Photo: Reuters/Rick
Wilking
Source: Russia Today
Six years after the White House first started running
amok on the computer networks of its adversaries, US President Barack Obama has
signed off on a top-secret order that finally offers blueprints for the
Pentagon’s cyberwars.
Pres. Obama has autographed an executive order outlining
protocol and procedures for the US military to take in the name of preventing
cyberattacks from foreign countries, the Washington Post reports, once and for
all providing instructions from the Oval Office on how to manage the hush-hush
assaults against opposing nation-states that have all been confirmed by the
White House while at the same time defending America from any possible harm
from abroad.
According to Post’s sources, namely “officials who
have seen the classified document and are not authorized to speak on the
record,” Pres. Obama signed the paperwork in mid-October. Those
authorities explain to the paper that the initiative in question, Presidential
Policy Directive 20, “establishes a broad and strict set of standards to
guide the operations of federal agencies in confronting threats in cyberspace.”
Confronting a threat may sound harmless, but begs to
introduce a chicken-and-the-egg scenario that could have some very serious
implications. The Post describes the directive as being “the most extensive
White House effort to date to wrestle with what constitutes an ‘offensive’ and
a ‘defensive’ action in the rapidly evolving world of cyberwar and
cyberterrorism,” but the ambiguous order may very well allow the US to
continue assaulting the networks of other nations, now with a given go-ahead
from the commander-in-chief. Next in line, the Post says, will be rules of
engagement straight from the Pentagon that will provide guidelines for when to
carry out assaults outside the realm of what is considered ‘American’ in terms
of cyberspace.
“What it does, really for the first time, is it
explicitly talks about how we will use cyber operations,” one senior
administration official tells the paper of the policy directive. “Network
defense is what you’re doing inside your own networks. . . . Cyber operations
is stuff outside that space, and recognizing that you could be doing that for
what might be called defensive purposes.”
When The New York Times published an exposé on the White
House’s so-called Olympics Games program earlier this year, the world became
fully aware for once of America’s involvement in international cyberwar, but
much to the chagrin of Washington. Officials including members of Pres. Obama’s
national security team spoke on condition of anonymity to tell the Times that
his predecessor, then-Pres. George W. Bush, began the program in 2006 to target
Iran’s nuclear facilities and then passed it along to the current
administration to continue under the leadership of the current commander-in-chief.
“From his first months in office,” David Sanger
wrote for the Times, Pres. Obama “secretly ordered increasingly
sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear
enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of
cyberweapons.”
Congress has fought tooth-and-nail in the months since to
plug any leaks that could potentially spill the
beans regarding any further secrets with the potential of effecting national
security, but those efforts appear unsuccessful given this week’s Post report
on Presidential Police Directive 20.
Now take the example of Iran: according to the Post,
Pres. Obama’s signature on last month’s directive means the US now has rules
and regulations when it comes to protecting its own infrastructure from
cyberattack, and can do so by means of launching what appear to be pre-emptive
assaults of their own.
“It should enable people to arrive at more effective
decisions,” a second senior administration official tells the Post.
“In that sense, it’s an enormous step forward.”
That comment echoes US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s
insistence earlier this year that “defense alone
is not enough” in terms of keeping the country safe. But what it also
seems to do is put on the books a presidential policy that equates an
overzealous offense with a solid defense. While the US has cited Iranian hackers as the key players behind a recent attack
on the websites of Capital One Financial Corp. and BB&T Corp.,
two of the biggest names in the American banking industry, the US has done
little — on the record — to reveal any similar assaults from abroad. Instead,
rather, it’s relied on fear-mongering to try and convince the country to accept
a cybersecurity legislation that will assure American’s safety from foreign
hackers, all for the small price of sacrificing their digital-age privacy.
While the Obama White House has failed to acknowledge the
Olympic Games program or any involvement in the Stuxnet or Flames viruses linked
to the initiative, computer researchers in both the US and Russia have tied
Washington to the cripplingly malicious coding. Earlier this month,
California-based Chevron, one of the world’s leaders in the oil sector, went
public with claims that Stuxnet had infected — but not affected — their
computers after the virus was unleashed.
The ability to slow down or speed up centrifuges in
nuclear facilities from thousands of miles away made Stuxnet a virus that had
very substantial powers. Refusing to speak of the Olympic Games program
specifically, former CIA chief Michael Hayden told the Times, “This is the
first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect
physical destruction.”
According to the Post’s latest, though, future assaults by
way of Stuxnet or similar worms could be considered by Washington as defense
mechanisms to make sure Iran doesn’t retaliate for what America has long-been
lashing out with. One source tells the Times that, before last month’s
directive, severing any link between a US-computer and an overseas server by
any means possible would be an act that would put America on the offensive. Now
even a preemptive attack that disconnects other countries could be considered a
defensive ploy according to the president.
“That was seen as something that was
aggressive…particularly by some at the State Department,” one defense
official tells the Post. With the signing of Pres. Obama’s latest order,
though, the paper writes that the directive “effectively enables the
military to act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks on the nation’s web of
government and private computer networks.”
It is thought that, through the directive, any systems
linked even remotely with America’s can be fair game for an assault. Given the
expansion of cloud computing and the ever-expanding interconnection of
communities across the globe on the Web, though, that could essentially enable
Uncle Sam’s cybersquad to get away with a whole new slew of tricks to try and
topple adversaries of any kind that threaten the American way of life. When and
where those actions are necessary, of course, remains another topic of
discussion. Will those orders be signed in secrecy as well, though?
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