What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies – Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam’s chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs – has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.

This new massive expansion has little to do with any actual cyber-threat – just as the invasion of Iraq and global assassination program have little to do with actual terrorist threats. It is instead all about strengthening the US’s offensive cyber-war capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and ensuring further transfers of massive public wealth to private industry continue unabated. In other words, it perfectly follows the template used by the public-private US National Security State over the last six decades to entrench and enrich itself based on pure pretext.

– Glenn Greenwald in his powerful article in today’s Guardian.

Glenn really knocked it out of the park today. What began as a story covering the latest revelation that the Pentagon will be increasing its cyber-security force more than fivefold, turned out to be a comprehensive and scathing critique of the surreptitious rise in the surveillance state gulag throughout these United States ever since 9/11. He rightly makes the point that it is our own government that actually fired the first real opening shot in the “cyberwar,” and as a result already essentially started war with Iran with the mobilization of the Stuxnet virus. So who’s acting like a rogue nation?

From the Guardian:

As usual, though, reality is exactly the opposite. This massive new expenditure of money is not primarily devoted to defending against cyber-aggressors. The US itself is the world’s leading cyber-aggressor. A major purpose of this expansion is to strengthen the US’s ability to destroy other nations with cyber-attacks. Indeed, even the Post report notes that a major component of this new expansion is to “conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries”.

Indeed, exactly as Obama knew would happen, revelations that it was the US which became the first country to use cyber-warfare against a sovereign country – just as it was the first to use the atomic bomb and then drones – would make it impossible for it to claim with any credibility (except among its own media and foreign policy community) that it was in a defensive posture when it came to cyber-warfare. As Professor Glenny wrote: “by introducing such pernicious viruses as Stuxnet and Flame, America has severely undermined its moral and political credibility.” That’s why, as the Post reported yesterday, the DOJ is engaged in such a frantic and invasive effort to root out Sanger’s source: because it reveals the obvious truth that the US is the leading aggressor in the world when it comes to cyber-weapons.

It’s all justified under by the claim that the US must defend itself from threats from Bad, Aggressive Actors, when the reality is the exact opposite: the new program is devoted to ensuring that the US remains the primary offensive threat to the rest of the world. It’s the same way the US develops offensive biological weapons under the guise of developing defenses against such weapons (such as the 2001 anthrax that the US government itself says came from a US Army lab). It’s how the US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by others when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more arms and bombs more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined.

As a 2006 BBC report on this Pentagon document noted: “Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military’s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.” And while the report paid lip service to the need to create “boundaries” for these new IO military activities, “they don’t seem to explain how.” Regarding the report’s plan to “provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum”, the BBC noted: “Consider that for a moment. The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.”

Since then, there have been countless reports of the exploitation by the US national security state to destroy privacy and undermine internet freedom. In November, the LA Times described programs that “teach students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage.” They “also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives.” The program, needless to say, “has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which conducts America’s digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security.”

In 2010, Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, gave a speech explicitly announcing that the US intends to abandon its policy of “leaving the Internet alone”. Noting that this “has been the nation’s Internet policy since the Internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s”, he decreed: “This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.”

As I detailed back in 2010, one of its primary goals is to scare the nation about supposed cyber-threats in order to justify massive new expenditures for the private-sector intelligence industry on cyber-security measures and vastly expanded control over the internet.

This public-private merger for intelligence and surveillance functions not only vests these industries with large-scale profits at public expense, but also the accompanying power that was traditionally reserved for government. And unlike government agencies, which are at least subjected in theory to some minimal regulatory oversight, these private-sector actors have virtually none, even as their surveillance and intelligence functions rapidly increase.

Have a nice night!

Read the rest here:

In Liberty,

Mike

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