Late to the party here. I knew that you had been calling BS on McFizzle and saying that there is serious AQ over there (from your connections), but I just discovered that you (we) nailed the specific plot.
The weeks before Christmas brought no hint of terror. But by the afternoon of
It was Code Orange. Americans first heard of it at a Sunday press conference in
The financial markets trembled. By Tuesday the panic had ratcheted up as the Associated Press reported threats to “power plants, dams and even oil facilities in
But there were no real intercepts, no new informants, no increase in chatter. And the suspicious package turned out to contain a stuffed snowman. This was, instead, the beginning of a bizarre scam. Behind that terror alert, and a string of contracts and intrigue that continues to this date, there is one unlikely character.
The man’s name is Dennis Montgomery, a self-proclaimed scientist who said he could predict terrorist attacks. Operating with a small software development company, he apparently convinced the Bush White House, the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies that Al Jazeera—the Qatari-owned TV network—was unwittingly transmitting target data to Al Qaeda sleepers.
An unusual team arrived in
ETreppid Technologies was a four-year-old firm trying to find its way. Some of its employees had been hired to design video games. One game under construction was Roadhouse, based on the 1989 movie in which Patrick Swayze plays a bouncer in a dive bar. Other programmers worked on streaming video for security cameras.
(…)
He is an unusual man. In court papers filed in
Since 1996 the Al Jazeera news network had been operating in the nation of
As strange as his technology appeared to be, it was nevertheless an attractive concept.
Over the years
Back in
The reason the whole thing worked was because
The federal government was acting on the Al Jazeera claims without even understanding how
Despite such skepticism, the information found its way to the top of the
A former CIA official went through the scenario with me and explained why sanity finally won out. First,
A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans that the bar codes were fake. The CIA and the French commissioned a technology company to locate or re-create codes in the Al Jazeera transmission. They found definitively that what
[Note perhaps how they waited until December 2001 to buy the Russian helicopters. (About a month after the fall of the Taliban)]
Continue reading Sharon Weinberger´s article at the New York PostOn Dec. 4, 2001, five members of a Las Vegas-based charter crew were detained by Russian authorities after they landed without visas in Petropavlovsk. The remote Russian city, located on the Kamchatka peninsula and surrounded by active volcanoes, is nine time zones east of Moscow and cannot be reached by road.
Three days earlier, the privately owned Boeing 737 had left Biggs Army Airfield in Texas, carrying the crew and 16 Americans traveling on tourist visas. The plane, a luxury aircraft outfitted with wood paneling and a three-hole putting green, had been chartered by a small company from Enterprise, Alabama, called Maverick Aviation.
What the plane and its passengers were really doing in Russia in the middle of winter is only hinted at in an appeal filed by two federal prisoners this year. But interviews with those involved in the case reveal a secretive, and sometimes comical, mission to strike back at the Taliban after 9/11 -- a rare glimpse into the CIA's efforts in Afghanistan.
According to unclassified court documents, the group was traveling to a helicopter plant in Siberia, where Maverick Aviation, which was experienced in acquiring Russian aircraft for the US military, was planning to buy two helicopters for a "customer."
Not mentioned: That "customer" was the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA needed Russian helicopters because of its clandestine operations in Afghanistan. On Sept. 24, 2001, a Russian-made helicopter loaded with $10 million in cash carried a small CIA team into Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley. Code-named "Jawbreaker," the mission was to cement support among tribal leaders and pave the way for US military operations. It was the first entry of Americans into Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.
The aging helicopter, an Mi-17, was the team's only way of getting in or out of the country. Though hardly state-of-the-art, the Russian helicopter had a distinct advantage for the CIA: it allowed the agency to operate relatively unnoticed in an area where Russian equipment left over from the Soviet occupation was commonplace.
There was only one problem: The CIA owned only one Russian helicopter. It needed more, but a clandestine American agency couldn't exactly pick up the phone and call a Russian factory. So it turned to Jeffrey Stayton, then the chief of the Aviation Division at the US Army Test and Evaluation Command and an expert in Russian copters.
Stayton's plan was to find a private American company to buy the helicopters, send a team of people over to pick them up from a plant in Siberia, modify them to CIA standards, and then get them to Uzbekistan, a staging ground for CIA operations into Afghanistan. And they would do it all within a matter of weeks.
