[iwar] I am accused of spreading hysteria about cyberwar

From: Ravi V Prasad (r_v_p@yahoo.com)
Date: 2002-12-05 07:36:13
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From: Ravi V Prasad <r_v_p@yahoo.com>
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Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 07:36:13 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] I am accused of spreading hysteria about cyberwar
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Article by George Smith in Los Angeles attacking me
and accusing me of spreading hysteria about cyberwar.

There is another attack on Dr Raj Mehta as well for
his Deccan Herald piece.

Ravi V Prasad

==========================

http://www.vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=330&page=4


Mumblings of monkey-men mock moderation 
by George C. Smith, Ph.D. -- 06/05/01 

LOCAL LOS ANGELES TV news anchormen had a great time
with the monkey-man of India -- an allegedly fierce
creature fond of attacking the destitute while they
slept. I bet yours did, too. Thanks to a strategically
placed news story in the Los Angeles Times and
subsequent legs on the Times-Post newswire in May,
everyone was laughing it up over this story of queer
beans emanating from the subcontinent. "Look at those
backward perishers in Gobble-Wallah," was the smug
subtext. "They don't know ---- from shinola!"

"Leading Hindu nationalists insisted that the military
intelligence agency in Pakistan had sent the
monkey-man in a sinister plot to destabilize India.
Several members of Parliament demanded that the
government send in crack paramilitary units to catch
the ape-man."  
-- from a May 2001 story in the Los Angeles Times on
the hysteria surrounding a recent urban legend of
India 
 
However, our myths are just as good. We just spackle
them over with a snobby, less proletarian
techno-veneer. The monkey-man would have been fine for
America in the early-70's, around the time of the
filming of "The Legend of Boggy Creek," but now that
we've invented the Internet, "digital Pearl Harbor"
and "information warfare" derivatives are better
socio-cultural fits.

So infatuated was I by the tale of the monkey-man of
New Delhi I went in search of more news on the
Internet and in so doing discovered that one of our
special monkey-men had wandered away and merged with
the cyber-lore of foreign lands.

It was said in the Los Angeles newspaper that an
analysis in the Hindustan Times wrestled with
explaining the belief in the monkey-man. Desperation
and hard times was what it boiled down to, according
to the Times -- superstition cooked up by "poor
people" driven to aggravation by 10-hour power
black-outs and water shortages.

Looking for the Hindustan Times on the Web for further
copy, however, got me sidetracked onto another article
published by the newspaper. In a piece from the June
8, 2000 edition, journalist Ravi V. Prasad mulled over
"cyber-terrorism and the threat to India" in the wake
of the KillerRésumé and ILoveYou computer viruses.

Prasad quoted R. James Woolsey, former director of the
CIA, as an expert on computer viruses. In the
Hindustan Times, Prasad alleged Woolsey had claimed
the existence of "an entirely new class of viruses
which he termed instructive viruses" during a talk
given to a Washington-based think tank.

"An instructive virus can instruct [which would seem
inarguable] critical computers to shut down vital
infrastructure," went the story.

The Hindustan Times also claimed the National Security
Agency had developed a "virus called Blitzkrieg ...
based on research in quantum electrodynamics and chaos
theory, which can destroy networks of entire nations
... the equivalent of the deadly human Ebola virus..."

"While there is no significant reason to suspect that
the US may use Blitzkrieg or instructive viruses
against India, we should be on our guard," continued
the newspaper.

"Because the monkey-man reportedly attacked only
sleeping people in the dead of night, actual sightings
were hard to come by."  
-- "...Sinister Simians Roam," the Los Angeles Times,
May 2001 
 

U.S. CYBER-MONKEY-MEN HAVE much in common with the New
Delhi species. Sightings of terrorists plotting to
douse the lights from the refuge of an offshore
cyber-bunker or Russian henchmen downloading precious
U.S. Department of Defense intellectual treasure are
often cited but occur only in the American equivalent
of very dim moonlight: hearsay of classified goings-on
or vague but stunningly grandiose mumblings delivered
by parties who speak under the shields of secrecy and
anonymity.

With the case of the NSA Blitzkrieg virus, the legend
concerning it was already just about two years old
when come upon by the Hindustan Times. In April of
1998, SIGNAL, the magazine organ of the Armed Forces
Communications and Electronics Association, a
publication notable for jargon-riddled articles on the
repeatedly alleged utter supremacy of Department of
Defense digital widgetry and a servile regard for the
details of Pentagon contracting, ran a cover story on
it.

Like many news items which take on the proportion of
myths, this story concealed a small nugget of truth --
in this case, word of a still-in-development piece of
commercial computer network security software --
within a billowing cloud of grandiloquent, often
common-sense-defying huffing and hooting.

