18 May 2007
So It Begins
Like you, I do most of my banking on line. When the postage went up two cents this week for a first-class letter, I shrugged, resolving to get some stamps, sometime, for the odd litter or contribution I still do by mail.
I should know better, since one of my last jobs in government was in the cyber-world. It was policy stuff that was the meat of the assignment- mostly playing traffic cop between the three-letter agencies that play in that sandbox.
It had already begun then, and the war in fact had been in progress for some time. The cyber-frontier was the Wild West, and had been since the beginning. There were brilliant hackers and pornographers and criminals, of course, but there was also more shadowy activity in progress. Espionage.
The opportunity to steal or alter sensitive data was a compelling new arena. So was the art of protecting it, since knowing how to protect implies the first two capabilities.
There were a couple high-profile attacks on US national-security systems, massive campaigns to penetrate and exploit databases all over the country. The nature of the web means that it was a global operation, and publicly there was never a final solution.
There was even a the first cyber war, which broke out after the collision in 2001 between a US Navy reconnaissance aircraft and a hot-dogging Chinese fighter. Thousands of irregulars sat down at their keyboards and began denial-of-service attacks against servers on both sides of the Pacific. There was a wild spate of anarchic traffic that washed up against, but did not swamp, the world wide web.
As far as we could tell, it was not a state-sponsored war, at least on the American side. But it was quite real.
I have gone on to worry about other things, and pay my bills from my home computer. That is probably a mistake. Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, is concerned about it. He has talked publicly about his concern for the vulnerability of our economy to concerted cyber attack. He said that with the right room full of experts, he could seriously change the quality of our lives.
I don't know anything sensitive any more, but I saw in the press that the first actual state-sponsored attack is in progress, right now, and it is bringing a little country to its knees.
The country is Estonia, one of the old German kingdoms on the shores of the eastern Baltic. It was the first part of old Europe to fall to the Red Army, and the last days under Nazi control were grim indeed.
Mass rape, murder and devastation were on the menu, followed by decades of occupation. The Victors erected monuments to the heroes that liberated that part of the Soviet Union, and the people who lived through the slaughter had to look at it each day, history as writ by the sword.
Of course they wanted the statures gone, but it was a sensitive issue. Many ethnic Russians settled there after the war. Many were bitter at the fall of the eastern empire. But the people of Estonia wanted their land purged of the monuments to atrocity.
In April, the town fathers and mothers finally had enough. It was a compromise, of course, since they are a mainly rational people. There was no howling mob with ropes and crow-bars. The Soviet Soldiers Monument in the capital of Tallinn was carefully taken down, and moved to the cemetery where the Red Army dead lie.
It was very much in the same spirit that the Indians pulled down the British statues of the Raj. I have seen some of them on a dusty plain north of Delhi, not desecrated. Just standing alone, irrelevant.
The Russians did not see it that way. They took the action as a direct affront, coming as it did so soon before Victory Day on May 9th, the celebration of the great sacrifice and the high-water mark of the Soviet State.
A resurgent Russia has apparently decided to punish the Estonians. For the last three weeks there has been a massive barrage of attacks against government websites. ATM's don't work, and the progressive Estonian are not paying their bills on the internet anymore, since it does not work.
The web pages of political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies are defaced as fast as they can be fixed. It is war.
This is a not a new thing, since all the parts of it have existed before. But there are many people watching to see how it will be resolved. There are many people planning. This sort of war does not take tanks or heavy divisions or suicide car bombs.
It just makes everything we take for granted stop working.
I would go and buy some stamps, but that would be a waste of time. They are printed by computers, after all, and sorted by computers, and distributed in accordance with computer programs.
The next war is not going to be anything like what we have seen before. At the moment we are all wired together, connected. In the next war, things are just going to stop.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com