War on the Internet: Threat to National Security as Pretext for Controls

As earlier posted, governments around the world will be rationalizing control of the web or the cyberspace by putting up various bogeymen (strawmen).

The US has now been considering cyber attacks as a threat to national security that would justify military response.

From the Wall Street Journal,

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.

This is an overblown reaction.

Writes Cato’s Benjamin Friedman

Actually, our claim is not that we should never use military means to respond to cyberattacks. Our point instead is that the vast majority of events given that name have nothing to do with national security. Most “cyberattackers” are criminals: thieves looking to steal credit card numbers or corporate data, extortionists threatening denial of service attacks, or vandals altering websites to grind personal or political axes. These acts require police, not aircraft carriers.

Even the cyberattacks that have affected our national security do not justify war, we argue. There is little evidence that online spying has ever done grievous harm to national security, thinly sourced reports to the contrary notwithstanding. In any case, we do not threaten war in response to traditional espionage and should not do so merely because it occurs online.

Moreover, despite panicked reports claiming that hackers are poised to sabotage our “critical infrastructure” — downing planes, flooding dams, crippling Wall Street — hackers have accomplished nothing of the sort. We prevent these nightmares by decoupling the infrastructure management system from the public internet. But even these higher-end cyberattacks are only likely to damage commerce, not kill, so threatening to bomb in response to them seems belligerent.

I am reminded by this wonderful quote from General Douglas MacArthur who said that government has always peddled fear to expand over us.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour -with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

Always somewhere a deception designed to curtail our liberties.