by Steve Watson
May 6, 2008
from
Infowars Website
|
New $30 Billion "electronic Manhattan
Project" underway to prepare military and federal government for all
out Cyberwar |
The Pentagon is to spend $30 Billion building a super secret "National Cyber
Range" in order to prepare for all out cyber warfare by using it to conduct
mock online battles with realistic info-warriors.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), previously
responsible for the development of electronic surveillance programs such as,
...has been ordered by Congress to create what is
essentially a new internet as a cyberspace battleground.
Wired.com has reported,
"According to a defense official familiar with the
program: 'Congress has given DARPA a direct order; that's only happened once
before - with the Sputnik program in the '50s'"
The NCR will not only allow for defense from electronic attack, but will
also allow offensive strikes against "adversaries online". It is rumored to
be the keystone of a so called "Comprehensive National Cybersecurity
Initiative", created via a secret presidential order in January.
A
request for proposals, released by DARPA yesterday outlined how the agency
wants the NCR to be able to,
"realistically replicate human behavior and
frailties," and feature "realistic, sophisticated, nation-state quality
offensive and defensive opposition forces".
The NCR's operators should be able to,
"integrate, replicate, or simulate"
military satellite and digital radio communications, mobile ad-hoc networks,
physical access control systems, U.S. and foreign "unmanned aerial vehicles,
weapons, [and] radar systems" - even "cyber cafes" and "personal
digital assistances [sic]" the proposal states.
A previous notice outlined that the NCR would allow the Pentagon to:
-
Conduct unbiased, quantitative and
qualitative assessment of information assurance and survivability
tools in a representative network environment
-
Replicate complex, large-scale, heterogeneous networks and users in
current and future Department of Defense (DoD) weapon systems and operations
-
Enable multiple, independent,
simultaneous experiments on the same infrastructure
-
Enable realistic testing of
Internet/Global-Information-Grid (GIG) scale research
-
Develop and deploy revolutionary cyber
testing capabilities
-
Enable the use of the scientific method for rigorous cyber testing
The project is so secret that it has been referred to as an
electronic "Manhattan Project".
The Senate Homeland Security committee, a key
Senate oversight panel has cited concerns about the secrecy around the
project and has been forced to write to the DHS to request basic information
on the project.
Commentators have speculated that the entire project may be a huge new part
of the federal government's so called "terrorist surveillance program",
which has so far only been shown to constitute cyberwarfare against everyday
Americans via warrantless wiretapping and interception of communications.
Wired.com comments:
"Why might citizens be worried about privacy and civil liberties? Consider
that the whole initiative appears to have been launched after the Director
of National Intelligence told the President Bush that a cyber attack might
wreak as much economic havoc as 9/11 did.
Consider that the NSA, which
currently protects classified networks, wants to expand into protecting all
non-classified federal government networks.
Consider that Congress is set to
legalize the NSA's monitoring rooms in the nation's phone and internet
infrastructure. For its part, the FBI says it also needs access to the
internet's backbone, while the Air Force is hyping its own efforts at cyber
defense and offense. [...]
Now it seems the only question is whether the government will be able to
turn the net into a controllable, monitorable and trackable pre-internet
AOL-type service or whether the chaotic net will live on as just another
frontier for the military-industrial complex to start an arm's race and rake
in billions of government dollars."
Could this be the Pentagon's ultimate "solution" to counter the internet, an
arena of freedom and progress that military strategists now view as a
bastard child they let slip from their grasp some twenty or so years ago?
While
Homeland Security head
Chertoff has denied that the project is part of
a vast effort to restrict or "sit on the internet", the Pentagon has
previously made it clear that the internet, free of restriction and holding
such potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals.
The Pentagon has stressed that the internet needs to be dealt with as if it
were an enemy "weapons system".
Recently, a document entitled
Information Operation Roadmap was
declassified by the Pentagon due to a Freedom of Information Act request by
the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
One portion of the document states:
“Information, always important in warfare, is now critical to military
success and will only become more so in the foreseeable future.....
Information operations should be centralized under the Office of the
Secretary of Defense and made a core military competency."
"Objective: IO [information operations] becomes a core competency. The
importance of dominating the information spectrum explains the objective of
transforming IO into a core military competency on a par with air, ground,
maritime and special operations.
The charge to the IO Roadmap oversight
panel was to develop as concrete a set of action recommendations as possible
to make IO a core competency, which in turn required identifying the
essential prerequisites to become a core military competency."
Another section of the document focuses on what is referred to as "Computer
Network Attack":
"When implemented the recommendations of this report will effectively
jumpstart a rapid improvement of CNA [Computer Network Attack] capability."
- 7
"Enhanced IO [information operations] capabilities for the warfighter,
including: ... A robust offensive suite of capabilities to include
full-range electronic and computer network attack..." - 7
While other sections urge the Department of Defense to "Fight the Net":
"We Must Fight the Net. DoD [Department of Defense] is building an
information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center
of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to "fight the net." - 6
"DoD's "Defense in Depth" strategy should operate on the premise that the
Department will "fight the net" as it would a weapons system." - 13
A previous document that echoes such sentiments is the now infamous
Rebuilding America's Defences by The Project for a New American Century
(PNAC).
In this 2000 document those that would go on to become the nucleus
of the
Bush administration stated:
"It is now commonly understood that information and other new
technologies... are creating a dynamic that may threaten America's ability
to exercise its dominant military power." - 4
"Control of space and cyberspace. Much as control of the high seas - and the
protection of international commerce - defined global powers in the past, so
will control of the new "international commons" be a key to world power in
the future.
An America incapable of protecting its interests or that of its
allies in space or the "infosphere" will find it difficult to exert global
political leadership." - 51
"Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to
unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly
different than it is today, and "combat" likely will take place in new
dimensions: in space, "cyber-space," and perhaps the world of microbes." -
60
The importance of information warfare is clearly laid out in both these
documents.
Brent Jessop, a regular contributor to Infowars.net and
Prisonplanet.com has exhaustively documented the phenomenon of “Full
Spectrum Information Warfare” in a four part series of articles.
We have also previously documented the existing moves
to kill off the
internet as we know it today by the federal government.
Note that the enemy is never specifically named, it is merely whoever uses
the net, because the enemy IS the net.
The enemy is the freedom the net
provides to billions around the globe and the threat to militaristic
dominance of information and the ultimate power that affords.
