we are beginning a journey into a
world that is fraught with danger.
The countries that have the most effective information
warfare capabilities are also the most vulnerable to attack. Uniquely in
the history of the world, a single individual armed with just a computer
and a modem can literally hold America to ransom.
A glimpse of that vulnerability was provided on
February 5, 1997, when George Tenet, then the proposed Director of Central
Intelligence, during his confirmation hearings took the Senate Intelligence
Committee through the usual litany of threats and potential crises that
confronted the United States.
"First is the continuing transformation of Russia
and the evolution of China," he said. "Second are those states -- North
Korea, Iran and Iraq -- whose hostile policies can undermine regional stability.
Third are very important Trans-national issues -- terrorism, proliferation,
international drug trafficking and international organised crime. Fourth
are those regional hot spots -- such as the Middle East, the south Asian
subcontinent, Bosnia and the Aegean -- which carry a high potential for
conflict. Fifth are states and regions buffeted by human misery and large-scale
suffering, states involved in or unable to cope with ethnic and civil conflict,
forced migration, refugees and the potential for large-scale deaths from
disease and starvation."
There was nothing particularly new in any of this.
It was a speech that could have been made by most CIA directors at any
time over the previous twenty years. Even the names would have been the
same. What set Tenet's remarks apart were the few sentences at the end
of his lengthy prepared statement.
"There's a new threat I've put in this Trans-national
threat area and that is security to information systems in the United States.
The tremendous growth in communications technology is shrinking distances
and weakening the barriers to the flow of information. This technology
also presents us with an important Trans-national challenge -- protecting
our information systems. Recognising this problem, we are assessing countries
that have such potential, including those which appear to have instituted
formal information warfare programs."
Concern is growing in many quarters that society's
reliance on computers has made it extremely vulnerable to attack via keyboard.
At the Pentagon, military theorists ponder how to defend America against
hackers in the employ of a foreign power who might use the Internet to
turn off the electricity, paralyse the armed forces, cause corporations
to crumble and write dirty words on your Web site.
“The case of America is... not to be fairly understood
without making due allowance for a certain prevalent unbalance and derangement
of mentality... Perhaps the commonest and plainest evidence of this unbalanced
mentality is to be seen in a certain fearsome and feverish credulity with
which a large proportion of the Americans are affected." -- Thorstein Veblen
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