Vic Socotra

07 December 2010

Digital Pearl

(Noted cyber journalist and accused sex criminal Julian Assange. Photo Espen Moe, used with permission.)

I am naturally gratified with the arrest of the self-righteous prig Julian Assange. I will let the sexual assault charges against him play out as they will, and we can see if the release of hundreds of thousands of classified messages will be appended to a bill of indictment against the 39-year-old Australian. We can talk about that later.

But there is another string worth pulling in all this swirl of cyber theft and revelation. One of the cables released by WikiLeaks is about a purported attack by China on Google. One of the leaders of the Peoples Republic apparently clicked in his own name on the search engine, and was distressed by the results that were produced. A sophisticated attack on the network resulted.

The Chinese are not the only cyberthugs lurking on the world wide web, and that is worth a moment of contemplation.

If you don’t remember this day, and the long shadow of the consequences of the anniversary, I would ask you to take a moment to think of the moment. Here on the East Coast of the United States, the moment of revelation that something had gone horribly wrong came from the Associated Press bulletin at 1:07 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

The major networks spread the news after getting confirmation from government sources and interrupted regular programming at 2:30 p.m. to announce the attacks, still in progress, to the American public. Take a moment, after lunch, to recall the perfidy of it, and the long chain of planning and policy blunders that led to the sudden, violent and unexpected deaths of a couple thousand Americans at the hands of a ruthless adversary.

(USS Shaw (DD-373) goes critical on the morning of December 7th, 1941)

The legacy of the Japanese attack on Pearl is a profound one, though we always return to complacency. Then, it motivated the nation to rally together to utterly destroy a fascist enemy, and make the world- briefly- free from tyranny. Then, of course, we moved on to other things. The last time we experienced the horror of the surprise sucker-punch was at the hands of the global jerks de jour, the Islamic radicals.

Coming as they do from the sands of the East, they are prepared to believe all sorts of strange things. The Arab street was comfortable with the notion that Mossad, the Israeli boogieman under the bed, had actually been responsible for the attacks on the Trade Center, and had even magically whisked co-religionists out of the towers before the aircraft hit them.

It is going on this morning; press reports from Egypt indicate it is Mossad that is responsible for shark attacks in the warm placid waters of the resort at Sharm el-Sheikh. The once peaceful and busy beaches of Sinai have been abandoned as panic is spreading along the Red Sea Coast. A German tourist has been killed. The logical theory from the Mubarak regime is that the attacks could be caused by a dearth of natural prey for the sharks.

Or a plot to harm Egyptian tourism by Mossad.

On this 69th anniversary of the day that will live in infamy, there is another Pearl that has occurred with modest fanfare but profound implications. It is a cool story, though as is true with many neat tales, it comes with implications that you might want to consider. I had lunch with a colleague yesterday who is more recently retired from the game than I am, and in whose bailiwick this sort of thing would have occurred.

I know nothing about the facts of this latest digital Pearl except what I can glean from the press. My colleague averred no knowledge either, and I looked at the eyes closely for signs of deception as I outlined what had happened, and why I was both gratified and filled with dread at the implications.

I have been concerned with the vulnerability of our national infrastructure for a long time. The 9/11 terrorists exploited a weakness in the physical security of our airports. There is much, much more to be concerned about.

The power grid- everything from generators to distribution systems to hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants work with systems termed “Supervisory Control and Data Administration” (SCADA). They evolved from what were essentially dumb, single function computers. They were linear systems with limited capabilities, though of course they can be extremely complex, depending on function. Traditionally, they were stand-alone systems and not particularly vulnerable to anything except deliberate insider sabotage.

That is not true anymore. In fact, what is arguably the most carefully protected system in the world turned out to be vulnerable to tampering. The target was the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, and it is the really cool and scary story I mentioned a minute ago.

(Delusional President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at his 29 November press conference. Photo UPI/Maryam Rahmanian.)

My contemporary, the delusional Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was forced to finally talk about it last week.

For the first time, he admitted that malicious software code had damaged Iran's centrifuge facilities. Reuters quoted him as saying "They succeeded in creating problems for a limited number of our centrifuges with the software they had installed in electronic parts. They did a bad thing. Fortunately our experts discovered that and today they are not able to do that anymore."

That is bullshit, of course. It was a big operation and a successful one.

Unlike the sneak attack on Pearl, this one is still going on, and it features a kinetic component too. The same day as Ahadinejad’s press conference, two Iranian nuclear scientists were immolated by car bombs that had been planted in their vehicles.

I wish we could spend the morning talking about this astonishing operation; I am quite certain that someone will assert that Mossad is behind it. Of course, thanks to Julian Assange and his leaks, we know that the Shia Iranian government has a lot of enemies in their own neighborhood.

But since my time is limited this morning, we will have to defer a discussion of the Stuxnet computer worm, and the amazing three-pronged attack (four, if you include the assasinations) on Iran’s atom bomb program tomorrow.