The Cyber-Surge
Shane Harris has a long article detailing the state of the US cyberwarfare capability. The hook for the story, though, is a claim that cyberwarfare championed by Michael McConnell and David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007 was as critical to turning the war around as the conventional surge.
In May 2007, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency, based at Fort Meade, Md., to launch a sophisticated attack on an enemy thousands of miles away without firing a bullet or dropping a bomb.
At the request of his national intelligence director, Bush ordered an NSA cyberattack on the cellular phones and computers that insurgents in Iraq were using to plan roadside bombings. The devices allowed the fighters to coordinate their strikes and, later, post videos of the attacks on the Internet to recruit followers. According to a former senior administration official who was present at an Oval Office meeting when the president authorized the attack, the operation helped U.S. forces to commandeer the Iraqi fighters communications system. With this capability, the Americans could deceive their adversaries with false information, including messages to lead unwitting insurgents into the fire of waiting U.S. soldiers.
Now, I hope the tech wonks read the whole article and let us know what they think of the overall article (Harris is well-sourced in the vicinity of Ft. Meade).
But for the moment I’d like to focus on the timing and the personalities: It was Petraeus and McConnell, with cyberwarfare, in Iraq, in 2007. That is, David Petraeus, currently in charge of both our wars. And McConnell, who in 2007 was busy pushing for expanded electronic surveillance authority, and has long been a champion of outsourcing intelligence, precisely this kind of thing (he’s currently back at Booz Allen).
No wonder there has been so much concern about putting NSA in charge of the nation’s cyber-defense.
And Petraeus is rumored to be thinking of a run for President?
I guess they fell back on the old “The best defense is a good offense” ploy.
Since the attempt does not appear to have ended up as a smoking crater (yet), they must not have outsourced this work to the folks who did MCSteele’s RNC website…
This got any relation to Bob Woodward’s ballyhooed “secret weapon” thing?
Harris notes the ballyhoo but says the timing is off–that Woodward was referring to something used earlier (2006), which seemed to be less comprehensive and effective.
FWIW my current take on the Woodward thing is that someone figured out that if they could locate a perp by first tapping the cell phone network (automatically searching all phone traffic by “voiceprint”), and then picking up the GPS location of his or her phone, then they could dial those same location coordinates into a Predator air strike. I could be totally wrong about that, and emphasize I have no first hand nor received knowledge of same, but if right, it’s very very nasty and I suppose other folks more versed in the law of war would have to weigh in as to whether collateral damage from such strikes (for example in residential neighborhoods) would or would not constitute war crime. If they would, then that could, perhaps, help explain why we haven’t heard any more about that program.
Remember they were doing SOMETHING will cells in Afghanistan, too, such taht the Taliban was bringing down towers (therefore, something that couldn’t just be eliminated by removing the battery).
Oh yeah, thanks for that reminder. I’ll have to think about that some more, as the GPS thing wouldn’t explain wanting to do that. Any time the battery’s out of the phone, the cell sites/towers should be irrelevant since it takes phone power to drive the radio link that is the only thing that connects the phone to the cell site. AFAIK, passive technologies like RFID (even if you assume, perhaps paranoidly, that phones have embedded RFID tags and cell sites in Afghanistan have integrated RFID scanners) — that would continue to work w/o battery — don’t have the necessary range to be a significant detection threat. Small radius around each cell site.
One thought: AS previously explained, if the phone is switched “off” with the battery in, then the cell network can still track the phone’s GPS location. So if you had your guys running around and occasionally one or two of them forget to pull the batteries out of their phones, and this was bringing air strikes down from the heavens onto groups of your people, you might prefer to just kill the cell network rather than keep losing the people.
Or maybe cell sites serve as some sort of calibration for the GPS coordinates of nearby phones? SO it’s better to have fewer of them farther apart? Dunno…
This ties in with your blog on German/EU resistance to NSA data mining doesn’t it? If you trust the likes of Petraeus and McConnell, NSA, CIA and the executive branch then of course they wouldn’t disrupt EU communications, let alone that of U.S. citizenry.
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/11/15/germany-us-data-mining-violates-european-human-rights/
PS EW for the last couple days I can’t post urls using the link tool
That is an interesting phenomenon. It happened to me as well. I registered my handle and took to the comments with links using the link tool but soon after, the link fairy was manufacturing 404’s. I thought the link fairy was mad but then it occurred to me that I hadn’t been “updating” my personal information. Thinking that the link fairy wanted to know more about me, I gave in and updated. Next thing you know… primo linkage priviledges again.
We are being trained by the link fairy to do its bidding. Kind of like getting the insurgents to plant ied’s in a designated location!!
I don’t care who is on the other end of the machine — it is just another point of view. Since I want to participate in the propigation of the FDL point of view, I willingly commit to “buy-in”. If I were a different kind of ideologist, I’d have to feel comfortable buying in before exhibiting “obedience”.
