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An article in the Washington Post today about the Russian government bolstering the influence of state-sponsored websites got me thinking about whether or not I am going to include this sort of thing in my paper on Cyberpower.

The article mentions the Orange Revolution in Ukraine as the foundation for Putin’s skepticism of the thought of an unregulated Internet in Russia. It says:

Some Russian Internet experts say a turning point came in 2004, when blogs and uncensored online publications helped drive a popular uprising in Ukraine after a pro-Moscow candidate was declared the winner of a presidential election. Days of street protests in the capital, Kiev, led to a new vote that brought a pro-Western politician into the presidency.

Apparently the Kremlin is thinking of building a small army of pro-Putin (soon to be simply “pro-Regime”) bloggers ready to wage a propaganda war against any surge in the opposition. The internet has already shown its efficacy in stirring dissent earlier this year, when internet resources were used to mobilize a march that led to the arrest of Garry Kasparov, a leading opposition figure.

Is this cyberpower? Surely, it is using cyberspace as an instrument of national power, but I am not yet sure if it qualifies. More on this topic and others later this week.

Posted by Michael at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s an interesting post from the NY Times “Bits” blog about net neutrality. Apparently, the future is now. The text of the entry (its not very long), is pasted below.

October 25, 2007, 12:41 am Deutsche Telekom Prepares for Two-Tier Internet
By Saul Hansell

Tags: Deutsche Telecom, net neutrality

In the discussion about net neutrality, the phone and cable companies in the United States never said they would charge some companies more money for better access to their networks. They just said they don’t want rules to prevent them from doing so.
Dave Burstein, the editor of DSL Prime, a telecom newsletter, just came back from Europe where he found that Deutsche Telekom is preparing to charge a fee to companies that want to deliver video to its Internet service customers. In a speech at the Broadband World Forum Europe, Wolfgang Schmitz, a senior executive vice president of Deutsche Telecom, said the phone company’s DSL network, which is rated for speeds much faster than most networks in the United States, can’t handle the demands of Internet video. Mr. Burstein wrote of Mr. Schmitz:
He wants the Bertelsmanns, Burdas and Googles of the world to pay Deutsche Telekom to deliver voice and video to German customers. DT doesn’t have cable competition and the regulator may let them get away with it.
Mr. Burstein has long argued that phone companies can, and should, charge far less than they do for far faster broadband service. He argues that Deutsche Telekom is using a much too complex network architecture and that other more simple approaches will be able to do more for less.
Regardless of that, if Deutsche Telekom does indeed start charging providers of video on its network, it will be an important fact as regulators in the United States look at net neutrality policy.
The rather technical article from DSL Prime is here. You have to scroll down through several other articles to get to it.

In the comments section below the entry, one of the commentors says that Google should respond by blocking all access to its sites and services through the DT network, implying that Google’s content monopoly will force the DT’s monoply to concede. I’m not sure which way I fall on the issue, but it will be interesting to see who backs down, and what precedent this sets for service in the US.

Posted by Michael at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the next few entries, I am going to examine how various US government agencies address the issue of cyberpower, starting with DHS. In Eric Lausten’s blog, he breaks down the National Strategy for Homeland Security which was issued earlier this month. This topic is closely reverent to my paper as well as Eric’s.

The only direct reference to cyberspace in the NSHS is a side bar titled “Cyber Security: A special Consideration on page 28. It reads:

Many of the Nation’s essential and emergency services, as well as our critical infrastructure, rely on the uninterrupted use of the Internet and the communications systems, data, monitoring, and control systems that comprise our cyber infrastructure. A cyber attack could be debilitating to our highly interdependent CI/KR and ultimately to our economy and national security.

A variety of actors threaten the security of our cyber infrastructure. Terrorists increasingly exploit the Internet to communicate, proselytize, recruit, raise funds, and conduct training and operational planning. Hostile foreign governments have the technical and financial resources to support advanced network exploitation and launch attacks on the informational and physical elements of our cyber infrastructure. Criminal hackers threaten our Nation’s economy and the personal information of our citizens, and they also could pose a threat if wittingly or unwittingly recruited by foreign intelligence or terrorist groups. Our cyber networks also remain vulnerable to natural disasters.

