Worldwide Concern over Information Warfare

The Russian defence and intelligence community has fears about the future of information warfare. They see it as threatening and likely to cause a new arms race between the major powers. They seem to agree with the point of view that we are beginning a journey into a world that is fraught with danger.

The countries that have the most effective information warfare capabilities are also the most vulnerable to attack. Uniquely in the history of the world, a single individual armed with just a computer and a modem can literally hold America to ransom.

A glimpse of that vulnerability was provided on February 5, 1997, when George Tenet, then the proposed Director of Central Intelligence, during his confirmation hearings took the Senate Intelligence Committee through the usual litany of threats and potential crises that confronted the United States.

"First is the continuing transformation of Russia and the evolution of China," he said. "Second are those states -- North Korea, Iran and Iraq -- whose hostile policies can undermine regional stability. Third are very important Trans-national issues -- terrorism, proliferation, international drug trafficking and international organised crime. Fourth are those regional hot spots -- such as the Middle East, the south Asian subcontinent, Bosnia and the Aegean -- which carry a high potential for conflict. Fifth are states and regions buffeted by human misery and large-scale suffering, states involved in or unable to cope with ethnic and civil conflict, forced migration, refugees and the potential for large-scale deaths from disease and starvation."

There was nothing particularly new in any of this. It was a speech that could have been made by most CIA directors at any time over the previous twenty years. Even the names would have been the same. What set Tenet's remarks apart were the few sentences at the end of his lengthy prepared statement.

"There's a new threat I've put in this Trans-national threat area and that is security to information systems in the United States. The tremendous growth in communications technology is shrinking distances and weakening the barriers to the flow of information. This technology also presents us with an important Trans-national challenge -- protecting our information systems. Recognising this problem, we are assessing countries that have such potential, including those which appear to have instituted formal information warfare programs."

Concern is growing in many quarters that society's reliance on computers has made it extremely vulnerable to attack via keyboard. At the Pentagon, military theorists ponder how to defend America against hackers in the employ of a foreign power who might use the Internet to turn off the electricity, paralyse the armed forces, cause corporations to crumble and write dirty words on your Web site.

“The case of America is... not to be fairly understood without making due allowance for a certain prevalent unbalance and derangement of mentality... Perhaps the commonest and plainest evidence of this unbalanced mentality is to be seen in a certain fearsome and feverish credulity with which a large proportion of the Americans are affected." -- Thorstein Veblen

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