Defenders of cyberspace

Questions were raised by the creation of a command to fight cyber attacks by the US - and more were raised by its sudden suspension
Crysis game

When Russia was accused of a cyber attack on Estonia last year, the White House took notice. George W Bush voiced a concern that the US was vulnerable to similar warfare. And when some in the military raised suspicion that Chinese cyberspies had already penetrated unclassified Pentagon computers, the decision was made to start a command to fight for America's supremacy online.

The $2bn (£1.1bn) project, which was started under the wing of the air force, was due to become fully operational later this year. Ominous adverts about hack attacks on the Pentagon were commissioned to recruit more people. And then, last month, it was suspended. No reason was given.


"The notion that modern countries should consider cyberspace a theatre of war is a no-brainer," says Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT and a Guardian columnist on web security. "It seems like they've had a lot of political manoeuvring over who should run it. The question is not whether there should be one, but where."

That's not the only question that Air Force Cyber Command had to answer. People weren't quite sure whether it was there to protect air force assets or all cyberspace. Some thought it would only be responsible for computer networks, while others were convinced that anything that used the electromagnetic spectrum would fall under its purview - including laser weapons. And no-one knows why it was put in charge of both cyberspace and space operations.

Cyber Command was started in response to millions of attack probes or scans from malicious computers on the Department of Defense's Global Information Grid (or GIG), which encompasses the military's networks, systems and computers.

"The nature of the threat is large and diverse," says Timothy Madden of Cyber Command. "It includes recreational hackers, self-styled cyber-vigilantes, various groups with nationalistic or ideological agendas, transnational actors and nation-states." The Pentagon felt a new section was needed because "much of the DoD's networks, systems, and computers is dependent upon commercial telecommunications links and the internet".

Schneier sums up its role more clearly, saying that Cyber Command is there to take "any military actions in cyberspace. Blowing things up, making them not work, just like in the real world. It's also offensive and defensive, just like in the real world."

Sami Saydjari, CEO and founder of online security company Cyber Defense Agency, was one of 54 leading computing figures who wrote an open letter to President Bush in 2002 urging him to secure the internet. "Potential costs of a multi-critical infrastructure attack on the banking system, the power grid and so on in a sequence designed to do maximum damage approaches the trillions, and the damage would look like a thousand hurricane Katrinas."

It's not something a 14-year-old could do in his bedroom, however. "You'd need half a billion dollars and three years," says Saydjari. "But that amount of money and time is not an absolute barrier to entry - nation states or transnational terrorism groups like al-Qaida or even someone like the Russian Mafia, which is not terrorism but organised crime, could certainly raise that kind of money."

Cyber Command was a step in the right direction, he says: "They wanted to treat cyber[space] as an area for war like a physical space, which is exactly the way to look at it."

Rhetorical warriors

So is the suspension of Cyber Command going to make America more vulnerable? "It's hard to answer," he says. "I think having someone in charge and capable of handling the mission is needed urgently."

Many blame political chicanery in the air force. After scandals about botched handling of nuclear weapons, major contracts going wrong and the firing of the top military and civilian leaders, the service needs time to regroup before deciding on how to fight in the cyber arena. But when and if it does come back online, there are still questions to be answered.

Cyber Command has the right to monitor anything that comes across its own networks, for defence purposes, and there's no evidence it's going beyond that. Madden does say, however, that "cases are turned over to law enforcement or counter-intelligence agencies for further investigation".

Scheier is worried about how rigorously the US government will maintain the line between military surveillance and civilian prosecutions. "You don't want the military working with the FBI. That's how you get police states," he says. "The army can't take charge of police work because there are laws against that, and the air force shouldn't be able to check up on civilian cybercrime. The needs of warfare are not the same as the needs of peacetime - we don't need howitzers and bombers in peacetime, and we don't need Cyber Command monitoring us either." Doesn't the war on terror justify it? "They're lying if they say that," he says. "They can pretend it's the same as war, but it's not. The war on terror is just a rhetorical war."