Richard Clarke: ‘Cyber War Has Already Begun’
“Cyber war has already begun,” writes Richard Clarke in his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. He says “nations are already preparing the battlefield” in cyberspace by “hacking into each other’s networks and infrastructures, laying in trapdoors and logic bombs — now, in peacetime. This ongoing nature of cyberwar, the blurring of peace and war, adds a dangerous new dimension of instability.”
Clarke, a former presidential adviser with decades of experience in nuclear arms control and espionage during the Cold War, compares that era with today’s secretive world of military cyber commands. He writes that militaries today are engineering attacks through the Internet, such as orchestrating DDoS attacks and creating dangerous Trojans that could steal or alter data and are extremely difficult to trace back to their source.
He writes that cyber war is not a victimless or orderly new sort of war. Neither is it some kind of secret weapon our government should keep hidden from the public, because the civilian population of the United States and the privately owned corporations that own and run our key national infrastructure are likely to suffer most in a cyber war. In fact, to improve our weak defensive posture in cyberspace, he says the United States should make radical changes, like putting methods in place to conscript ISPs into defending infrastructure in the event of cyber attack.
Clarke says a deterrence doctrine like the Cold War-era concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, “does not work well in cyber war.” He writes, “cyber war is shrouded in such government secrecy that it makes the Cold War look like a time of openness and transparency.”
Even the United States, the nation that invented the new technology and the tactics to employ it, may not be the victor if its own military is mired in the ways of the past, writes Clarke. He says America’s military has been overpowered by inertia and overconfident in weapons systems they have come to depend on.
As the country that first developed and deployed the Internet, cyber war places the United States in greater peril any other nation. Instead of presenting an alternative to conventional war, could actually increase the prevalence and frequency of conventional combat. He writes: “If we could put this genie back in the bottle, we should—but we can’t. Therefore, we need to understand what cyber war is, to learn how and why it works, to analyze its risks, to prepare for it, and to think about how to control it.”
You can read an excerpt of the book here.
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