Eventually, the team included William "Curt" Childree, whose company, Maverick Aviation, won the contract to buy the helicopters and organize logistics; Army personnel and contractors from El Paso with experience modifying Russian aircraft for use by the US military; and then "six guys from the customer's office," as Stayton put it (a CIA team that included special operations personnel).
That's when things started to get complicated.
In an interview, the pilot, Fred Sorenson, said he thought visas they had ordered would arrive by FedEx by the time the plane landed. When he found out over satellite phone that the papers hadn't arrived, the plane was already descending, so he hid the fact from the crew for fear of a cockpit argument. The team was detained on arrival.
In the end, the visas came, and the crew was released the next day. But when the plane finally made it to Ulan Ude, in Siberia, the crew and passengers faced more challenges. To say merely that it was cold does not capture the Siberian winter, where temperatures that month approached 30 degrees below zero. Even worse, the team was in a Russian hotel with spotty electricity and limited heat.
The charter crew was shocked at the conditions (Siberia, after all, was off the beaten track of their typical VIP clients), but the Army personnel from El Paso also seemed woefully unprepared. None of them had ever been to Russia before -- some had never left Texas -- and the rough conditions shocked them. "I had the sense that I might end up in a Russian jail," Kimberly Boone, a Russian translator for the Army, later recounted in court testimony.
Several members of the team grew sick with flu-like symptoms. There was also a major hitch with the helicopters. According to the factory, there was the equivalent of a mechanic's lien on the helicopters, and they couldn't be released. While Stayton and Childree attempted to negotiate the release from the factory, the Army personnel were told to act like tourists on a winter getaway to Siberia: They visited a Buddhist monastery and shopped for fur coats.
Childree, by then suffering from pneumonia, flew to Moscow to meet with the broker, where he found that a competitor (no one knows for sure who) had apparently offered $30,000 to kill the deal.
After some heated discussions, the helicopters, which cost about $1.6 million each, were released.
Back in Siberia, meanwhile, Stayton was having problems with Brian Patterson, the Army warrant officer in charge of the El Paso team, who, according to multiple people on the trip, was drinking heavily.
Lisa Teuton, a flight attendant for the charter company, recalled several members of the El Paso team drinking and bragging about their work for the CIA. "It just blew me away," said Teuton. "I thought they would have been more professional and more secretive."
The charter crew, fed up with the delays and the conditions, threatened to leave, but the El Paso team was having none of it. According to Sorenson, chief warrant officer Patterson poked him in the shoulder and said: 'If you leave, we'll shoot you down.' "
Patterson laughed when asked about the incident. "I would like to know how I could accomplish that," he said.
That night, while the others were settled in their rooms, the crew surreptitiously checked out of the hotel. They used some of their remaining cash and alcohol to bribe airport personnel not to notify the Army of their departure. With no cash left for additional fuel, and no clearance to fly over China, the aircraft headed toward Japan, as the flight attendants kept watch out the windows to see if they really would be shot down.
The real question was: Did anyone not know it was a CIA trip? The CIA team had traveled under the amusingly obvious cover name of Donovan Aerial Surveys (William "Wild Bill" Donovan is regarded as the father of the CIA). The Russians in Ulan Ude were wondering what a group of private Americans were doing in Siberia in the middle of winter buying helicopters.
"They were very curious the whole time [about] why we were there; they would ask questions: 'What are you doing?' " Joe Perry, a master sergeant on the mission, recalled. "Our rooms were bugged . . . It was just unreal some of the things they were doing."
Relations with the Army team had been bad from the start. Stayton was unhappy with many of them, and the CIA considered them a nuisance. After one final argument, Stayton informed the Army's Patterson that his team was going home immediately on commercial flights. The CIA team would finish the work on the helicopters.
Less than a week later, the two helicopters were packed in an Antonov cargo plane. When Stayton and the CIA personnel left Russia on the evening of Dec. 31, 2001, they had just 30 minutes left on their visas.
From the perspective of the CIA, the mission to Siberia, whatever its quirks, was a success. But the contract, which was administered by Army officials in New Mexico unaware of CIA involvement, quickly attracted scrutiny from the Army Criminal Investigative Division.
Agents found some unusual things. For instance, Army officials paid the most of the $5 million contract in a credit card transaction in an El Paso bar called the "Cockpit Lounge." More troubling, the file was missing signatures; included few of the required supporting documents; and no invoices. When asked by investigators to explain why he allowed so many irregularities to go unnoticed, Edwin Guthrie, the contracting officer, responded: "Sleep apnea."
