Way back in 2012 I gave a presentation called “Big Data’s Fourth V“, which really was meant to kick-off my “new” book about how hard data integrity is in the emerging technology space.
In it I described how the mobile phone is the modern battlespace, using charts like rapid adoption of technology in the island of Vanuatu makes it kind of a prime target for attempting coup through disinformation.
Don’t ask me why Vanuatu. Long story.
No kidding, in 2012 I was speaking about disinformation being the problem with big data on giant platforms and predicting political destabilization of countries with rapid tech adoption lines.
And by 2014 I was going inside the big data platforms, visiting HQ, observing bad habits and warning staff to get on top of things (move beyond focus on confidentiality alone) or they would accelerate harms dangerously.
Obviously my wolf-crying didn’t go far… perhaps I should have just finished the book instead but I ended up becoming determined to deliver answers to my own warnings.
The “so what do we do about it” has always been the most fascinating aspect of my book writing journey. It would not have been satisfying to just cry wolf, which seems to be what so many have been doing lately (the wolf does eventually come, so again I’ve tried to spend my time figuring out that eventuality).
This is what was on my mind while reading a new report on Afghanistan
Even though the ANDSF have superior numbers, superior weapons, and aircraft, this balance is generally irrelevant on the information battlefield, one where superior skill in visuals, social media, and narrative will win. As one Afghan officer quipped, “Every Talib has a cell phone, and they are using them more than us.” The fate of the republic may depend upon this battlespace.
Don’t get me wrong. All this kind of stuff was what I studied in the early 1990s, including research on methods going back to the early 1900s (although my focus mainly was 1940-1943, like how Rommel actually sucked).
Rommel was a reckless and impulsive leader who believed a failure to grasp logistics wouldn’t interfere with his aggressive “success” narratives, yet he failed completely against any real force or equal determination.
News on a mobile phone is an obvious next step on a long continuum of disinformation for battle, not something I alone expect to have predicted. Surely others were saying the same as early or earlier than me, I just haven’t seen or met any of them (yet).
Broken chains at the feet of the statue prematurely celebrated liberty from American slavery (e.g. racist Jim Crow laws were starting around the same time it was erected). Source: NPS
Here is an interesting write-up from the National Park Service (NPS), explaining how abolition was central to the monument known today for something different.
The Statue of Liberty would never have been conceived or built if its principal French and American advocates had not been active abolitionists who understood slavery as the cause of the Civil War and its end as the realization of the promise of liberty for all as codified in the Declaration of Independence.
The NPS also writes how symbolism of the statue led to skepticism because America’s racist reality wasn’t rising to the French aspiration of anti-racism.
African Americans rarely used the Statue as a relevant symbol for their struggle – they were reluctant to embrace the symbol of a nation which would not fully include them as citizens. The Statue of Liberty did not help them to gain equality and justice in the truest sense – it was only the beginning.
A NYU historian further explains. A group of French abolitionists June 1865 met in Versailles and…
…talked about the idea of creating some kind of commemorative gift that would recognize the importance of the liberation of the slaves.
Yet by the time the statue was unveiled in 1886 the Supreme Court already had failed to protect liberty.
Just like in France (1802-1848), slavery in America was basically being re-established after abolition and the Civil War continued by other means.
Roll-back of liberation from American tyranny came quickly with racist Jim Crow laws and state-sanctioned domestic terrorism (branded as “America First” under President Wilson’s restart of the KKK in 1915).
An oft-cited reason to stop riding horses in cities was their prodigious output of excrement as a by-product, not to mention disposal of dead and rotting horse carcasses.
Source: Project MUSE
Both of these could have been easily solved problems (Golden Gate Park owes its lush environment to train carloads of manure being dumped on sandy dunes — fertilizer being in high demand for urban better quality of life).
Though no reliable estimate of the amount of horse-excrement collected for park fertilizer exists, the total undoubtedly ran into tens, even hundreds of thousands of tons.
Instead the legged mobility of horses was scrapped in favor of augmentation (legs pushing wheels) with bicycles. A cost model being so much better meant it was more equitable transit, and this opened up markets to more people working in more places… bicycles were en route to a greater future.
Then the “wheelmen” got a bright idea of putting paved roads everywhere to ease legwork (again a problem to be better solved, probably by improving bicycle technology instead) and suddenly giant automated carriages (cars) started taking over and demanding both legged and augmented legs get off the roads.
But instead of composting natural manure and carcasses, automobiles spread toxic disease-inducing chemicals and piles of dangerous waste.
Today we’re back to asking if legs can perform long distance travel, perhaps making the obvious point that cars were a bad idea from the start.
Instead of dumping manure after eating loads of grass, however, these legs drain an unbelievable amount of robotic electricity (which could end up as emissions if we’re not careful).
As energy cost comes down through engineering (like how manure could have been engineered into fertilizer, from a cost to a profit) legs may return as the obvious better way of transit by removing any requirements for nasty roads.