In order to secure our cyber infrastructure against these man-made and natural threats, our Federal, State, and local governments, along with the private sector, are working together to prevent damage to, and the unauthorized use and exploitation of, our cyber systems. We also are enhancing our ability and procedures to respond in the event of an attack or major cyber incident. The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace and the NIPP’s Cross-Sector Cyber Security plan are guiding our efforts.

In a sidebar on the previous page, the document lays out the “17 sectors of critical infrastructure”. Reading through this list with the intent of finding references to cyberspace in the document, I identified 9 of the 17 sectors as those affected by the Internet. With such a high proportion of the sectors involved, I expected the document to address cyberspace in a more comprehensive manner.

At the same time, I think DHS has a good concept of its role as an instrument of cyberpower. Homeland Security is essentially playing defense when it comes to cyberpower, using its resources to protect cyber infrastructure targets and identify vulnerabilities. I find it curious that the sidebar’s sentence about terrorism talks about the “command and control” and “information operations” aspects of terrorism and cyberspace. I see the kinds of actions taken to counter these two kinds of cyberspace operations more in the purview of the justice or Defense Departments. Over the next few entries, I will seek to see if the relevant documents from those organizations meet my expectations in that regard.

Posted by Michael at 06:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, I wrote about the reasons cyberpower is needed as an instrument of national strategy. As part of that analysis, I briefly touched on vulnerabilities and asymmetric threats posed by actors in cyberspace. This week, I focus on the threats, breaking them down into a few different categories and providing further structure for the question that I will be answering in my paper.

The threats that exist in cyberspace to US civil, commercial and government assets can be broken down in two fundamental ways. The first is by the source of the attack. There are important legal and political differences between malefactory cyberspace operations committed by individuals and those committed by states. The former is treated as crime and, generally speaking, I think it will continued o be handled in the US by law enforcement agencies like the FBI. The latter, because it is dealing with the power of foreign governments, is probably more in the purview of the military. The obvious and important exception to this rule is terrorism, which, uniquely, must be addressed by a combination of law enforcement and military agencies.

With regard to cyberpower, this dichotomy would be extremely useful, as it is in the physical world. However, the problem with cyberspace is that the sources and actors involved in a specific cyberspace operation are extremely difficult to identify and even if it is possible to identify them, difficult to reliably prove the source of an attack. Because of this, the perhaps useful division of responsibilities between law enforcement and military requirements is a false one. Instead, in my cyberpower paper, I will divide offensive cyberspace operations into three different categories, based on the type of operations – command and control, direct attack and information operations.

Command and Control - When talking about command and control, most of the literature I have encountered has been devoted to terrorism in cyberspace. Terrorist and other kinds of groups use the Internet and Internet technologies to coordinate operations, provide training and recruit new adherents. They are able to do all of these while keeping the individual actors dispersed across the entire globe.

Direct Attack – I have done the least research in this area. However, I know that direct attack operations include nefarious things like computer viruses, worms and “volume attacks” as well more innocuous actions like phishing and information solicitation.

Information Operations – This category includes propaganda as well as using the Internet for other kinds of self-promotion and “getting the message out.” Anti-government and terrorist groups have been highly effective in using cyberspace to promote themselves and challenge the government, especially when it manipulates of hides facts.

These three general categories of cyberspace threats each require different strategies in order to combat against them. The wide range of operations that an adversary can conduct seems to imply that a strategy for cyberpower would have to include a similarly wide range of capabilities and span civilian and military organizations, if not the commercial sector as well.

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Throughout our course so far this semester, we have discussed at length the importance of the Internet. Internet commerce accounts for billions of dollars of the US economy, is essential to the US financial sector, and is used by the government to accomplish a wide variety of critical tasks. Google and Yahoo! alone, two of the largest US Internet firms, accounted for a combined $17 billion in revenue in 2006. The Internet industry includes all major media outlets, online marketers and retailers like eBay and Amazon, as well as conventional retailers with online components like Wal-Mart and Target. The government at the state, local and, federal level, uses the internet to provide a variety of citizen services like e-file tax returns and other documents processing, as well as providing critical information on a wide range of topics. Overall, these two sectors, excluding the social sphere for the time being, represent a huge portion of day-to-day American life. As such, the instruments of national power must protect it, as American assets on land and sea are today.

