The decades of the Cold War, that period of tension between East and West following World War II, saw powerful nations pursuing hostile intent through a variety of fronts, always stopping short of the all-out war they were probably convinced would destroy all involved. Through proxies, the United States and the Soviet Union escalated their enmity to the point of armed conflict. As the temperature of the Cold War grew steadily warmer, bathed in the reflected heat and light of the firefights that were Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and countless smaller regimes across the globe, the planet came closer to the brink of total conventional combat.
Propelled in part by the United States’ refusal to give up SDI technology, the arms race that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet economy managed to do financially what neither side was willing to attempt conventionally. It ended the Cold War by defeating the Soviet Union from within. On Christmas, in 1991, the Soviet threat ended. Years later, we are now dealing with the fallout from an increasingly aggressive Russia and its allies and trading partners among terrorist nations … but that is a topic for another column (not necessarily this one).
What you may not realize is that a new Cold War, or perhaps an extension of the former Cold War, is being waged even now. Your nation, the United States, is under attack from foreign enemies. You are already aware of the international threat posed by terrorist organizations like al-Qaida, and you know only too well what the acts of real-world, real-life violence wrought by such groups can do to America’s citizens.
Another proxy war, another shadow conflict, is taking place behind the veil of modern technology. Every minute of the day, external foes are mounting assaults on American infrastructure, civilian American assets and American military targets. Those enemies do this through the virtual world. Their foot soldiers are an army of disparate computer hackers, ranging from state-sponsored operatives to ordinary people in almost every nation on the planet.
Echoes of the Cold War can be heard in admissions by the United States and Russia that “cyberspace is an emerging battleground.” As reported in the New York Times, Russia wants an international treaty limiting other nations’ use of cyberspace attacks on military assets, while the United States favors a strategy of “increased cooperation among international law enforcement groups to make cyberspace more secure.”
The fact that this is actually a point of contention between the two nations – one a former superpower, the other a fading superpower – should worry you, because it points to what both nations are trying to do to each other through hacking intrusions behind the scenes. “Many countries,” states the Times article, “are developing weapons … like ‘logic bombs’ that can be hidden in computers to halt them at crucial times or damage circuitry.” Other cyberspace warfronts include microwave and electromagnetic pulse weapons development (targeting the world’s hardware) and “botnets” that can “disable or spy on websites and networks” (targeting the world’s software).
According to columnist John Naughton, writing in The Observer, “the world has embarked on a new arms race. The weapons this time are malicious data-packets of the kind hitherto employed mainly by spammers. … [N]ations will use their cyber-tools to wreak economic havoc and social disruption.” Naughton points out that we’ve seen what such cyber-warfare can do. Two years ago, he explains, Estonia was attacked by hackers (most likely in Russia), resulting in the crippling of key portions of Internet infrastructure and telecommunications in the beleaguered nation.
The U.K. has also admitted that it has “cyber-attack capability.” According to TG Daily, the U.K.’s security minister, Lord West, has said that the United Kingdom “has the ability to launch cyber-attacks against foreign governments.” West went on to say that he would “think it silly of any nation not to have an ability to use cyberspace for [its] safety and security.” He claimed that England leads the world in its cyber-war strategy, which includes counter-strike capability should the U.K. itself be attacked in this manner.
Nations are already engaged in open cyber-attacks on each other, to gain military secrets and to test their abilities to interfere with their foes’ infrastructure. Back in 2005, a group of Chinese hackers stole U.S. military secrets and flight-planning software from Redstone Arsenal, which houses the Army Aviation and Missile Command. The Chinese government was believed by our intelligence forces to be “the most likely recipient of the information [the hackers] intercepted.”
The problems don’t stop with the hostile governments of emerging military and technological threats like China. According to Popsci.com, it isn’t just China’s government that is attacking our cyber-infrastructure. It’s also hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians – a loose federation of Chinese hackers attacking the United States simply because their government feeds them propaganda about how evil we are. The FBI can do little to prosecute hackers in foreign countries, least of all hostile nations like China (whose government turns a blind eye to simple copyright infringements, must less wholesale cyber war). The hackers are also becoming harder to monitor and track through conventional means.
The Obama administration, already quite weak on defense and busily projecting that weakness abroad, may or may not understand the extent of the cyber-warfare threat we now face. If the United States is to avoid the economic ruin and social chaos that will result from persistent and ever-more widespread hacker attacks on its virtual infrastructure, it must waste no time participating in this cyber-arms race. Unless we use technology to combat the threat posed by technology, we will be left behind. We must outwit, outspend and out-hack our enemies … or we will lose this proxy war before we truly begin to fight it.
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Wayne Allyn Root