There were other strange aspects, all related to the CIA's secret involvement. Money allotted to pay expenses associated with mystery "subcontractors" (CIA personnel traveling under fictitious names); helicopters bought by the military being given civilian registration numbers (another quirk of CIA aircraft); and large cash transactions (typical of Russia). "They, the government, really leaned on me," said Childree, noting that provisions, such as support for the CIA personnel, were added on to the contract at the last minute.
Investigators also focused on all the problems that took place on the trip, which the El Paso team blamed on Maverick Aviation and Stayton. "It was a nightmare," recounted Boone, the Russian translator (it was Boone's first trip to Russia).
But John Wilson, whose company also competed for the helicopter contract and was interviewed by law enforcement officials, was surprised that anyone thought the problems were a big deal. Buying helicopters in Russia isn't easy. "I sat there going: Is that all?" he said. "That's a good trip; I mean, really, honestly and truthfully, that was a pretty good trip as far as normal stuff goes."
Simply put, a war of ideas is a clash of visions, concepts, and images, and—especially—the interpretation of them; for the images themselves matter much less than the way they are perceived. They are, indeed, genuine wars because they serve a purpose, usually political, social, or economic in nature, and they involve hostile intentions or hostile acts, though they are not always physically violent.12 History suggests wars of ideas fall into four general categories: (a) intellectual debates, (b) ideological wars, (c) wars over religious dogma, and (d) advertising campaigns. All of them are essentially about power and influence, just as with wars over territory and material resources, and their stakes can run quite high. In fact, many wars of ideas occur as part of larger physical conflicts. One of the principal motives for a war of ideas is fear that others will gain access to, or control of, some form of physical power or material wealth. In some cases, ideas are the most effective weapons for countering such threats.
(...)
The U.S. military must consider revising its corpus of doctrine pertaining to information operations. Joint doctrine is reasonably comprehensive in terms of addressing information operations, to include sub- and related categories such as psychological operations and military deception.84 However, the chief assumption underpinning each of these documents is that information operations support (kinetic) military operations. That is true in many types of conflicts. However, in other cases, particularly the current war of ideas, this relationship is reversed: military operations need to support information operations. Al- Qaeda and other jihadi organizations are not fighting a new kind of war, but instead are subordinating their military operations to a well-crafted information campaign designed to exploit certain cultural and religious values. All Joint and service publications pertaining to information operations should be revised to incorporate those wars where military operations are conducted in support of a larger information campaign. Put differently, U.S. military doctrine must broaden its view of the relationship between kinetic and information operations.
(...)
[...and pertaining to IO supporting deep intelligence]
Furthermore, doctrine concerning information operations must be revised to reflect the reality that the “information environment” is neither neutral nor static. Disparate cultural and social influences almost ensure that diverse audiences will interpret the same information differently. Even within that variegated landscape, the meanings of images, concepts, and visions are often bitterly contested. It is almost impossible to interpret information objectively because the very tools needed for interpretation in the first place are derived from subjective experiences and structures of meaning. In many cases, enough commonalities exist to allow at least a baseline of communication to take place. Yet, an important assumption underpinning U.S. doctrine on information operations is that all audiences will essentially draw the desirable conclusion, if given enough of the “right” information. This assumption overlooks how various cultures assess information depending on the sources. Simply put, “right” appears differently to diverse audiences. While we would expect our opponents to spin information to their advantage, even so-called neutral populations are not necessarily impartial when it comes to interpreting information offered by either side.
Desperate for a glimpse into Adolf Hitler's unpredictable mind, British spies hired an astrologer during World War II to match the forecasts of the Nazi leader's personal astrologers, documents declassified Tuesday show.
[ Not entirely correct - actually William Stevenson's 1976 book A Man Called Intrepid somewhat describes the astrologer's work in the USA on behalf of British Security Co-ordination. Enough of that -M1 ]
They soon regretted it.
The file released to Britain's National Archives catalogs the frustrations of MI5 handlers as they try to prevent the astrologer, Louis de Wohl, from publicly embarrassing high-ranking intelligence and military officers over whom he briefly held sway.
