Infowar and Disinformation: From the Pentagon to the Net

Although professionals once insisted on a distinction between business intelligence (the collection of business and competitive information through legal and ethical methods), and industrial or economic espionage (the clandestine collection of sensitive, restricted or classified information),[18] this distinction is rarely mentioned these days. A softening of position has occurred in just the last year. Moreover, the major problem with this distinction is that there’s a massive gray area between these two extremes, and that’s where the action is.

Two examples of this gray area come from U.S. intelligence, where there is new activity and concern over economic spying. The U.S. currently has a program to tap into international satellite communications to collect financial data. This program is designed to detect instances of bribery of foreign officials by foreign companies. Since such bribery is illegal for U.S. companies, the playing field is leveled when the CIA can blow the whistle on foreign companies through diplomatic channels. Mike Jensen of NBC News (11 May 1995) reported enthusiastically that “the analysis is done at CIA headquarters, where a new era in spying has quietly begun.” A number of large contracts have been won for U.S. firms with this technique. This is uncomfortably close to the use of blackmail to stop bribery.

The other example is the proposed escalation of counterintelligence efforts against economic spying. In August the White House released a report produced by the National Counterintelligence Center, which identified efforts by allied governments to spy on the U.S. in the areas of biotechnology, aerospace, telecommunications, computer software and hardware, advanced transportation and engine technology, advanced materials and coatings such as stealth materials, energy research, defense and armaments, and manufacturing processes.

The CIA has put the number of foreign countries involved at around twenty. Among the methods used by foreign economic spies are recruiting company insiders, computer intrusions and telephone intercepts, and office or hotel-room break-ins and thefts.[19] But anyone who has read a spy novel knows that the line between counterintelligence and intelligence can seldom be drawn cleanly; the same assets and activities are required for both.

“The Pentagon has drafted a classified document asking the White House to draw up a national infowar strategy,” writes Neil Munro in the Washington Post. “If the request is approved by the Defense Department and accepted by President Clinton, senior officials from the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, Secret Service, State Department, U.S. Information Agency and Commerce Department would develop the infowar strategy for the president’s approval.”[20] According to Munro, the author of “The Quick and Dead: Electronic Combat and Modern War” (St. Martins Press, 1991), defense officials feel hamstrung by the American libertarian tradition, which limits their ability to protect private-sector networks.

The Pentagon is worried that an offensive capability in infowar doesn’t require much capital. “It’s the great equalizer,” says Alvin Toffler. “That’s why poor countries are going to go for this.” Former Pentagon communications chief Donald Latham adds that “a few very smart guys with computer workstations and modems could endanger lives and cause great economic disruption. ”[21] For those with capital, WMD (weapons of mass destruction) becomes the great temptation. Even here, the proliferation of information is the chief culprit, according to Carl Builder of the Rand Corporation. At one time Builder was responsible for the security of all nuclear materials in civilian hands in the U.S. He worries about the fact that the flow of information into and out of a nation can no longer be controlled:

The materials for nuclear devices are increasingly in commerce, and all that lies between the taking of those materials and making nuclear devices is information. I was so concerned about this when I was responsible for nuclear safeguards that we called in some nuclear bomb makers and they told us hair-raising recipes: “If you really want to make a crude nuclear explosive, here is how you could do it, and do it very simply on your kitchen table, with materials that are available in the hardware store.”[22]

Too much information, too much vulnerability, and to top it off, there’s a sense of unreality about it. Walter Wriston, the former head of Citibank and Citicorp, and a former trustee at Rand and other think tanks, has claimed that information about money is more valuable than money itself. A new “information standard” is replacing the gold standard, as electronic data shifts exchange rates around the world instantly, without any bullion or currency physically changing hands.[23] What does it all mean?

At a minimum, it provides new opportunities to feed post- Cold War paranoia. In the Pentagon game scenario described by Time magazine, ATM networks go berserk in Georgia, and people across the country start panic withdrawals.[24] In real life it gets even better. On 22 November 1994, Robert Hager reported breathlessly on NBC News about hacker intrusions into Pentagon computers. Just in case some kindly old ladies failed to grasp the gravity of the situation, Hager’s voice-over gratuitously added that hackers broke into one nameless hospital’s records and reversed the results of a dozen pap smears. Patients who may have had ovarian cancer, Hager claimed, were told instead that they were okay. If the Pentagon suddenly tells us that Bulgarian hackers are the reason why the ATMs and card-swipe machines in Peoria aren’t working, will this be the new call to arms, the modern equivalent to Pearl Harbor?

