IP: Cyberwar: Proper Vigilance Or Paranoia?

["Vladimir Z. Nuri" <vznuri@netcom.com>]

From: believer@telepath.com
Subject: IP: Cyberwar: Proper Vigilance Or Paranoia?
Date: Tue, 06 Oct 1998 06:16:19 -0500
To: believer@telepath.com

Source:  ZDNet
http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/printhigh/100598/cover/chapter1.html

Cyberwar: Proper Vigilance Or Paranoia?

 By Will Rodger

The last war was on land, air and
sea. The next one may be on
your computer. Armed with
reams of data showing dramatic
increases in computer crime since
1995, a wide-ranging but
little-noticed federal working
group is moving swiftly to try to
 knit together a private and public partnership against
 armies of hackers, government spies and terrorist agents
 that could make cyberspace unsafe for democracy. 

 The fear: that no part of the industrialized world is safe
 from digital disaster. Successful attacks on power grids,
 hospitals, banks, farms, factories and railroad switches
 could plunge a target nation into chaos and dysfunction. 

 Administration officials say this is no joke, ticking off
 threats already encountered: 

A 19-year-old Israeli hacker, known as the
Analyzer, and two California teenagers successfully
penetrate U.S. Department of Defense computers in
February, setting off fears that their intrusions are
related to U.S. troop buildups against Iraq. 

Russian hacker Vladimir Levin breaks into Citibank
systems and steals $12 million in 1994. He escapes
arrest for one year, only to be brought to justice as
he gets off a flight to London and walks into the
arms of Interpol. 

A study by network security specialist Dan Farmer
that shows more than 60 percent of 1,700
high-profile Web sites - many run by banks - can be
broken into or destroyed using a program he
designed to probe for weaknesses no system
administrator should allow in the first place. 

 At the center of the U.S.' attempts to create a
 cyberdefense structure is the Critical Infrastructure
 Coordination Group, an assembly of cabinet
 undersecretaries and other senior officials sworn to work
 with the FBI and American business to protect a society
 that now depends on a safe, free flow of bits and bytes.
 But even as the defense structure emerges, civil
 libertarians, industry executives and even administration
 insiders worry about how well the Clinton administration or
 its successors can steer between protecting against all
 forms of disruption on one hand and creating a police state
 on the other. 

 Fears that police agencies will use the threat to gain
 unprecedented power "reflect a misunderstanding of what
 we're all about and what the administration is all about,"
 said Michael Vatis, director of the National Infrastructure
 Protection Center (NIPC) at the FBI. "We are structured
 as a real partnership [between government and free
 enterprise]. It's our own intention to bring people on board
 from the private sector. We all say the same thing." 

 But James Adams, former chief executive officer of United
 Press International and head of the newly formed
 Infrastructure Defense Inc. consultancy, said government
 must surrender more power first. "I don't think the
 government can any longer say we know what's good for
 you and we're going to take care of it. The government is
 becoming increasingly irrelevant. I'm not arguing that's a
 good thing or a bad thing - it's simply a fact." 

 Either way, bitter, seemingly endless disputes between the
 administration and the people whose cooperation it needs
 already have tainted the process of developing a national
 approach to protecting critical information assets, both
 sides said. A five-year battle over use and export of
 data-scrambling technologies crucial to data security, for
 instance, has alienated much of the computer industry. FBI
 demands that telephone companies spend hundreds of
 millions of dollars to make wiretaps easier to perform,
 meanwhile, have led to charges of betrayal by phone
 companies that claim they were promised more
 compensation than they're getting, and civil libertarians who
 say the new proposals invite abuse by rogue police. 

 As a result, what should be a cooperative effort to secure
 the nation from outside attacks threatens to bog down in a
 morass of mistrust and stony silence. 

 "Our members are scared to death of this whole program,"
 a Washington association executive said, insisting on
 anonymity. "You've got the FBI and the National Security
 Agency pushing this thing. These guys are spies. Then there
 are these 'private sector' groups springing up to coordinate
 'information sharing' about how different companies have
 these huge holes in their networks. Some of them are
 headed by ex-Defense Department people. The whole
 thing makes us paranoid." 

 Worse, still, the lobbyist said: The nation's chief computer
 security organization - the secretive, estimated
 50,000-employee National Security Agency (NSA) - is
 the same one responsible for wiretapping and signal
 interception everywhere outside the U.S. As long as the
 world's biggest Big Brother has a major role to play,
 business may be gun-shy of the program. 
-----------------------
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is
distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
-----------------------




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