De Wohl was born in Berlin in 1903, where he worked as a bank clerk, a novelist and a screenwriter before fleeing to Britain in 1935 to avoid Nazi persecution for being part Jewish. His wife, Alexandra, fled to Santiago, Chile, where she claimed to be a Romanian princess and was known as La Baronessa. Their relationship was closer to mother and son than man and wife, his file said.
In London, he claimed variously to be a Hungarian nobleman, the nephew of an Austrian conductor, the grandson of a British banking magnate and a relative of the Lord Mayor of London. His books told of traveling the Far East in Arab disguise and hanging out in Berlin cafes in women's clothing.
De Wohl laid out his astrological credentials in a 1937 autobiography, I Follow My Stars. A year later in Secret Service of the Sky, he argued stars were like spies that could obtain secret information.
His break came, he wrote in a later book, during a dinner at the Spanish Embassy in London, when a Spanish duchess asked de Wohl to reveal Hitler's horoscope to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax.
Sir Charles Hambro, the head of Britain's Special Operations Executive, soon hired him as part of his network of agents across Europe.
The government rented an apartment for de Wohl in a hotel in London's exclusive Park Lane. On paper headed Psychological Research Bureau, he
reported on clients and wrote horoscopes for Allied and Nazi leaders.
But de Wohl's predictions were often so vague it is impossible to see any military use. Take his December 1942 prediction for seven months later: "The German astrologers must pray that enemy action does not force the Fuehrer into making important decisions within the first eight days of the month (of July), as this would lead to great disaster."
Agents complained de Wohl's flamboyantly gay demeanor was destroying their carefully constructed cover story that his hotel apartment was paid for by a wealthy female patron and that his special operations liaison officer was a mistress. Agents also complained of his boasting about connections to the War Office and Naval Command.
What everyone in Britain wanted most was to get the Americans to enter the war. Prime Minister Winston Churchill didn't believe in astrology, but in mid-1941 he sent de Wohl to the U.S. to persuade Americans that the Nazis would lose within months if they entered the war.
de Wohl went round radio stations and newspapers casting Hitler's horoscope and predicting things were all going to go very badly and that the Nazis would lose within months if they entered the war.
A U.S. convention of pro-German astrologers had predicted Hitler would win the war, giving the U.S. more reason to stay out. Billing himself as The Modern Nostradamus, de Wohl proclaimed the same stars showed the opposite.
Ultimately it was Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, that brought the U.S. into the war - not de Wohl's assurances that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's horoscope was stunning.
His services no longer needed, he was called back to London in February 1942. He told an MI5 officer that he was astonished when he returned to find his hotel apartment stripped bare and his department disbanded.
His handlers did not contact him. He knocked on doors looking for Hambro - wearing the uniform of a British Army captain. The rank was assigned to him temporarily for his U.S. mission and withdrawn afterward. But to MI5's dismay, that wasn't explained to de Wohl.
Behind the scenes, MI5 correspondence shows his handlers at a loss. Senior officers offer a number of proposals on how to dispose of de Wohl, including interning him in a camp or moving him to a remote corner of the country. Two other options are blanked out in the file.
Deciding that de Wohl was potentially dangerous because he could damage the reputation of his clientele and the War Office, MI5 decided to keep him happy and continue to employ him.
The war ground on and the Allies won without consulting the stars.
But as it drew to an end, de Wohl wrote one last autobiographical book, The Stars of War and Peace, in which he revealed he was Britain's state seer and had fought Hitler from his luxury hotel using star warfare.
The aim of this monograph is two-fold. First, it attempts to distinguish between the various "levels" of cultural knowledge and how they are used at various levels of warfare—strategy, operations, and tactics. Although not mutually exclusive, cultural knowledge informs these distinct levels in different ways. For example, the kinds of cultural knowledge that are required at the tactical level (e.g., the cultural knowledge of specific customs) is quite separate from the kinds of cultural knowledge that are required to formulate grand strategy and policy.
Second, the monograph attempts to explore how cultural knowledge might help to redefine an overarching strategy on counterinsurgency. While the military has been at the forefront of significant new and innovative thinking about operations and tactics, revising its old doctrines on the fly, America's political leaders have failed to provide the necessary strategic framework to guide counterinsurgency. The innovative insights about cultural knowledge adapted in operations and tactics by our military leaders have so far not yielded any comparable innovations from our political leaders. While the use of cultural knowledge is transforming military operations and tactics in significant and revolutionary ways, this same knowledge is not being adapted by our political leaders to help redefine a compelling new strategy for counterinsurgency.