It’s not even clear that we’re getting something in return for our increasing insecurity. “We see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” notes MIT economist Robert Solow.[25] A neo- Luddite tendency is emerging, represented by writers such as Theodore Roszak,[26] Kirkpatrick Sale,[27] and John Zerzan.[28] Sale recently smashed a computer with a sledgehammer in front of 1,500 people at New York City’s Town Hall. Zerzan doesn’t own a computer on philosophical grounds. (Perhaps it’s just as well. Once while I was tripping with him in 1974, Zerzan remarked that his stereo wasn’t working. I instantly discovered that his cables were plugged into the wrong jacks, and presto, we had rock and roll.)

The ambivalence of the information age is a theme that also runs through the works of Jacques Ellul. He worries that the hype about the wonderful decentralization and democratization of the new technology, and the insistence that we must adapt to it, is a form of “ideological terrorism.”[29] Alvin Toffler, a cheerleader for the information age if ever there was one, also expresses reservations about the “fragility” of knowledge (small bits can make a huge difference), the “analysis paralysis” of information overload, and the power of the media over a nation’s political life.[30]

As more people feel marginalized by information technology, confusion over its significance and capabilities, as well as paranoia and concern over its effects, are bound to increase. New surveillance technologies alone will do this if nothing else does. In Britain, the government promotes and supports the installation of closed-circuit television cameras in public places. Today these cameras feature night vision, computer- assisted operation, motion-detection capability, and bullet-proof casing. Many of them can read a cigarette pack at 100 meters.[31]

Communications surveillance technology is even more worrisome. FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, enjoyed some media hoopla under their first director, Brian Bruh, who used to give interviews. No one is talking now under director Stanley Morris, and their mission is quietly expanding. FinCEN collects and tracks financial data, and then uses modeling techniques to detect money laundering and organized crime. This year President Clinton expanded their brief to include security- clearance investigations. An interagency effort, FinCEN has over 200 employees from the IRS, FBI, Secret Service, DEA, NSC, NSA, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and they work closely with the BATF, CIA, and DIA. Their dozens of databases function as a vacuum cleaner for financial information, including currency transaction reports from banks, credit reports, computerized real estate records, and the like.[32]

Most likely this is only the beginning. In 1991 the FDIC was asked to blueprint a plan that would monitor every single bank account in the U.S. The FDIC wasn’t enthusiastic, but they did determine that it would cost only $30 million to build and $20 million per year to operate. Congress dumped the idea in June 1993 because of concerns about privacy. Due to the recent hype over domestic terrorism, however, the CIA and other agencies have expressed renewed interest in the concept.[33] Although the CIA and NSA are not supposed to be involved in the surveillance of U. S. citizens, the interagency approach represented by FinCEN, which allows constituent agencies to roam unsupervised through their data, appears to have obviated this prohibition.

The Clipper Chip, about which so much has been written, is currently on hold but not forgotten. On 30 March 1995, FBI director Louis Freeh testified before a House subcommittee that “powerful encryption is becoming commonplace,” and “this, as much as any issue, jeopardizes the public safety and national security of this country. Drug cartels, terrorists, and kidnappers will use telephones and other communications media with impunity knowing that their conversations are immune from our most valued investigative technique.”[34] In August, the Electronic Privacy Information Center received hundreds of FBI documents under the FOIA showing that more than two years ago, despite their assurances that Clipper would be voluntary, federal agencies had already concluded that Clipper would only succeed if alternative security techniques are outlawed.[35]

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While U.S. intelligence agencies want a monopoly on encryption, Congress and some lobbying groups are nervous about the new cyber-savvy populism. Internet-phobe Dianne Feinstein (D- CA) tacked an amendment to the Senate’s terrorism bill which prohibits the distribution of “information relating to explosive materials for a criminal purpose.” The amendment passed by unanimous consent and the entire bill passed the Senate 91-8, but is currently stalled in the House. Another Senator, Jim Exon (D- NE), reintroduced the Communications Decency Act in February because “American children are subjected to pornography and smut on the Internet.”[36]

