07 April 2010
The Attribution Problem
(American Imam Anwar al-Awlaki)
There are some pretty amazing things going on out there. Now that the Health Care matter has been settled, the Administration is spinning off all sorts of action items that were on the back-burner.
Secretary Gates announced the a new nuclear strategy that exempts all nations that are in compliance with the non-proliferation treaty from retaliation by the nuclear arsenal of the United States, which will be reduced.
Specifically, the rogue states of North Korea and Iran are exceptions to policy, which is clearly a message, but I am baffled. If there is clear and unambiguous evidence that a nuclear attack was launched by a state in compliance with the treaty, wouldn’t we go ahead and nuke them back?
I am way confused, and seem to have wandered into this week’s plot line from the television epic “24.” In that one, the female president of the United States was prepared on Monday night to accept the deaths of 100,000 New Yorkers in order to save the life of a president of a mid-Eastern nation-state who looks a lot like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Beats me. I think attribution is the key to all this, and if we keep that straight about who to wave our nukes at, we will be fine.
That is one of the other extraordinary things. In cyber space, the Administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki.
This isn’t much different than lobbing unannounced Hellfire missiles into compounds in Pakistan, but the irascible cleric is hiding out in Yemen, and he speaks colloquial American English, has a Facebook page, and apparently is directly responsible for encouraging terror attacks up to and including the 9/11 monstrosity.
He was apparently a counsel to mad Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and the Detroit Underwear Bomber.
I support his sudden and violent death, of course, and am a bit surprised that we have told him via the media that we are coming to kill him.
I guess we have gotten the attribution thing under control, but that goes back to my old standing concern about knowing who is doing what.
When I worked information operations policy matters for the DCI, it was pretty clear that we had absolutely no idea who was systematically ransacking our cyber vaults for information.
A thing called “Moonlight Maze” was an investigation that went on for months about who was hacking into DoD computers and making off with sensitive information, including stuff about our nukes. There was circumstantial evidence that it was the Russians who were up to no good- many of the attacks seemed to coincide with normal business hours in Moscow- but the further we got into it the more bewildering the hopscotch of servers and continents got.
I do not think we ever did get to positive attribution of who was doing it. Now the Chinese seem to be globally hacking away, though the attacks are coming from all sorts of directions.
One thing is pretty clear. We have informed Mr. Awlaki that he has nothing at all to lose, and if we are expecting another attack from him, I am thinking it might just come from Cyber space in conjunction with something nasty and kinetic.
If it does, and there is no attribution for who is responsible, all our network capabilities and aging nukes won’t mean a thing.
I certainly hope we kill him first. We have that attribution-of-evil problem in the can. Beyond that, things get hazy really fast.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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