At the Danger Room, Noah Schachtman writes
This Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry Birds:
For the last year, the Pentagon’s top technologists have been working on a program that will make cyberwarfare relatively easy. It’s called Plan X. And if this demo looks like a videogame or sci-fi movie or a sleek Silicon Valley production, that’s no accident. It was built by the designers behind some of Apple’s most famous computers — with assistance from the illustrators who helped bringTransformers to the silver screen.
Today, destructive cyberattacks — ones that cause servers to fry, radars to go dark, or centrifuges to spin out of control — have been assembled by relatively small teams of hackers. They’re ordered at the highest levels of government. They take months to plan. Their effects can be uncertain, despite all the preparation. (Insiders believe, for example, that the biggest network intrusion in the Pentagon’s history may have been an accidental infection, not a deliberate hack.)
With Plan X, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking to change all that. It wants munitions made of 1s and 0s to be as simple to launch as ones made of metal and explosives. It wants cyberattack stratagems to be as predictable as any war plan can be. It wants to move past the artisanal era of hacking, and turn cyberwarfare into an industrial effort. Across the U.S. government, there are all kinds of projects to develop America’s network offense. None are quite like this.
“Plan X is a program that is specifically working towards building the technology infrastructure that would allow cyber offense to move from the world we’re in today — where it’s a fine, handcrafted capability that requires exquisite authorities to do anything… to a future where cyber is a capability like other weapons,” Darpa director Arati Prabhakar told reporters last month. “A military operator can design and deploy a cyber effect, know what it’s going to accomplish… and take an appropriate level of action.”
But you can’t expect the average officer to be able to understand the logical topology of a global network-of-networks. You can’t expect him to know whether its better to hook a rootkit into a machine’s kernel or its firmware. If cyberwar is going to be routine, Darpa believes, the digital battlefield has to be as easy to navigate as an iPhone. The attacks have to be as easy to launch as an Angry Bird. [...]
Darpa was established by President Dwight Eisenhower more than a half-century ago to prevent another incident of strategic technological surprise, like the Soviet launch of the Sputnik spacecraft. It’s long been the mantra at Darpa that the best way for America to prevent such surprises is to create the leap-ahead technology ourselves. But even inventors can be caught off-guard by what they make. As the Plan X demo ends, I can’t help but wonder who will be the most shocked, eventually, by what we’ve seen on that cyberwar screen.
|
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—Rumsfeld backtracks on WMD claims:
Before the war, Rumsfeld was so sure that Iraq had WMDs, that [he] disregarded CIA evidence to the contrary and formed his own little in-house intelligence agency to buttress the claims.
Now even he has to admit that perhaps he was wrong.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has suggested publicly for the first time that Iraq may have destroyed chemical and biological weapons before the war there, a possibility that senior U.S. officers in Iraq have raised in recent weeks.
Rumsfeld has repeatedly expressed optimism that it is just a matter of time, and of interviewing enough senior Iraqi scientists and former government officials, before military teams uncover the illicit arms that President George W. Bush cited as a major reason for attacking Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein's rule.
While Rumsfeld repeated that assertion Tuesday, he added, "It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict." Major General David Petraeus, commander of the army's 101st Airborne Division, now in northern Iraq, mentioned the same possibility two weeks ago.
Given that WMDs were the administration's primary justification for war (as it made Iraq a clear and imminent danger), is the realization that no WMDs existed mean that all the death in the conflict was for naught? |
Tweet of the Day:
On today's
Kagro in the Morning show: The shifting context of the IRS story. The White House tees up a filibuster fight over appointments to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. That's the court that stood a last century of recess appointments practice on its head, so we dive into that.
Armando joins in discussion of Walter Pincus's article on the Fox News/James Rosen branch of the AP controversy. Also: have the budget battles impacted the National Weather Service, or not? Depends who you ask, and how you ask it. And: the latest in Conservative Crayzee: Unskewed Polls guy says Obama made Nate Silver buy crack from Hitler during Benghazi.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments. Overnight News Digest.