The monograph concludes by suggesting four distinct ways in which cultural knowledge can work to help redefine an overarching strategic framework for counterinsurgency.1. Reconceptualizing the "war on terror" not as one war, but as many different wars.
2. Focusing less on the moral distinctions between "us" and "them"—a major centerpiece of the Bush Doctrine—and more on the differences between "them."
3. Building support and relationships among both friendly and adversary states by taking into account how other societies assess risks, define their security, and perceive threats.
4. Building support for counterinsurgency among America's civilian leaders. Especially amid the domestic acrimony spawned by the Iraq War, inadequate coordination between military and nonmilitary power will severely hamper U.S. counterinsurgency capabilities. Cultural knowledge of both military and civilian institutions is therefore vital if the coordination between them is to be effective.
Dual Use technology often carries with it the potential for both great good and horrific harm - and lots of fuzziness there in between.The rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 showed that disease outbreaks pose a threat beyond the borders of the country where they originate. The United States has initiated a broad effort to ensure that countries can detect outbreaks that may constitute a public health emergency of international concern. Three U.S. agencies—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of Defense (DOD)—support programs aimed at building this broader capacity to detect a variety of infectious diseases.
The U.S. government operates or supports four key programs (as shown in the graphic below) aimed at building overseas surveillance capacity for infectious diseases. In fiscal years 2004-2006, U.S. agencies obligated approximately $84 million for these programs, which operate in developing countries around the world. Global Disease Detection is CDC’s main effort to help build capacity for infectious disease surveillance in developing countries. The Field Epidemiology Training Programs, which CDC and USAID support, are another tool used to help build infectious disease surveillance capacity worldwide. Additionally, USAID supports CDC and the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Africa in designing and implementing Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response in 46 countries in Africa, with additional technical assistance to 8 African countries. DOD’s Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System also contributes to capacity building through projects undertaken at DOD overseas research laboratories. USAID supports additional capacity-building projects in various developing countries.
For each of the four key surveillance capacity-building programs, the U.S. agencies monitor activities such as the number of epidemiologists trained, the number of outbreak investigations conducted, and types of laboratory training completed. In addition, CDC and USAID recently began systematic efforts to evaluate the impact of their programs; however, because no evaluations had been completed as of July 2007, it is too early to assess whether these evaluation efforts will demonstrate progress in building surveillance capacity.
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.
Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.
The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network. ...
Katz said she decided to offer an advance copy of the bin Laden video to the White House without charge so officials there could prepare for its eventual release.
She spoke first with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, whom she had previously met, and then with Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the president for homeland security. Both expressed interest in obtaining a copy, and Bagnal suggested that she send a copy to Michael Leiter, who holds the No. 2 job at the National Counterterrorism Center.
Administration and intelligence officials would not comment on whether they had obtained the video separately. Katz said Fielding and Bagnal made it clear to her that the White House did not possess a copy at the time she offered hers.
Around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, Katz sent both Leiter and Fielding an e-mail with a link to a private SITE Web page containing the video and an English transcript. "Please understand the necessity for secrecy," Katz wrote in her e-mail. "We ask you not to distribute . . . [as] it could harm our investigations." ...
[W]ithin minutes of Katz's e-mail to the White House, government-registered computers began downloading the video from SITE's server, according to a log of file transfers. The records show dozens of downloads over the next three hours from computers with addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies.
By midafternoon, several television news networks reported obtaining copies of the transcript. A copy posted around 3 p.m. on Fox News's Web site referred to SITE and included page markers identical to those used by the group. "This confirms that the U.S. government was responsible for the leak of this document," Katz wrote in an e-mail to Leiter at 5 p.m.
Influencing foreign governments and populations is a complex and inherently political activity. This Joint Operating Concept (JOC) describes the military role in protracted IW campaigns; however, these campaigns will fail if waged by military means alone. The nature of IW requires the US Government (USG) to achieve the level of unified action necessary to integrate all available
instruments of national power to address irregular threats. The USG will have to develop “Whole of Government” approaches to waging IW at the political, strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Other government agencies must build their capacity to operate in unstable or hostile environments.