The importance of cyberspace is a necessary, but not sufficient reason to develop cyberpower capabilities. In addition to being critically important to the economy and government of the United States, American internet assets are also extremely vulnerable to domestic and, increasingly, foreign attack. In Dennis Nishi, “Protect the Digital Frontier”, the author claims that online criminals cost US organizations (citizen and government) $11.6 billion a year. Additionally, he says, “foreign hackers regularly breaking into US government Web site sand try to steal top-secret information. [In 2006,] hackers operating from China successfully disabled the Web site of the US Commerce Department.” Past attacks have been by individuals or small groups, possibly with some limited state support. However, if future attacks on US cyberspace assets were fully sponsored or conducted by a foreign government, it is hard to imagine what the effects would be. What is known is that, in the current state of affairs, American cyberspace assets are vulnerable.

Related to this point about vulnerability is the fact that cyberspace, the Internet especially, tends to favor these small groups or individuals against the larger organizations that they attack. This creates an asymmetric advantage that must be addressed by any current or future cyberspace capability. Next week, I will write more about the kinds of threats posed, but for this week the important point to make is that cyberspace as a strategic medium seems to decisively favor the offense. Although millions are invested in protecting against hacker attacks, it regularly seems that new viruses, worms and techniques arise that give the attackers access to restricted information. It is less clear that the defenders have a fully developed means of active defense, going after those offenders before they can strike and expose vulnerabilities.

Posted by Michael at 05:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Any fully developed concept of cyberpower requires a firm definition of the boundaries of cyberspace. While this issue might seem simple on first glance, it is actually a lot deeper than one might expect…

After the Second World War was over, the US military underwent a massive reorganization, culminating in the National Security Act of 1947. The Act merged the departments of Army and Navy into the National Military establishment (later, the Department of Defense) as service branches and created a third branch, the United States Air Force. This radical reorganization was caused, in part, by a recognition by civilian stakeholders that airpower had assumed a co-equal role with the Army and Navy in exercising American military power. Similarly, at the start of the Bush administration, the Rumsfeld Space Commission report called for the establishment of a separate “space force.”
These two events are linked in that they sought to draw a a demarcation around a certain area of operations for a particular kind of force. Before the Air Force was created, it was a subordinate, yet generally autonomous command under the Department of the Army. During this period, leading up to WWII, the Army Air Forces were considered a kind of long range artillery, along with the requisite reconnaissance and force protection units, and were thought of in those terms. The Air Force was created because that concept of operations no longer applied after the lessons of WWII were absorbed.
Nowadays, the debate over to create a separate “space force” – separate, that is, from the US Air Force – revolves around a sub-debate about the spacepower concept of operations, namely the concept of “aerospace.” Up until the mid 1990s, the Air Froce proclaimed that there was one “seamless media” extending from the surface of the Earth into the far reaches of the universe, all of which was in the area of responsibility of the Air Froce. The Air Force also has claimed, more recently, that cyberspace “exists” in this area.
In order to develop a true concept and strategy for cyberpower, as I will attempt to do in my term paper, the AOR of “cyberspace” will need to be clearly defined. Cyberspace appears to be a rather fuzzy concept. Does it just include the internet? If not, does it include all electronically transmitted data? Clearly, the answer lies somewhere in between. This debate will fuel another, the definition of cyberspace operations. Clearly, a cyberspace operation would include using a computer virus to attack a server farm or disable a satellite. But would it also be considered a cyberspace operation to bomb a server farm or physically attack a satellite? Sure, there are physical effects of such an action, but what if the purpose of the operation were to achieve effects in “cybrspace.”

If that’s the case – maybe “cyberpower” is more expansive than it seems. Futhermore, if those two examples above are “cyberpower operations”, then maybe the Air Force is right to take over the cyberpower mission.

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