Infowar and Disinformation: From the Pentagon to the Net
by Daniel Brandt
In 1967, a satire was published under the title “Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.” This analysis soberly reflected, in think-tank style, on the importance to society of waging war. Leonard Lewin, who pretended that the secret report was leaked and did not claim authorship until five years later, argued forcefully that war provides a type of social and psychological glue, without which society cannot function.
“Roughly speaking,” Lewin writes, “the presumed power of the ‘enemy’ sufficient to warrant an individual sense of allegiance to a society must be proportionate to the size and complexity of the society. Today, of course, that power must be one of unprecedented magnitude and frightfulness.”[1] Lewin’s tongue-in- cheek premise is that before peace breaks out, it becomes urgent to find substitutes for war.
They say that life imitates art. Almost 30 years later, Lewin’s claim of authorship is lost amid the general enthusiasm over the manuscript. Dog-eared copies of “Report from Iron Mountain” are passed around by patriots and militia groups as if it were the secret plan from above.[2] This provides liberal critics of “conspiracism” a good chuckle or two. But it’s not at all clear who will laugh last. As a predictor of the capacity of elites to manage public opinion, and to deal with stubborn fringe groups, populists can do worse than to study this 100-page volume.
Already there’s an effort underway to replace the Cold War in the hearts and minds of Middle America. The ruling class has to do something. Patriots in camo were easily managed when they had commies to kick around. After these patriots struck out “Communism” on the their enemies list, next up was “Council on Foreign Relations” and similar organizations. This is proving temporarily inconvenient for the global managers.
One Cold War substitute might be Information Warfare. Novelist Tom Clancy, a hard-line conservative and close pal of Bob Woodward (media elites with spook connections transcend party politics), has the evil Japanese planting a stock-exchange software bomb in “Debt of Honor” (1994). Dain Gary, manager of the Pentagon-funded Computer Emergency Response Team in Pittsburgh, remarks at a conference sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that there are universities in Bulgaria that teach how to create more effective viruses.[3] A cover story in Time magazine touts “cyberwar,” the latest Pentagon fad.[4] “Hackers are even better than communists,” says one Washington activist who deals with civil rights and electronic privacy issues.
Much of the Time story describes game-playing scenarios that are currently popular at military think tanks. Designed to simulate future capabilities, these games serve to identify potential vulnerabilities in U.S. communications and information systems. As soon as this issue of Time appeared, however, one reporter recommended it as confirmation of his own story (see sidebar). Until recently a senior editor at Forbes, this reporter gave up the good life in exchange for a fan club on Internet conspiracy newsgroups. His story relies on spooky sources who see infowar something that’s been going on for two years now.[5] Life imitates art.
Military professionals recognize that information technology is leading to new modes of warfare. One Pentagon general described the 1989 operation in Panama, when the command centers were “noisy places where a lot of people ran around and there were little sticky things that were put on acetate maps,” and compared these to the Haiti operation, when commands were issued over video links. Between Panama and Haiti, the Gulf War’s smart bombs with nose cameras popularized infowar on the battlefield. Even Tom Clancy’s fans were impressed.
Defense industries, feeling the squeeze of shrinking budgets, are also climbing on board. As the leader in information technology, as well as the cop on the international beat, America finds itself with a new opportunity to spend billions on defense. The hacker gap has replaced the missile gap, and operations security (OPSEC) is suddenly the hottest field for think tanks and consultants that do business with the government. The six- -year-old OPSEC Professionals Society increased their membership by sixty percent in 1994. Even the U.S. Secret Service has an OPSEC department.[6]
Rand Corporation has their cyberwar screed posted on the Internet. In their essay, the new MTR (military technology revolution) homes in on, among other things, the problem with WMD (weapons of mass destruction). “Topsight” (seeing the big picture) is required. Colin Powell is quoted (Byte, July 1992) about how “battlespace” includes an “infosphere,” and personal computers were “force multipliers” in the Gulf War.[7] Mitre Corporation, another beltway bandit, has a Web page that presents their Information Security Technical Center. They help clients with Internet and database security issues, such as “multilevel secure distributed data management, security for federations of autonomous database systems, secure object-oriented data management, and integrity protection and separation of duty.”
When punk hackers in Germany dialed into Mitre’s computer lines in 1986 and used them to romp around other defense-related computer systems on the Internet, it cost Mitre thousands of dollars in telephone bills. Their security experts said it couldn’t be true. Almost a decade later, after at least two books[8] and countless newspaper articles, we now know that if hacker hype didn’t exist, it would have to be created. Every corporation should leave holes for hackers; it gives reporters something to write about and it’s good for the security business. The proclamations of self-identity from OPSEC professionals seem hazy at best; without hackers, they’d have nothing at all.