Ready for the Second Internet War?

Image via WikipediaForget last month’s news story about the International Atomic Energy Agency that learned Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan sold nuclear bomb designs over the internet to the Libyans.

The worst that can happen from that mishap, according to the IAEA chief, is a terrorist group could assemble some TNT and radioactive waste and manufacture a dirty bomb.

I suggest more concern be focused around the coming of the Second Internet War.

(Time Magazine reported about the First Internet War in October 2001 as the domino effect of 9/11; though others consider the April 2007 Russian attack on Estonia’s infrastructure as more damaging for a country where 95% of banking is performed electronically, where every municipality is mandated by national law to run an internet cafe, and where parliamentarian elections were held online.)

Johnny Ryan of the Dublin-based Institute of European and International Affairs authored an eye-opening piece of commentary in last winter’s issue of NATO Review about the developing security threat of iWar — which he describes as a form of electronic warfare that can be waged by individuals or corporations to “target the consumer internet infrastructure, such as the websites providing access to online services.”

This form of warfare’s potency will grow as economies, governments, and communities close the so-called “digital divide.” Those embracing the internet most will be increasingly vulnerable to iWar attacks…

If you think back to 9/11 when the South Tower of the World Trade Center was hit, a telecommunications structure at 25 Broadway suffered a loss of power. By itself, the power loss was insignificant but it caused a 1% drop in internet server activity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Andy Ogielski and Jim Cowie of Renesys Corporation, in their March 2002 presentation on 9/11 internet routing behavior to the National Research Council, concluded:

Geographic concentration of peering facilities and of certain transatlantic and transcontinental cable routes implies that a moderate number of carefully targeted localized events will likely cause a significant loss of global routing capabilities, and a fragmentation of the global internet into disconnected components.

In other words, if you adhere to the words of Johnny Ryan and the Renesys researchers, the next Internet War won’t be waged with armorment and missiles but with targeted computer attacks by electronic terrorists who could be anyone and anywhere in the world.

If you use social networking services, it’s fair to assume you could be indirectly targeted, say, by iWarriors targeting the destruction of Facebook’s servers.

We can be thankful that the Comprehensive Political Guidance adopted by NATO member states in November 2006 includes “the ability to protect information systems of critical importance to the Alliance against cyber attacks,” but Pentagon advisor John Arquilla suggests we might want to fancy a different route and one that goes to the heart of the DoD.

Arquilla, a teacher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., was interviewed in MIT’s Technology Review in March 2006 and cited the U.S. Department of Defense overseeing daily expenses of $1.25 billion, a statistic that is probably higher today.

Over this past quarter-century, we’ve reinforced an old industrial-policy military with hardware that makes increasingly less sense, spending most on things that provide the least return.”

…Since we’re spending so much on military affairs, maybe some of that should be directed towards technologies that will break our opponents’ communications. In World War II, there was an investment in creating the first high-performance computers, for that very purpose. Today, it may be an investment in creating the most effective quantum computing or figuring out how to structure the vast ocean of data that masks the movements of al-Qaeda on the Net and on the Web.

My inspiration for this post stems from a recent Current TV commentary on whether Americans should continue to live with a fear of another 9/11, or if we’ve moved on:

“War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory,” said French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

I suggest that war as we know it today could collectively be construed as version 1.0.

With the rise of online communities and Internet for Dummies books enabling anyone to surf the information superhighway at lightning speeds and do pretty much anything online with near-anonymity, perhaps Clemenceau’s statement comes true with repetitive denial of service attacks as the next generation of warfare, or War 2.0.

The remaining question in my mind is who strikes first and will we be ready?

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Tagged as: military, security

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