Irregular warfare is about people, not platforms. IW depends not just on our military prowess, but also our understanding of such social dynamics as tribal politics, social networks, religious influences, and cultural mores. People, not platforms and advanced technology, will be the key to IW success. The joint force will need patient, persistent, and culturally savvy people to build the local relationships and partnerships essential to executing IW. ...
What makes IW "irregular" is the focus of its operations – a relevant population – and its strategic purpose – to gain or maintain control or influence over, and the support of, that relevant population through political, psychological, and economic methods. Creating and maintaining an enduring, functioning state requires the government to be legitimate in the eyes of the population. On the other extreme, while a brutal dictatorship may control a population, it will eventually lead to frustration and dissatisfaction that can be exploited by an irregular adversary. Warfare that has the population as its "focus of operations" requires a different mindset and different capabilities than warfare that focuses on defeating an adversary militarily. ...
The foundation of IW activities are those that produce a positive psychological effect on the populace in order to gain their support and weaken their support of an adversary. Assessing psychological effects on contested populations must take into account existing cultural and social norms. Some planning considerations are:• The people will desire a strong degree of security.
• The people must feel as if they can influence the social and political order.
• The people will want meaningful economic activity that enables them to provide a living for their families.
• The people will want to maintain a society that reinforces their cultural preferences and allows them to feel pride in their citizenship.
Without this focus on the will of the population, IW will degenerate into a struggle marked by brutal suppression and intimidation to force the people to submit to the will of the belligerents.
U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed to exploit information power, which could be a U.S. advantage but instead is being used advantageously by insurgents. Because insurgency and counterinsurgency involve a battle for the allegiance of a population between a government and an armed opposition movement, the key to exploiting information power is to connect with and learn from the population itself, increasing the effectiveness of both the local government and the U.S. military and civilian services engaged in supporting it.
Utilizing mostly available networking technology, the United States could achieve early, affordable, and substantial gains in the effectiveness of counterinsurgency by more open, integrated, and inclusive information networking with the population, local authorities, and coalition partners.
The most basic information link with the population would be an information technology (IT)-enhanced, fraud-resistant registry-census. The most promising link would come from utilizing local cell phone networks, which are proliferating even among poor countries. Access to data routinely collected by such networks can form the basis for security services such as enhanced-911 and forensics. The cell phones of a well-wired citizenry can be made tantamount to sensor fields in settled areas. They can link indigenous forces with each other and with U.S. forces without interoperability problems; they can also track the responses of such forces to emergencies.
Going further, outfitting weaponry with video cameras would bolster surveillance, provide lessons learned, and guard against operator misconduct.
Establishing a national Wiki can help citizens describe their neighborhoods to familiarize U.S. forces with them and can promote accountable service delivery.
All such information can improve counterinsurgency operations by making U.S. forces and agencies far better informed than they are at present. The authors argue that today’s military and intelligence networks — being closed, compartmentalized, controlled by information providers instead of users, and limited to U.S. war fighters — hamper counterinsurgency and deprive the United States of what ought to be a strategic advantage.
In contrast, based on a review of 160 requirements for counterinsurgency, the authors call for current networks to be replaced by an integrated counterinsurgency operating network (ICON) linking U.S. and indigenous operators, based on principles of inclusiveness, integration, and user preeminence.
Utilizing the proposed ways of gathering information from the population, ICON would improve the timeliness, reliability, and relevance of information, while focusing security restrictions on truly sensitive information. The complexity and sensitivity of counterinsurgency call for vastly better use of IT than has been seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When suspected Chinese hackers penetrated the Pentagon this summer, reports downplayed the cyberattack. The hackers hit a secure Pentagon system known as NIPRNet – but it only carries unclassified information and general e-mail, Department of Defense officials said.
Yet a central aim of the Chinese hackers may not have been top secrets, but a probe of the Pentagon network structure itself, some analysts argue. The NIPRNet (Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network) is crucial in the quick deployment of US forces should China attack Taiwan. By crippling a Pentagon Net used to call US forces, China gains crucial hours and minutes in a lightning attack designed to force a Taiwan surrender, experts say.
China's presumed infiltration underscores an ever bolder and more advanced capability by its cybershock troops. Today, of an estimated 120 countries working on cyberwarfare, China, seeking great power status, has emerged as a leader.
