IQ2’s blurb:

It could be the greatest strategic irony of the last twenty years: the American lead in digital technologies – upon which our financial, communications and defense systems are built, and on which they depend – may also represent a serious American Achilles heel. The sophistication of our mobile phone networks, of the GPS system that guides air traffic, even of the networked command-and-control that drives our power grids, may be without rival. But it also provides one great big and sprawling target to enemies determined to discover the choke points that can cripple us in a time of war.

At least that’s the scenario as described in various, and increasingly alarmed media accounts, especially in the wake of incidents like the hacking of Google last year, by digital assailants often described (without clear confirmation) as being based in China. It’s indeed alarming, to contemplate fighting the next war with both hands tied behind our backs because a canny enemy figured out how to shut us down electronically.

Alarming – but possibly, also, alarmist? Can we really be that vulnerable? Is our digital undergirding really that exposed, especially given that the Internet itself – the foundation of all this critical connectedness – was itself initially developed as a military undertaking? Even if our enemies – state enemies or terrorists – manage to cause damage in one corner of American cyberspace, don’t we have enough redundancy built in to protect us? As one technology writer has put it, this is one of those topics where the internet press likes to get worked up into a lot of “heavy breathing.”

So which is it? Are we at existential risk in the event of a well coordinated cyber attack, and if so, are we taking measures to protect ourselves? Or will the first cyber war be a war we are already positioned not only to survive, but to win?

After that, be sure to check out Fallows’s blog entry on the same subject rounding up reactions to the imagery of a “digital Pearl Harbor” and whether or not that really is a valid concern (a topic about which I’ve previously expressed my own skepticism but is something well worth discussing).

This is not a new criticism. But even if you take out the digital aspect of this new tide in warfare, criticisms against the U.S.’s approach to security operations and conflict still seem to suggest that the American military is slow to adapt. We still have the latest technology, the biggest guns, and thousands of nuclear warheads that can destroy that world several times over. Yet, in the “War Issue” of Foreign Policy magazine released just today, a commentary on the U.S.’s lack of understanding of networking stings:

“…the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What’s missing most of all from the U.S. military’s arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear — for good and ill.

Civil society movements around the world have taken to networking in ways that have done far more to advance the cause of freedom than the U.S. military’s problematic efforts to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan at gunpoint. As for “uncivil society,” terrorists and transnational criminals have embraced connectivity to coordinate global operations in ways that simply were not possible in the past. Before the Internet and the World Wide Web, a terrorist network operating cohesively in more than 60 countries could not have existed. Today, a world full of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs awaits — and not all of them will fail.”

The rest of the issue looks to be an intriguing read on the shifting tides in modern war. But perhaps even this one critique is myopic still. Unrestricted Warfare, a 1999 best-selling book in China and a heavy influence on the People’s Liberation Army, advocated this approach to war in the modern age:

“War which has undergone the changes of modern technology and the market system will be launched even more in atypical forms. In other words, while we are seeing a relative reduction in military violence, at the same time we definitely are seeing an increase in political, economic, and technological violence. However, regardless of the form the violence takes, war is war, and a change in the external appearance does not keep any war from abiding by the principles of war.

If we acknowledge that the new principles of war are no longer ‘using armed force to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will,’ but rather are ‘using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.’”

Perhaps this is what we really should be preparing for.

Still, it’s difficult to overstate the significance of this decision, especially given the morally murky nature of most relationships between Chinese authorities and major Internet players that has served as the status quo over the last decade. Will it have an impact on free speech in China? Probably not much. But Google has taken a stance, which only makes it easier for other companies to start doing the same.

But the flurry of analysis and news reports on the issue has only briefly touched on what I consider to be the larger problem underneath all this: China’s growing prowess in the art of the cyberattack. I’ve expressed my skepticism of doom-and-gloom scenarios of cyberattacks bringing down electrical grids and water supplies before, but breaches of privacy, cyber espionage, and denial-of-service attacks are common and effective. Google’s public statement released on Tuesday describes the reach of the attacks that led up to their decision to reconsider working in China:

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses—including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors—have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant US authorities.

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective. Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

Reports have surfaced that Adobe, Northrop Grumman, and Yahoo could have been other victims of similar security breaches as well.