"A growing echelon of chief technology officers are
likening the stealthy [Blitzkrieg] virus to the
digital equivalent of Star Wars technology," alleged a
sample. Yet another segment of the now mythic story
referred to an apparently very excitable but unnamed
CIA computer security specialist who claimed
Blitzkrieg virus to be "potentially more dangerous
than nuclear weapons."

Mostly, all the magazine's blustering was aimed at
getting the interested to attend an annual high tech
conference sponsored by AFCEA. And, in the fullness of
time, that was pretty much the end of it.

No "Star Wars" computing technology gained supremacy.
Despite a great deal of wishful thinking on the
subject, no digital "nuclear weapons" appeared.
Virus-writers made ILoveYou and Melissa and Kournikova
and a few thousand others of no account. Cyber-World
Wars were said to be started and stopped, won and
lost, lost and won, stalemated, checkmated,
fool's-mated and deadlocked. It was Serbia vs. NATO,
India vs. Pakistan, Arab vs. Israeli, Chancre Jack
China vs. Commie China, Commie China vs. America,
Lick-Spittle vs. the Cyber-Pantywaist, cats vs. dogs,
a dozen or so I've forgotten, and Me vs. You -- you
crusty botch of nature!

Are you beginning to grasp where your editor is going
with this?

"One man who claimed that he had looked the monkey-man
straight in the eye said the beast immediately turned
into a cat and ran away."  
-- from the Los Angeles Times 
 
If one takes the wide-angle view, it becomes painfully
obvious that it doesn't really matter if the songs we
sing to each other are based on nothing at all. If
enough believe the myths have merit then subsequent
public discussions and national policy can and does
arise as a response to them.

In this specific case, empty-headed talk -- tales of
monkey-men -- of U.S. origin about network blitzkriegs
and instructive viruses is taken as an indication, by
a foreign country's Washington Post, that the American
military has taken a lead in development of
cyber-weapons and that it might be rational to think
about devising balancing forces.


IRONICALLY, THIS IS not the view from the
cyber-trouble front typically presented in the
American mainstream. Instead, the US-centric view,
which in and of itself is a rather selective myth, is
best explained in connection with the Department of
Defense buzz-term -- "asymmetric threat."

Invoked ad nauseum since the middle of the past decade
by Pentagon-wonks, "asymmetric threats" are "weapons
[like 'instructive viruses'] and tactics that
relatively weak enemies ... use to foil [U.S.]
technological supremacy." Or, for another common
example, they can be explained as features of "a war
where [the adversary] will strive to fight
electronically" instead of irrationally attacking the
U.S. military head on.

Always in accompaniment is the vaguely-defined
received wisdom that such menaces arise more or less
spontaneously in foreign powers or agencies crazy-mad
bent on attacking America in the future. The heretical
idea that an "asymmetric threat" might not actually be
so, that it might just be a sign of symmetry -- a
refection or reaction stemming from a perception that
the U.S. military has an aggressive interest in the
same type of offensive warfighting -- is not
entertained.

In other words, the myth of the asymmetric
cyber-threat will generally appear in our national
news media as a reported condition in which American
infrastructure is always said to be the target of
foreign operations or plans in development. And it
will present in a vacuum in which examples from the
foreign perspective (of which there are now,
unsurprisingly, quite a few) are excluded. One never
expects to see mention of an article from the New
Delhi (or any foreign capital's) newspaper suggesting
the need for cyber-war agencies as a response to a
presumed corresponding and quite possibly precedent
American build-up. The exception to the rule is one in
which such an article is filtered through a
government, military or private sector source who
paraphrases only the portion where information warfare
agencies are recommended -- not the context in which
it is delivered.

"If he's a monkey, I'm ready for him."  
-- a New Delhi man "now in the monkey management
business" waiting and hoping for a call to take on the
monkey-man 
 
However, this is not all bad news! Rampant confusion
and mass insanity can be good for the economy. The
multiplication of monkey-men myths creates job
stimulus. Professionals recruited to prevent
"instructive viruses" or network Blitzkriegers can be
thought of as our more technologically informed
variety of monkey-man managers. Indeed, they can spawn
even more jobs and goods, creating "synergies" with
strategic forecasting services or threat warning and
information sharing networks. Anyone can get in the
game, from federal agencies like the National
Infrastructure Protection Center or the National
Security Council to the private sector.

Better still, the work is inexpensive and can turn a
substantial profit upon mark-up prior to delivery of
the finished product. You see, the dirty little secret
of monkey-man prediction is that it is the
technological equivalent of unskilled labor.

That is, unless you consider daily Web-surfing and the
collection of electronic gossip tasks requiring
scholarly rigor. 

http://www.vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=330&page=4

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Next message: Ravi V Prasad: "[iwar] European Conference on Information Warfare and Security, 30 June - 1 July 2003"
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