"The Chinese are the first to use cyberattacks for political and military goals," says James Mulvenon, an expert on China's military and director of the Center for Intelligence and Research in Washington. "Whether it is battlefield preparation or hacking networks connected to the German chancellor, they are the first state actor to jump feet first into 21st-century cyberwarfare technology. This is clearly becoming a more serious and open problem."
China is hardly the only state conducting cyberespionage. "Everybody is hacking everybody," says Johannes Ullrich, an expert with the SANS Technology Institute, pointing to Israeli hacks against the US, and French hacks against European Union partners. But aspects of the Chinese approach worry him. "The part I am most afraid of is … staging probes inside key industries. It's almost like sleeper cells, having ways to [disrupt] systems when you need to if it ever came to war." ...
Probes of the Pentagon system that would bring US intervention should China attack Taiwan are part of a program dating to the 1990s that links cyberwarfare to real-world military action by China's People's Liberation Army. The very probe shows success in China's long-term program, experts say.
"The Chinese want to disrupt that unofficial network in a crucial time-frame inside a Taiwan scenario," says Mr. Mulvenon. "It is something they've written about. When you read what Chinese strategists say, it is the unclassified network they will go after … to delay deployment. China is developing tremendous capability." ...
Of particular alarm for Washington and other world capitals are so-called "zero-day attacks" – cyberpenetrations that look for software flaws to exploit. This is not an uncommon pastime for hackers. But in China's case, suspicion falls on professional hackers, says Sami Saydjari, a Defense Department computer-security veteran who now heads a firm called Cyber Defense Agency in Wisconsin. ...
For several years, China has focused most of its military research and production on a high-tech air and missile-attack force – to overwhelm Taiwan. Hence, China's probe of the Pentagon NIPRNet. "They want to be able to attack the Net. They don't need a supersexy penetration program," Mulvenon argues. "They just bomb the Net itself. They disrupt the deployment of our military, simultaneously saturate Taiwan, delay the US arrival, and Taiwan capitulates. It's what they talk about."
It is important to distinguish between financial and economic systems. This distinction is central to understanding the growing opportunities for financial warfare, as distinct from classic economic warfare. The economic system deals with the hard and soft outputs of the economy—that is, goods and services. The financial system deals with money and credit. In the modern financial system these can be very complicated. Bank credit, money transfers, stocks, bonds, and derivatives are the “stuff” of the financial system. It is a system built on confidence. There is trust that loans will be paid, that money transferred to an account will actually get there, and that money once placed in an account will not suddenly "disappear." ...
Financial warfare complements military operations as well as information operations. When combined with advances in social network mapping, it can give a highly detailed picture of an elite's communication and financial structure that can be used for targeting. Communication and software tools now exist to analyze connections in vast networks of heterogeneous information, such as financial transactions, mobile telephone calls, e-mail, and air travel. This gigantic information pool can be a source of knowledge about a nation's elite, where they stash their money, who they talk to, and their position in a social hierarchy. The key to doing this lies in constructing overlays of these datasets to visualize the various connections.
Watching how money flows out of a country in a crisis can be an important tip-off to who is in the know and who is at least partially responsible for national decisions. Carried to the next step, this can be combined with precise military attacks to go after a nation's elite. For example, tracking mobile telephone calls can reveal things like where the elite live, their vacation homes, and their travel patterns. Financial tracking of their bank accounts can reveal where they keep their money and who has access to their accounts. This creates the conditions for potentially ruinous attacks with far-reaching social implications on the national leadership. Were a national elite's overseas bank accounts frozen and their homes targeted with cruise missiles, simultaneously, a hyper-decapitation attack could destroy a nation's leadership. Clearly, this represents a large escalation. But there are many possibilities which fall short of this, and these constitute an important type of strategy: counter-elite targeting. Counter elite targeting has been considered in the past, both in the Cold War, with nuclear weapons, and more recently in conflicts in Kosovo and Iraq. But the 21st century is likely to see considerably more applications of it.
Spoofing—sending false signals of increased military and financial pressure—could be used to map out the crisis response patterns of a national elite, who they call, and where they send their money. This could be an intelligence treasure-trove of information. It could also be an input to information operations designed to make certain individuals, groups, or companies "suspect" in the eyes of a leader. This could undermine confidence in the regime. Seen as an escalation process, this focuses attention on actions which fall short of all-out attacks. These lower-level or intermediate actions are likely to provide U.S. decision-makers with a range of options between doing nothing and all-out attacks.