True, there is no hard evidence to prove that these recent attacks were caused by Chinese governmental authorities themselves (although nobody is shy in suspecting as much). Concerns over China’s increasing expertise in cyberattacks – especially in probing other countries’ networks – is not new. Last October, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission released a report entitled “Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation.” Part of the report notes:

General James Cartwright, while serving as the Combatant Commander of US Strategic Command, testified before a Congressional commission that China is actively engaging in cyber reconnaissance by probing the computer networks of U.S.
government agencies as well as private companies. He further noted that the intelligence collected from these computer reconnaissance campaigns can be used for myriad purposes, including identifying weak points in the networks, understanding how leaders in the United States think, discovering the communication patterns of American government agencies and private companies, and attaining valuable information stored throughout the networks.

A review of the scale, focus, and complexity of the overall campaign directed against the United States and, increasingly, a host of other countries around the world strongly suggest that these operations are state-sponsored or supported.

The report goes on to detail the level of sophistication reached by the PLA’s efforts to build their information networks and exploit that of others.

Simply put, China’s use of cyber attacks has reached such a problematic point that even a major company like Google sits up and sounds the alarm to the point of threatening to pull out entirely. The silent discomfort between U.S. and China over the consistent probing of American networks may finally break into vocal protest.

Through most of 2005 and 2006, the Department of Homeland Security flew a Predator drone over the U.S.-Mexico border. The robot border-cop helped arrest 2,309 people and seize seven tons of marijuana.

In 2008, DHS presented plans to Congress to buy eighteen drone planes to patrol the U.S. broder. Of course, all realize that the drones are actually focused on stopping a different type of border crosser than al-Qaeda agents — illegal immigrants. “But the acceptability of using these systems for border surveillance has increased dramatically since terrorism became such a real, in-our-backyard threat,” says Cyndi Wegerbauer of General Atomics, which sold the Predator drone to the Border patrol.

Indeed, the war to defend against would-be immigrants, robots have also gone to work not only for the government, but also for the private border patrols, or “militias,” as some have called themselves. One example is the “Border Hawk” drones serving with the American Border Patrol, a private organization operating in Cochise County, Arizona.

…[The] group’s technology is twenty-first century. They operate three drones that carry video and infrared cameras. The drones are launched by radio control and then automatically fly a patrol pattern using GPS, staying at four hundred feet, just below what the government requires for certification. While in the air, they search out any illegal immigrants crossing the border and record the images to TiVo for playback and review. The group doesn’t arrest the illegal aliens themselves, but passes on the information to the United States Border Patrol as well as loads its robots’ footage onto the Internet using a satellite connection, or, as the group describes, “broadcasting the invasion live on the internet.”

And today, the Department of Homeland Security announced the expansion of its drone program in surveillance and patrol of the U.S.-Mexico border. These new drones will survey maritime smuggling and illegal drug trafficking and will employ special wide-ranging radar to scan the seas. In January, DHS will test out a drone over the Caribbean off the Florida coast, and there are plans to launch a second one over the Gulf of Mexico by the summer of 2010.

The idea of having a machine that is more often used in the battlefield in Pakistan and Afghanistan in a civilian environment is unsettling, to say the least – not to mention the hefty $13.5 million bill that comes with its services. But the success of the land drones currently in use at the border has Homeland Security officials ecstatic and willing to explore future possibilities. And despite the ominous name and affiliation with a chaotic war abroad, the drones don’t carry any weapons and serve primarily as a monitoring tool.

Still, it’s unnerving to come to grips with the fact that somewhere along the road, humans and international relations entered the future. Three days ago, it was reported that the CIA would expand the drone program in Pakistan – a controversial move, since the program has been sharply criticized for killing innocent civilians in addition to military targets. Robotics technology alarmed us when it entered the battlefield – and it’s a topic that still remains somewhat taboo for officials – but now that both its military and  civilian roles are expanding as well, how will we begin to reassess our relationship with technology in international affairs? As P.W. Singer reminded us in the New York Times, “We’re talking about a technology that’s not going away.” The technology will only become better, faster, more efficient, and more durable, and will wheedle its way further into transnational crime, law enforcement, terrorism and counter-terrorism. We’ll keep a lookout, of course. But as always, we will not realize the extent of the changes until they are already fully upon us.