Running 60 miles to work on beaches, through a forest and over mountains sounds a LOT better than sitting in a boring stuffed cage on a boring flat road full of other boring boxes. Here’s a video showing some progress towards that augmented future.
The easy answer is really a semantic one: nothing that can be done in cyber (information technology) is directly comparable to widespread kinetic destruction of military forces.
Once something approaches that level of destructive force, it’s no longer really the domain of cyber. In other words we don’t really call it a voice attack if someone speaks into a microphone instead of turning keys to launch nuclear weapons. As the 1941 book “War on the Short Wave” put it on page 69:
Gunpowder it it is said, was first used as a holiday crackers. Radio in the early days operated to give men pleasure. Both have been turned to use in wars and nations have used broadcasting as an ally of the bomb.
More seriously, the problem lies in the psychological power of the narrative. Despite basic early indicators, the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a “bolt out of the blue” on a major military target.
Their duty done, George, who was new to the unit, took over the oscilloscope for a few minutes of time-killing practice. […] Their device could not tell its operators precisely how many planes the antenna was sensing, or if they were American or military or civilian. But the height of a spike gave a rough indication of the number of aircraft. And this spike did not suggest two or three, but an astonishing number—50 maybe, or even more. “It was the largest group I had ever seen on the oscilloscope,” said Joe.
It was just past 7 in the morning on December 7, 1941 when the US failed to recognize over 300 Japanese planes about to unleash massive devastation on the Navy.
Take now for example a modern nuclear weapon that delivers in less than half an hour a surprise attack using an intercontinental missile.
Such a surprise on the right targets might prevent any kind of counter-strike. That is an apt framing for lightning dropping out of a clear blue sky and zapping capabilities.
As I’ve documented here before, however, it’s been a VERY long road since at least the 1970s telling us that a normative situation of information technology is more like continuous grinding attacks everywhere all the time.
Andrew Freedman writes about this phenomenon as “more like a hill we’re sliding down at ever-increasing speed”.
We can choose to alter course at any time by hitting the brakes…. But the longer we wait, the faster we’ll be traveling, and the more effort it will take to slow down and achieve the cuts that are needed. And we’ve already waited a long time to start pumping the brakes.
Please note, this is NOT to be confused with a slippery slope, which implies there are no brakes and thus is a fallacy.
It’s pretty much the opposite of Pearl Harbor as a narrative — a never-ending thunderous grey downpour leading to increasing rate and scope of failures. There is no bolt from blue, no sudden wake-up event without warning.
Otherwise wouldn’t any event such as this one rise to became a Pearl Harbor?
Eighty percent of email accounts used in the four New York-based US Attorney offices were compromised [by Russian military intelligence].
We’d be talking about tens of thousands of Pearl Harbor events each year (when in reality who even remembers the Code Spaces cloud breach of 2014 instantly putting them out of business). Or let me put it this way: for nearly half the years since Pearl Harbor the US has talked about a Cyber Pearl Harbor.
If anything, 2016 was it and even that was more like a poorly done coup than a destructive bombing preventing counterattack.
My main quibble with my own argument here is the poor quality practices of companies like Uber and Tesla. Nobody needs to be sending intercontinental missiles to America when they can remotely automate widespread carjacking instead.
Take that kind of bad engineering and maliciously route 40,000 cars in an urban center and you’ve got a surprise mass casualty event via information technology vulnerabilities… which sounds an AWFUL lot like a bolt out of the blue when you look at tens of thousands of highly-explosive Teslas being adversarial dive-bombers loitering about stealthily just waiting to happen.
The counterargument to my counterargument is that Tesla has been killing a LOT of people, being less safe after installing fraudulent “autopilot”, and at least 3X more likely than comparable cars to kill its driver. We won’t see a Pearl Harbor even in driverless when Tesla is allowed to continue normalizing devastating crashes and ignore its mounting death tolls.
Anyway, all this debate about the relevance of Pearl Harbor has come up again in another article, which bizarrely claims a negative: that we didn’t see the lack of a cyber Pearl Harbor coming.
Over the past decade, cyber warfare has changed in ways the experts didn’t see coming.
Let me say that again. They’re suggesting we didn’t see a lack of Pearl Harbor attack, when that is exactly what we saw (those predicting a bolt of blue always faced opposition).
I mean their point is just flatly false.
As an expert (at least to some, hi mom!) in both cyber and military history I absolutely saw today’s situation coming and gave numerous very public talks and comments about it.
Hell, (to paraphrase military icons in movies) I even gave a presentation in 2012 dedicated to cyber warfare that predicted a lot of what mass media just started talking about now.
Meh.
The article goes on to say experts didn’t predict that laying networks into repressive regimes would increase repression, yet again that is false. Early reports said exactly that. It wasn’t rocket science.
You deliver into a power vacuum shiny new tools (let’s say a pitchfork, for example) and want to believe optimists that it won’t be used as a weapon or lead to oppression. Because why?
History and political science as a guide told us the opposite would come and that’s exactly what we’ve seen.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
