Public Intelligence Blog

John Robb

Iran, Cyberwar, and the Perils of Lazy Thinking

For those of you that don’t know, the US doesn’t spend much time/energy/effort on military strategy and theory.  They do spend money on political scientists and engineers to provide a substitute.  Regardless, this deficit means the US continually falls victim to strategic errors due to stale military theory.

The big one we recently fell victim to?

The US unilaterally launched an arms race in autonomous weapons (for more on this read my article;  Pandora Smiled).

NOTE:  In fact, in all of the work I’ve done for the national security system (CIA, NSA, DoD, JCS, DNI, etc.), I’ve never run across a true military theorist.  They don’t exist in the 2 m plus person bureaucracy, despite trillions in spending based on those theories.  Go figure?!?   It’s like building a Large Hadron Collidor without a physicist.

Well, that arms race is starting to bite us back, but not in the way our lazy national security strategists expected.  There’s a pretty good article in Vanity Fair about cyberwarfare and Iran by Michael Joseph Gross that details how.

It starts with a nice kick at the start, like Brave New War (on its fifth printing), but for cyberware:

The data on three-quarters of the machines on the main computer network of Saudi aramco had been destroyed. Hackers who identified themselves as Islamic and called themselves the Cutting Sword of Justice executed a full wipe of the hard drives of 30,000 aramco personal computers. For good measure, as a kind of calling card, the hackers lit up the screen of each machine they wiped with a single image, of an American flag on fire.

As you can see, if you like my stuff, it’s worth the click to read the entire thing.  Here’s one of the payoffs:

In the U.S., the escalating bug-and-exploit trade has created a strange relationship between government and industry. The U.S. government now spends significant amounts of time and money developing or acquiring the ability to exploit weaknesses in the products of some of America’s own leading technology companies, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In other words: to sabotage American enemies, the U.S. is, in a sense, sabotaging its own companies. 

Here’s another one from a bug developer:

“You don’t have to be a nation-state to do this,” he says. “You just have to be really smart.”

BTW: the lead graphic is close to an article I did for Wired in 2007, When Bots Attack. From the Vanity Fair article:

It reminded me of this graphic from my Wired article that I thought you would enjoy:

Michael Scheuer

The Geeks Who Leak

The President calls them a threat to national security. the Internet calls them heroes. A new wave of hacktivists is changing the way we handle secrets.

By Michael Scherer

Time, June 24, 2013, Pg. 22

The 21st century mole demands no payments for his secrets. He sees himself instead as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him. Rather, it’s the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attract his imagination, a hacker mentality founded on message boards in the 1980s, honed in chat rooms in the ’90s and matured in recent online neighborhoods like Reddit and 4chan. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas.

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Marcus Aurelius

The Costs And Benefits Of The NSA

The data-collection debate we need to have is not about civil liberties.

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

Weekly Standard, June 24, 2013

Should Americans fear the possible abuse of the intercept power of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland? Absolutely. In the midst of the unfolding scandal at the IRS, we understand that bureaucracies are callous creatures, capable of manipulation. In addition to deliberate misuse, closed intelligence agencies can make mistakes in surveilling legitimate targets, causing mountains of trouble. Consider Muslim names. Because of their commonness and the lack of standardized transliteration, they can befuddle scholars, let alone intelligence analysts, who seldom have fluency in Islamic languages. Although one is hard pressed to think of a case since 9/11 in which mistaken identity, or a willful or unintentional leak of intercept intelligence, immiserated an American citizen, these things can happen. NSA civilian employees, soldiers, FBI agents, CIA case officers, prosecutors, and our elected officials are not always angels. Even though encryption is mathematically easier to accomplish than decryption, the potential for abuse of digital communication is always there—all the more since few Americans resort to encryption of their everyday emails.

But fearing the NSA, which has been a staple of Hollywood for decades, requires you to believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of American employees in the organization are in on a conspiracy. In the Edward Snowden-is-a-legitimate-NSA-whistleblower narrative, it also requires that very liberal senators and congressmen are complicit in propagating a civil-rights-chewing national surveillance system.

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Berto Jongman

Rape of Iraqi Women by US Forces as Weapon of War: Photos and Data Emerge

Phi Beta Iota:  The rest of the world is sick of US misbehavior, upset at the continued posture of the US Government in covering up rather than remediating such persistent abuses, and saddened by the idiocy and passivity of the US public in the face of such atrocities.  The national shame is enduring — and an obstacle to any possible progress on any front as long as the current Administration remains in lock-step with the mis-steps of its predecessor’s crimes against humanity.

Three Explicit Photos and Full Article Below the Line

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John Robb

DATA Dystopia. The NSA Scandal and Beyond.