Last December the Simon Wiesenthal Center asked the Prodigy online service to stop “hate groups” from posting messages, and wants the federal government to police the Internet in a similar manner.[37] The Anti-Defamation League’s Tom Halpern says that the ADL is “undertaking efforts to monitor the activities of Muslim extremists and others on the Internet. When evidence arises that a posting constitutes or encourages illegal activities, naturally we’d bring it to the attention of law enforcement.”[38]

To fan the flames of incipient Internet repression, it’s always useful to run a front-page story about Subcomandante Marcos and his laptop, which he carries in a backpack and plugs into the lighter socket of an old pickup truck. “When federal police raided alleged Zapatista safe houses in Mexico City and the southern state of Veracruz last week, they found as many computer diskettes as bullets,” writes Tod Robberson for the Washington Post from San Cristobal. In January, the story goes, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo “became acquainted with the power [of] the Internet when [he] announced the start of a military offensive aimed at capturing the ski-masked Zapatista leader.” Within hours, Zedillo’s fax machine “broke or was eventually turned off,” as “cyber-peaceniks” sent out urgent requests on the Internet for a fax campaign. The hundreds of faxes caused Zedillo to call back his troops.[39]

If that doesn’t make Congress nervous, another cover story in Time should do the trick. An undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University named Martin Rimm spied on the personal directories and downloading habits of 3,000 students, staff, and faculty to compile a survey on computer pornography. Rimm’s study was published in a law journal, was the centerpiece in the Time cover story, enjoyed exposure on the ABC News program Nightline, and was entered into the Congressional Record by Charles Grassley (R- IA). Now a campus committee is considering the ethics of the spying, which is apparently considered an internal campus matter. But Time came as close as they ever do to a retraction for a different reason: the methodology of the study was so poor that the data did not support the conclusions.[40] Carnegie Mellon, by the way, is the same university that hosts the Pentagon’s Computer Emergency Response Team.

The most consistent horror story is that the Internet is dangerous for business. The Computer Security Institute in San Francisco, in their 1995 Internet Security Survey, reports that one out of every five Net sites has suffered a security breach. Thirty percent of the intrusions occurred after a firewall, which is designed to guard the site, was installed. There is a bright side: CSI estimates that sales of anti- hacker software will grow from $1.1 billion in 1995 to $16.2 billion in year 2000.[41] What they don’t mention is that by then you’ll also need a driver’s license to cruise the superhighway.

The only mystery is why anyone would feel that new laws are needed to rein in the Net. America Online cooperated with a two- year FBI investigation into computer child pornography, and more than 120 homes were raided and searched in August.[42] (Adult pornography falls under the “community standards” interpretation of the First Amendment, but the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that child porn is always illegal.) And all it would take to get a warrant to monitor the Internet backbone would be to complain about Bulgarian viruses to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Between 1979 and 1994, this secret court approved a total of 8,130 surveillance actions submitted to it by federal agencies, and has yet to deny even one application.[43]

Apparently there’s more to information warfare than hackers and Pentagon buzz words, overpaid OPSEC consultants, economic intelligence, and surveillance of financial networks. Something else could be going on here, and Alvin Toffler offers a clue:

The shift to third-wave information warfare is … ultimately a battle for control of the information flows of the world. In the Gulf War you saw classic examples of the use of propaganda and perception management…. [In Washington] you had a young woman appear before television cameras and talk about babies being ripped out of incubators in Kuwait…. It later turned out that she was related to the Kuwaiti embassy and that she was really apparently following a script. In the era of information warfare, all of that is going to become far more important and be managed with far more sophistication.[44]

So one important aspect of infowar, it would seem, is disinformation. This makes it especially difficult: it’s not enough to be merely informed, because now it’s also necessary to consider the motives and agendas of every source of information. With twice as much access to information today, that means four times as much work. Few of us are up for the challenge.

Just when the stakes are highest, our major reporters, pundits, and political representatives are least helpful. Their one-liners are too predictable, they are too easily manipulated by forces they should be trying to expose, and apart from endless analyses of the nuances of presidential party politics, or what the jurors are thinking at the O.J. trial, they have little to say about issues that matter. Millions of ordinary people are sensing this, and are looking toward alternative media such as zines, the Internet, and talk radio.

We could all use some help. Academia has been out to lunch for years; there’s little point in wasting much time there. The populist right and the incredible shrinking left, much to the delight of the elites who manipulate them both, still waste their time attacking each other. Small wonder that the neo-Luddites are nervous, the militias suspicious, and the authorities would like to monitor everyone. Welcome to the wonderful Information Age.

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