Reuters/Rick Wilking
Six years after the White House first started running amok on the
computer networks of its adversaries, US President Barack Obama has
signed off on a top-secret order that finally offers blueprints for the
Pentagon’s cyberwars.
Pres. Obama has autographed an executive order outlining protocol and
procedures for the US military to take in the name of preventing
cyberattacks from foreign countries, the Washington Post reports, once
and for all providing instructions from the Oval Office on how to manage
the hush-hush assaults against opposing nation-states that have all
been confirmed by the White House while at the same time defending
America from any possible harm from abroad.
According to Post’s sources, namely
“officials who have seen the classified document and are not authorized to speak on the record,”
Pres. Obama signed the paperwork in mid-October. Those authorities
explain to the paper that the initiative in question, Presidential
Policy Directive 20,
“establishes a broad and strict set of
standards to guide the operations of federal agencies in confronting
threats in cyberspace.”
Confronting a threat may sound
harmless, but begs to introduce a chicken-and-the-egg scenario that
could have some very serious implications. The Post describes the
directive as
being “the most extensive White House effort to date to
wrestle with what constitutes an ‘offensive’ and a ‘defensive’ action
in the rapidly evolving world of cyberwar and cyberterrorism,” but
the ambiguous order may very well allow the US to continue assaulting
the networks of other nations, now with a given go-ahead from the
commander-in-chief. Next in line, the Post says, will be rules of
engagement straight from the Pentagon that will provide guidelines for
when to carry out assaults outside the realm of what is considered
‘American’ in terms of cyberspace.
“What it does, really for the first time, is it explicitly talks about how we will use cyber operations,” one senior administration official tells the paper of the policy directive.
“Network
defense is what you’re doing inside your own networks. . . . Cyber
operations is stuff outside that space, and recognizing that you could
be doing that for what might be called defensive purposes.”
When
The New York Times published an exposé on the White House’s so-called
Olympics Games program earlier this year, the world became fully aware
for once of America’s involvement in international cyberwar, but much to
the chagrin of Washington. Officials including members of Pres. Obama’s
national security team spoke on condition of anonymity to tell the
Times that his predecessor, then-Pres. George W. Bush, began the program
in 2006 to target Iran’s nuclear facilities and then passed it along to
the current administration to continue under the leadership of the
current commander-in-chief.
“From his first months in office,” David Sanger wrote for the Times, Pres. Obama
“secretly
ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that
run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding
America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons.”
Congress has fought tooth-and-nail in the months since to plug any
leaks that
could potentially spill the beans regarding any further secrets with
the potential of effecting national security, but those efforts appear
unsuccessful given this week’s Post report on Presidential Police
Directive 20.
Now take the example of Iran: according to the Post,
Pres. Obama’s signature on last month’s directive means the US now has
rules and regulations when it comes to protecting its own infrastructure
from cyberattack, and can do so by means of launching what appear to be
pre-emptive assaults of their own.
“It should enable people to arrive at more effective decisions,” a second senior administration official tells the Post. “
In that sense, it’s an enormous step forward.”
That comment echoes US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s insistence
earlier this year that “
defense alone is not enough”
in terms of keeping the country safe. But what it also seems to do is
put on the books a presidential policy that equates an overzealous
offense with a solid defense. While the US has cited Iranian
hackers as the key players behind a recent
attack on
the websites of Capital One Financial Corp. and BB&T Corp., two of
the biggest names in the American banking industry, the US has done
little — on the record — to reveal any similar assaults from abroad.
Instead, rather, it’s relied on fear-mongering to try and convince the
country to accept a cybersecurity legislation that will assure
American’s safety from foreign hackers, all for the small price of
sacrificing their digital-age privacy.
While the Obama White House
has failed to acknowledge the Olympic Games program or any involvement
in the Stuxnet or Flames viruses linked to the initiative, computer
researchers in both the US and Russia have tied Washington to the
cripplingly malicious coding. Earlier this month, California-based
Chevron, one of the world’s leaders in the oil sector, went public with
claims that Stuxnet had infected — but not affected — their computers
after the virus was unleashed.
The ability to slow down or speed
up centrifuges in nuclear facilities from thousands of miles away made
Stuxnet a virus that had very substantial powers. Refusing to speak of
the Olympic Games program specifically, former CIA chief Michael Hayden
told the Times, “
This is the first attack of a major nature in which a cyberattack was used to effect physical destruction.”
According
to the Post’s latest, though, future assaults by way of Stuxnet or
similar worms could be considered by Washington as defense mechanisms to
make sure Iran doesn’t retaliate for what America has long-been lashing
out with. One source tells the Times that, before last month’s
directive, severing any link between a US-computer and an overseas
server by any means possible would be an act that would put America on
the offensive. Now even a preemptive attack that disconnects other
countries could be considered a defensive ploy according to the
president.
“That was seen as something that was aggressive…particularly by some at the State Department,” one
defense official tells the Post. With the signing of Pres. Obama’s
latest order, though, the paper writes that the directive
“effectively
enables the military to act more aggressively to thwart cyberattacks on
the nation’s web of government and private computer networks.”
It
is thought that, through the directive, any systems linked even
remotely with America’s can be fair game for an assault. Given the
expansion of cloud computing and the ever-expanding interconnection of
communities across the globe on the Web, though, that could essentially
enable Uncle Sam’s cybersquad to get away with a whole new slew of
tricks to try and topple adversaries of any kind that threaten the
American way of life. When and where those actions are necessary, of
course, remains another topic of discussion. Will those orders be signed
in secrecy as well, though?
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