Cyber-war, or mind-war as I see it is all about crafting obedience. You don’t get that by taking down the net. You get that by controlling the information space in a convincing way. Bush failed at that because FDL and others revealed the man behind the curtain was a fraud. Plus the fact that a little foresight goes a long way. So timing plays an important role too.
It is all the result of updating we have been doing to our system. When we tweak things and reset, sometimes it creates those glitches. Not to worry about anything nefarious, I promise.
it may be of interest that the “federal times” newspaper has been covering federal government cyber-security issues for months, including the back-and-forth about whitehouse “cyber czars” going and coming.
a recent such article is here: http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20091115/AGENCY02/911150301/1055/AGENCY
O/T, but the rapidly flashing ad: ‘congratulations, you are the 100,000th visitor, etc.’ is really obnoxious and distracting.
I’m pretty skeptical of this whole story. It is missing all the details you would need to verify its accuracy. Sounds like somebody is trying to protect some boondoggle project. Btw, the most likely reason the Taliban was destroying cell towers was to prevent triangulation. If a non-gps phone is in range of 3 cell towers, it can be located. If not you just know its general area. The Taliban wanted to use their cells w/o giving away their exact location. If you don’t care about your neighbors reception, you just take down enough cell towers to prevent triangulation but allow you to make calls. This is probably easier in mountainous places.
That makes sense to me.
You got that right! Any self-respecting hacker (black hat or white) would look down on those US government hacker wannabees.
The article is short on details and credibility as WO points out. One interesting thing though is how flat-footed BushCo was in response to the financial meltdown.
Since the continuity of the Bush regime was dependent on mass myopia, the pre-collapse texture of debate was the usual hear no; see no; speak no evil. This served to create a dichotomy between the crafted obedience by the low information public and the very real panic of the masters of the financial universe. This disconnect hid the true devastation from the public eye until the momentum of collapse gave way to dust and debris everywhere.
And people would like to think it is all in the past. Unless China is a miracle on earth, the next leg down will be even worse. I wouldn’t count on a centrally planned economy having a buoyant effect on the entire global economy. Once we hit the next inflection point in the market then the rapidity of decline will be as spectacular as any seen in modern history.
Would that be a function of US cyber-strategy, either directly or as collateral damage to a world wide exchange?
No, it can neither be controlled or even mitigated by fiscal policy. The self-limitation of global behavioral psychology is the uber-cyber-tool. No government controls it but it can be unleashed by individuals who merely plumb the structural defects with minimum force. We have a wildly unstable financial system on the brink of collapse and it won’t be the Taliban or the French or the Chinese who bring it down. It will be the tools of financial innovation used perfectly legally in a free market circumstance which triggers a cascade of asset deflation over a prolonged period globally.
Mind-war is ultimately and completely devastating.
Related to the topic of this post, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold the following hearing tomorrow:
Feh. It’s probably just psyops, plain and simple.
Interesting list of witnesses there MadDog. Only one panelist’s title explicitly mentions a foreign country — China.
I’ll bet that our nation’s defense structure is keenly aware of the evolving threat that the Chinese military, economic and social structure represents. As this opinion piece in the Telegraph suggests,
China has now become the biggest risk to the world economy
Iraq and Afghanistan are so yesterday by comparison. The Taliban ought to recognize that the Americans aren’t nearly the threat that communist China could become and just declare a cease fire… Why fight against the very force that could prevent existential discontinuity? If they cough up what’s left of Bin Laden we could all get back to praising the Creator in the privacy of our own closets. Not fighting would be alot more productive.
Supposedly, we stand for human rights and individual freedom. We used to defend that notion because religious freedom was a fundamental obligation of our national ethic of tolerance. Nowadays, conservatives are ready to declare ideological war on non-conservatives. That is so dumb. Wingnuttery is what keeps us in the Cheney War mentality and it is blinding the American public to the reality at hand — that we aren’t the sole superpower like we thought we were at the so called End of the Cold War. We’re choking on hubris and blinded by rage.
Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army is developing advanced weaponry to deter foreign navies from interfering in domestic policy operations.
The Great Panda is girding for militancy. This comment in response to the Telegraph article is telling…
The topic is Cyber-combat. Offense is surgical. Defense is systemic. Asymmetry is the problem for all the adversaries because the outcome is lose-lose. Mutually assured devolution means nobody speaks the same language and political differences are reduced to open warfare. Just look at how the Grand Old Party of No has become the Grumbling Obsolete Party of Woe. Similarly, the economic progress gained through global cooperation will go bust in deflationary spasms of demand destruction and forced de-leveraging. Neither side can claim victory when both sides are bankrupt. And mind-war is just the way to bring it all about. Cyber warriors must feel like Yahweh’s progeny. Genesis 11:7…
That’sa some psyop!