Ascension Blog

(Just to let everyone know, I haven’t forgotten about the Infosec/Professional Cooking string – I’ve been both very busy and very sick the past few weeks.  I also don’t want to just put something down and post it.  As the last post, I want to really bring the analogy together and I’d rather hold off a bit and do it right than lose it just before I bring it across the finish line.)

(Oh, and just another quick note on terms – I know that some people out there have an issue with any use of the term “cyber.”  With all the issues out there I think this one is perhaps the most worthless.  Personally I don’t care what we call it but it appears that “cyber” has caught on and therefore I will use it until another word tends to dominate.  Arguments and debates over semantics serve no purpose other than to distract us away from the real issues.  If you really want to debate that then let me know and I’ll start another thread for that.)

After seeing a tip from Bob Gourley on an article over at Government Computer News (GCN) I went over to read it.  Bob, and his blog, CTOVision are great sources to keep abreast of the goings on of the federal government especially from the National Security/Intelligence Community perspective. 

The article, entitled “Cyber threat calls for flexibility in command model, general says” offers great insight into the problem of cyber warfare as well as the general problems that everyone faces with threats from the Internet.  The article is rather short but it brings up a lot of issues that would take a great amount of space to really explore. 

Running the risk of oversimplifying things let me say that the issues that we face with the Internet both from a Cyberwar as well as a Cyberthreat perspective is that it are never static.  Attacks can come from anywhere and most often not directly from an attacker.  A device or network that is safe today won’t necessarily be so tomorrow or even five minutes from now.  Now I’m no military strategist by any stretch of the imagination but to the laymen it appears that the natures of cyber warfare and cyber threats are more akin to guerilla warfare than a traditional battlefield. 

The article talks about how the command and control structure should be established within the U.S. Military to deal with the threat.  It cites Lt. General William Lord, Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force.  One of the quotes I find most telling:

“We need to operate without heavy restrictions.  There are enormous restrictions in the offensive domain.  The biggest problem isn’t the enemy, the biggest problem is us.”

There is so much contained in that short three sentence quote that we could talk for days. 

The problem is that Cyberspace is global as well as local.  It involves both the physical devices that transmit information in the electromagnetic spectrum and the electromagnetic spectrum itself.  There are physical boundaries (network, national, and international) in some respects but in others there are no boundaries at all.  Any action taken within this realm has the potential for global ramifications.  Achieving cyber superiority may not be as easy and straightforward as it seems. There are a confusing array of laws and international agreements that deal with the free flow of communications between countries.  These add layers of complexity to an already complex issue. 

We have hemmed ourselves in with the laws and agreements we have made and have chosen to operate by a code of conduct that our adversaries do not have to follow.  This is how we have chosen to organize ourselves as a society and there is no doubt that it sometimes puts us at a disadvantage when pitted with an adversary who rejects our conventions.

I don’t believe that we can ever eliminate all risk or all threats.  I believe that these are just part of the world we live in.  We can chose to manage them and we can find ways to reduce them to levels with which we are comfortable (acknowledging that comfort levels can also change over time.)

As the article suggests, we must above all else remain flexible in order to meet the challenges that face us.  We must be learn to fight the next war, not the last one.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 10:38 and is filed under General, Recent News.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.