Cyber War | Op-Ed Fallout

This is the second post of a series examining this week’s theme: Cyber War.

I wrote at length yesterday about retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell’s recent WaPo editorial about Cyber War. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who found a lot to disagree with. The blogosphere has reacted swiftly to Mr. McConnell, and the fallout has been broad and far reaching.

Jay Stanley has a post up over at the Huffington Post about what enacting McConnell’s suggestions might mean. He cuts straight to the point:

Cybersecurity is many things. It is a genuine problem. It is a threat to civil liberties, especially online privacy and anonymity. And, it is also being pushed as the latest reason to keep shoveling new tax dollars and new powers to the NSA and other security agencies — sometimes with almost comical eagerness, as in McConnell’s piece. His op-ed is almost a perfect exhibit in leveraging current events as part of a security-bureaucracy bid for power.

Stanley agrees with my assertions that the power and value of the Internet would be extremely diminished (eliminated?) should it come under the control of people like McConnell:

The Internet has been an amazing engine of freedom, innovation and economic growth precisely because it is not under anyone’s control. Its radical decentralized design has permitted it to flourish through the actions of millions of people acting independently and not under anyone’s control.

What would McConnell’s Internet look like? Stanley writes:

But McConnell’s overwrought declaration of war, with its suggestion that we must mobilize a top-down military campaign, should be seen for what it is — less a rational response to the threat than an ominous security-bureaucracy bid for power. What’s at stake is Americans’ online privacy, anonymity, and whether we allow our security agencies to “re-engineer” the Internet in ways that work for them, not for us.

Wired‘s Threat Level blog went so far as to call McConnell and his OpEd one of the greatest threats to the Internet:

He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.

Wired makes the threat very clear:

Make no mistake, the military industrial complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wet dreams of cyberwarfare. Never shy of extending its power, the military industrial complex wants to turn the internet into yet another venue for an arms race.

As cyber citizens – and if you’re reading this blog, you certainly qualify as a cyber citizen, we must encourage our leadership to think very carefully about what choices we’re making about cyber and how they might impact the way we all (as cyber citizens) live, work, and interact.

As we find ourselves nearly a decade removed from 9/11, we are still thinking in reactionary terms about our national security, finding ourselves simultaneously misdirected and overstretched, succeeding at nothing and seemingly failing at everything. Is this how we want the Internet to be run? The very same Internet that has become arguably the single most important global resource?

I don’t think so.

The rest of this week will focus on ways that we can work towards the (needed) goals of securing the cyber environment while maintaining the integrity of the systems that have given us so much, hold so much potential, and must be preserved regardless of whether or not we’re engaged in a Cyber War.