This is one of the most important essays SR has ever published. Here, I believe you see the real reason for the creation of the security apparat. Terrorism is its second, but public, brief. Its real brief is to prepare for climate change. When you cut through what flows out of the Aegean Stable! s that is the Congress, you find that in the civil and military bureaucracies they are laying track for what they see coming.

This should definitely give you pause.

Pentagon Bracing for Public Dissent Over Climate and Energy Shocks
DR. NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED, Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development – The Guardian (U.K.)

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Franklin Lamb Esq.

Why Obama is Declaring War on Syria

Veterans Today, 15 June 2013

(Beirut) – The short answer is Iran and Hezbollah according to Congressional sources. “The Syrian army’s victory at al-Qusayr was more than the administration could accept given that town’s strategic position in the region. Its capture by the Assad forces has essentially added Syria to Iran’s list of victories starting with Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, as well as its growing influence in the Gulf.”

Other sources are asserting that Obama actually did not want to invoke direct military aid the rebels fighting to topple the Assad government or even to make use of American military power in Syria for several reasons. Among these are the lack of American public support for yet another American war in the Middle East, the fact that there appears to be no acceptable alternative to the Assad government on the horizon, the position of the US intelligence community and the State Department and Pentagon that intervention in Syria would potentially turn out very badly for the US and gut what’s left of its influence in the region. It short, that the US getting involved in Syria could turn out even worse than Iraq, by intensifying a regional sectarian war without any positive outcome in sight.

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David Swanson

The Pope and the Kill List

In 1984 — the year not the book, but it was fitting — and five years before she died, Barbara Tuchman published a book called The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam.  In one part of the book she looked at the destructive work of a series of a half-dozen popes, work destructive of the papacy, work that brought into being the protestant secession from the Catholic church.  This was offered as an example of folly, of rulers acting against the interest of their own institution.  It was also an example of what we so casually label “the imperial presidency.”  That is, in these popes we watched the mad and cumulative concentration of power and normalization of abuses that Tuchman almost certainly was aware she was living through again — along with the debasement of an institution previously imagined to embody certain principles and integrity.

Does history repeat itself?

Is the Pope Catholic?

. . . . . . . . .

Clement VII, Pope from 1523 to 1534 / Barack Obama, President since 2009

“The new Clement’s reign proved to be a pyramid of catastrophes.  Protestantism continued its advance. . . . Supreme office, like sudden disaster, often reveals the man, and revealed Clement as less adequate than expected. Knowledgeable and effective as a subordinate, Guicciardini writes, he fell victim when in charge to timidity, perplexity, and habitual irresolution. . . . By 1527, hardly a part of Italy had escaped violence to life and land, plunder, destruction, misery, and famines.  Clement’s misjudgments having prepared the way, Rome itself was now to be engulfed by war.”

“The folly of the popes was not pursuit of counter-productive policy so much as rejection of any steady or coherent policy either political or religious that  would have improved their situation or arrested the rising discontent.  Disregard of the movements and sentiments developing around them was the primary folly. . . . When private interest is placed before public interests, and private ambition, greed, and the bewitchment of exercising power determine policy, the public interest necessarily loses, never more conspicuously than under the continuing madness from Sixtus to Clement.  The succession from Pope to Pope multiplied the harm.  Each of the six handed on his conception of the Papacy unchanged. . . . St. Peter’s See was the ultimate pork barrel.  Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly.  While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.”

Full Post Below the Line

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Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Behind Obama’s About-Face on Syria

Jolted by Hezbollah’s Entry Into Civil War and Chemical Weapons, Administration Chose to Arm Rebels

Adam Entous

Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2013

EXTRACT:

In one sobering moment in late April, Jordan’s King Abdullah II presented President Barack Obama and aides with a bleak scenario for Syria—showing them a map of how the country could split into warring, sectarian fiefdoms, with a tract of desert dominated by al Qaeda and its allies, U.S. officials said.

. . . .

In meetings with officials from the White House and other departments, King Abdullah told policy makers that Syria would become similar to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, or FATA, where al Qaeda has long been based.

“Syria is going to become the new FATA, the breeding ground from where they launch attacks,” the king said, according to a person in the meetings.

Read full article.

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Sterling Seagrave

No one reads history anymore.

Japan’s Military Moves Toward Pre-Emptive Strike Capability

By YUKA HAYASHI

Wall Street Journal, 30 May 2013

TOKYO—Japan’s military, long constrained by the nation’s postwar pacifist constitution, moved toward gaining the freedom to strike enemy targets abroad if an attack is anticipated.

Read full article.

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