Cyber warfare is a fascinating topic, mainly because it’s new, mysterious, and potentially could inflict damage comparable to that of a nuclear weapon. Few need to be reminded of the security threats that our increasing inter-connectedness exposes us to on a daily basis: online fraud, identity theft, invasions of privacy, accidentally revealing embarrassing music tastes on Facebook, the list goes on. And because of the nature of the Internet, all of these criminal activities operate internationally, and often in complex yet organized rings. But more sinister cyber attacks have cropped up in recent years — take Estonia’s three-week outage by a denial-of-service attack in 2007. Hackers targeted several government and commercial websites during a conflict between Estonia and Russia, at times “vandalizing” sites with images or altered text. The commercial transactions lost by the DDoS attacks resulted in millions of dollars worth of economic damage.

Denial-of-service attacks are fairly common, and have been a frequent tool in political and international conflicts. DDoS attacks were also used in the conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia, and in various skirmishes between Israeli and Palestinian groups.

Cyber warfare is becoming an increasingly attractive tool for the tech-savvy and the aggravated, no doubt. Hacking is a huge problem, and so is privacy and security. The more problematic feature for me is when the discussion turns to an end-of-the-world scenario — namely, if cyber attacks are used to bring down a city’s power grid, or water system. From the 60 Minutes report:

“Do we believe that there are, the governments have planted code in the power grid?” Kroft asked.

“Steve, I would be shocked if we were in a situation where tools and capabilities and techniques have not been left in U.S. computer and information systems,” McConnell said.

Of all the critical components in the U.S. infrastructure, the power grid is one of the most vulnerable to cyber attack. The U.S. government has control of its own computers and those of the military. The power grid, which is run and regulated by private utilities, is unbeholden to government security decrees.

The idea of a group of angry yet sophisticated acne-laden teenagers (after all, many of today’s modern hackers are teenage boys) clicking away to bring down an entire power grid is terrifying, to say the least. But how realistic is it? The problem is that few of us are technologically sound enough to understand both the possibilities of hacking and the security design of something like a power grid, leaving us only to trust a handful of “experts” in news stories. Will the cyber warfare discussion evolve into a Cold War-esque nuclear scare as it becomes more and more of a possibility? Surely we have learned by now that fear can’t take priority over hard, verifiable facts. So before we all start doing safety drills under our desks, let’s dig for more information first.

We were left aching, lying in a street in Timba, a woman approached, ‘What has happened?’… ‘A kidnapping,’ I managed to say. We cried in each others arms in the middle of the sidewalk, thinking about Teo, for God’s sake how am I going to explain all these bruises. How am I going to tell him that we live in a country where this can happen, how will I look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her opinions in kilobytes, has been beaten up on a public street. How to describe the despotic faces of those who forced us into that car, their enjoyment that I could see as they beat us, their lifting my skirt as they dragged me half naked to the car.

Read the rest at Global Voices Online.

Personally speaking, it’s a disappointing result – particularly given that San Francisco, arguably the most gay-friendly city in the country, is the place I call home. But it’s a reminder that there is still much fighting to be done not just for marriage equality, but for the protection and human rights of the LGBT community worldwide.

Reports of gay men being systematically killed and tortured by militia groups in Iraq began surfacing earlier this year – gritty, gruesome accounts of murders and kidnappings without so much as a flinch from authorities. The Ugandan parliament received a bill two weeks ago that would criminalize any acts of homosexuality with life imprisonment or the death penalty. Global Voices Online has documented a scamming trend in Ghana where groups set up fake dating websites targeted towards gays and then extort their unsuspecting victims for money under threat of arrest.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. It’s true that LGBT rights have come a phenomenally long way in recent years. India decriminalized homosexuality by overturning a 148-year-old ban; President Obama recently signed a bill declaring violence against gays a hate crime; South Africa has passed landmark legislation allowing gay marriage (although it has not been without loud opposition). Yet still, the mere existence of homosexuality, let alone the thought of legalizing gay marriage, has wrought so much deeply-rooted fear in so many societies that the thought of achieving full equality seems both a Herculean task and a distant ideal.

But attitudes are undeniably shifting, and perhaps as is the case with America, global tolerance will rise as the younger generation takes over. Perhaps LGBT rights will even be enshrined in international law. But how long can we afford to wait? How much more violence and denial of equal treatment will the LGBT community have to withstand until their rights are finally recognized?