Berto Jongman: DARPA Weaponizes (Sort Of) the Internet — Has the Time Come to Close DARPA?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, DoD, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

The article is long and certainly worth reading, with many links.  Below are two comments that capture the hacker view of this initiative.

This Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry Birds

By Noah Shachtman

WIRED Magazine, 28 May 2014

Read full article.

EXTRACT (Comments):

BillStewart2012 ErikasBulbasaur 3 days ago

Yes, it’s the camo-colored-hat skript k1dd13 tool.  And is it going to check whether it has the required warrants or legal authorization before launching an attack on a target, or just fire away? I’ve got some guesses..

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endus 3 days ago

Leave it to the government to turn the internet into the next battlefield and to weaponize technology. Any new frontier we explore, the first priority is to figure out how the hell we are going to fight wars in it, because wars are what life is all about.

I work in infosec and I’m not saying passivity is an option, but this is the same idiotic mentality that causes so many problems in the “real world” today. Half the problems they talk about with the vulnerability of our infrastructure are totally avoidable if companies and agencies were willing to take basic security precautions, but that would be too easy and too cheap…how would the defense contractors make their money? Why make it about simple actions which can protect networks and computers and keep issues from spreading, when you can keep doing all the stupid ignorant stuff you were doing all along and find a way to escalate the conflict?

It’s wonderful that they’re trying to dumb down the technology so that people with no understanding of how this stuff actually works can command it too. We know from documentaries like “This is what winning looks like” and the book The Outpost just how well military bureaucracy functions. I can totally understand why we need to simplify the technology to a point where the brilliant minds that brought us Afghanistan and Iraq can work their magic in cyberspace too. If there’s one thing we need on the internet it’s the input of bloated, corrupt, out of date government agencies.

Someday humankind will figure it out…if we don’t destroy ourselves first, that is. We’re allowing the worst and most corrupt elements of our society to lead the way, and then we wonder why everything is so screwed up. I get that the rest of the world has equally corrupt and evil people running it, but is the best answer to that problem really to appoint our own legion of corrupt sheisty assholes to combat them?
