This briefing addresses the world's first global Internet war: the cyber skirmishes associated with the Palestinian intifadah. What started out as a localized conflict spread to battles around the globe as forces sympathetic to either the Israelis or the Palestinians joined the fray. With the Middle East cyber war as a backdrop, this presentation will cover the ways in which people can try to affect the course of world history through coordinated action in cyberspace.
The authors first describe the globalized and asymmetric nature of modern warfare, the asymmetry of computer hacking, and the psychology of subcultures. They outline the legal issues surrounding cyber warfare, from the perspective of a lone hacker to a massive government intelligence service, and discuss the problems inherent in cyber retaliation and in the prosecution of hackers.
On the technical side, this briefing discusses the targeting of Internet sites for attack, and the strategies used by hackers to bring them down or merely leverage them in more subtle ways to support their cause. The primary focus is the means used by cyber commanders to accomplish political and/or social goals, in particular the creation of Web portals through which their foot soldiers are able to unite and rain network packets down upon their enemies.
Finally, this briefing examines the difference between the perception and the reality of cyber attacks. We address the strategies that national governments are employing to combat the threat, the potential impact of cyber attacks on military operations, and the vexing problem of Denial of Service attacks, Web defacements, and free speech. The authors assess the threat and the limits of the more powerful weapons in the cyber arsenal, and consider who might be the biggest target of cyber attacks in the coming years.
Peter D. Feaver (Ph.D., Harvard, 1990) is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Duke University and Director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS). Feaver is co-directing (with Bruce Jentleson) a major research project funded by the Carnegie Corporation, "Wielding American Power: Managing Interventions after September 11." Feaver is author most recently of Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations (Harvard Press, 2003),and co-author, with Christopher Gelpi, of Choosing Your Battles: American Civil-Military Relations and the Use of Force ( Princeton University Press, 2004). He is co-editor, with Richard H. Kohn, of Soldiers and Civilians: The Civil-Military Gap and American National Security (MIT Press, 2001); and author of Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Cornell University Press, 1992).
Kenneth Geers (M.A., University of Washington, 1997) is a Computer Investigations and Operations analyst with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). His career at the Department of Defense also includes work at the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, an SAIC nuclear arms control support team, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Review Board, and the U.S. embassy in Brussels, Belgium. He is an expert in French and Russian, who finished first in a class of seventy at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey. Mr. Geers is the author of training and testing software to prepare U.S. Army Major Commands for Russian strategic arms inspections, and he has designed multiple U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command websites devoted to arms control.