Today,  May 6th, Richard Clarke will be speaking  at the International Spy Museum for one of our free noon lunchtime author debriefings and book signing.    From 1992 to 2003, Clarke held several positions within the National Security Council as National Coordinator and Chair for issues dealing with security, infrastructure protection, and most importantly counter-terrorism.  Effectively, he was our counter-terrorism czar.  From this position, he became one the strongest voices arguing in favor of more effective measures against Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.  He favored the use of Predator drone strikes to take out Bin Laden and submarine cruise missiles strikes to destroy training camps in Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, it took 9/11 before many of these ideas were effectively tried and/or accomplished. In 2003, he would leave government and come to widespread recognition a year later with the release of his memoirs detailing these events and his experiences.  He believed strongly that the public had a right to know what happened on 9/11. 

Now, with his new book  Clarke brings to our attention a new threat to our national security, Cyber War.  Cyber-security was one of the last policy issues he dealt with under the last Bush administration. Unfortunately, the same lack of interest in Al Qaeda that  plagued the days leading up to 9/11, plagued his final days in government dealing with cyber-security.   The Bush Administration seemed content to let the private sector protect the taxpayer as long as the government could protect itself.  That all started to change when the Chinese successfully hacked the Pentagon in June of 2007 along with several other significant cyber-attacks attacks in Germany and Britain.  The margin of error was shrinking. 

Last September, the International Spy Museum launched a new exhibit dealing precisely with many of the issues portrayed in his new book.   This exhibit, called Weapons of Mass Disruption, presents the threat we faced from cyber-terrorists and the significant number of other countries that have developed cyber-warfare capabilities.  According to Clarke, our capabilities as a nation toward cyberwarfare are considerable and probably the best in the world despite.  But, what about our cybersecurity?  You may be prepared to live a week without the Spy Blog, but how about a week without electricity? Given that Richard Clarke has debriefed four presidents,  we should probably all be listening to what he has to say.

To learn more check our Richard Clarke’s book: Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It

Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

Intelligence agencies are facing two principal challenges—the acquisition of secret information, and its twin, the peril of information overload. The difficulty of finding the proverbial needle in the haystack has exponentially grown since the introduction of the Internet and the explosion—and availability—of human knowledge. Every day, intelligence agencies must sift through literally millions of pieces of information—satellite images, blogs, intercepted phone calls, emails, blogs, etc.—to determine what is going on in the world. Evidently, human beings cannot accomplish this task alone.

Several years ago, the CIA commissioned its investment arm, In-Q-Tel, to devise a scheme to mine and evaluate information on the web. In-Q-Tell, in turn, hired the software company Visible Technologies to monitor and analyze social media. Now, the company crawls over half a million web sites a day, mining more than a million posts and discussions taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Every hit is categorized, thus making the mass of online information easier to digest for human end users at Langley and elsewhere in the intelligence community.

At this point, Visible Technologies limits its monitoring to openly available sources. The process is designed to provide U.S. intelligence an “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” says an In-Q-Tel spokesman. In fact… if you are using any of the common online tools—and since you are reading this blog, you probably are—chances are, you’ve already been mined.

Nothing is What It Seems.

SPY staff member, Abbie,explores the new cyber warfare gallery

Dr. Thomas Boghardt, Historian

Computer experts have repeatedly warned about our nation’s vulnerabilities to cyber attacks. These concerns are certainly not unwarranted, given the rising number of cyber incidents registered by U.S. networks, ranging from destructive viruses to spyware. More interesting to me is our government’s offensive capabilities.  

By all accounts, our cyber capabilities are enormous, and the U.S. military has fully embraced this new type of warfare. The Pentagon graduates 80 students per year from its cyberwar school, and the 57^th Information Aggressor Squadron of the Air Force and the Network Warfare Battalion of the Army are diligently war-gaming cyber attacks. Much of the military’s training and strategizing is done in collaboration with the nation’s premier cryptanalytic organization, the National Security Agency.

The United States has already wielded this virtual weapon on several occasions. In the late 1990s, Washington launched cyber attacks on Serbian government and communications systems. Similar assaults were carried out against Iraq in 2003. The Pentagon and the intelligence community even planned to electronically freeze billions of dollars in Saddam Hussein’s bank account and cripple his government’s financial system, but the operation was eventually shelved for fear that its execution would wreak havoc across the Middle East and beyond (much of Saddam’s money was tied up abroad).

 As one of the most internet-dependent nations of the world, the United States is well-advised to ponder the unintended consequences of a cyber strike as well as the havoc caused by possible counter-strikes. It will be interesting to see how cyber planners will deal with this issue. But you may rest assured that they are working on a solution as you read this blog.

Nothing is What It Seems.