Obama's Challenge: Cyberwar on Terrorists

Invisible armies of hackers are threatening the United States, and Barack Obama reacts by launching a flamboyant cybernetic security plan. The White House will get its own cyber security coordinator who’s going to team up with the president in the West Wing to decide on initiatives that will “Protect our nation’s critical cyber infrastructure while at the same time adhering to the rule of law and safeguarding privacy rights and civil liberties,” which Obama explained in the East Room. The Pentagon will get its own cybernetic war room lead by a four-star general based in the top secret National Security Agency headquarters. The cyber czar will be located in the White House’s digital war room. The Pentagon will have to protect America from three kinds of more and more frequent intrusions: attacks from hostile entities, espionage and hackers’ raids.

In April, the “Wall Street Journal” revealed the blitz with which hostile elements managed to enter the electronic system, leaving behind killer software that’s ready to explode, blinding the whole nation. Obama revealed yesterday that things happened in 2008 that were even worse: invisible enemies able to overcome the Pentagon’s defenses, poisoning thousands of military computers and forcing commands to reshape its use. “What isn’t widely known is that during the general election hackers managed to penetrate our computer systems,” added the president, “And we worked closely with the CIA — with the FBI and the Secret Service and hired security consultants to restore the security of our systems.”

The president points out three examples of cyber security dangers: al-Qaeda, which has the known aim of destroying vital centers of the USA, terrorist cells like the ones that attacked Mumbai using voice messages via the web and the Georgian precedent: coincidentally with the Russian invasion, Georgia was the victim of an attack so strong that NATO was compelled to coin it “iWar.” The first two cases are just new versions of the terrorist menace; the third one opens up a window on what military documents certified in the recent Internet attacks against USA: suspicion falls on Russia and China, since their sites work as a springboard for the most aggressive and talented hackers and spies. On March 28th, a Chinese server started a blitz against governments and private companies in 103 Countries, including the United States, and in previous years, Chinese and Russian networks classified such attacks as “Titan Rain” and “Moonlight Maze.” Suspicions about Russia are fueled by the cybernetic aggression launched in May 2007 against the government, parliament, banks and newspapers of Estonia with a technique very similar to the one used in the iWar against Georgia. Beijing and Moscow always brush back such accusations, aware of the impossibility of tracing the origin of a web attack with any certainty; this feature of invisibility is the reason why Obama decided to protect “the nation that invented the Internet, that launched an information revolution, that transformed the world — But we need to remember: We’re only at the beginning.” In other words, future wars could be online, and it is time to get ready to fight them.