Since the presidential election result was announced last month, America has become an embittered battlefield. Few issues are causing fiercer controversy than the role of Russia in securing Donald Trump’s victory.
The CIA last week asserted ‘with high confidence’ that Kremlin-directed hackers were responsible for the revelation through Wikileaks of thousands of Democratic Party emails, derailing the Hillary Clinton campaign wagon just at a crucial moment during the election when Trump was in trouble over his appalling treatment of women.
Then, in a sensational development reported yesterday, intelligence officials said that Russia’s President Putin was personally involved in the hacking campaign.
If that was not enough to spark intense unease in Western capitals, President Obama’s spokesman then launched an extraordinary attack on Mr Trump, saying that it was ‘obvious’ he knew about the Russian interference in the election.
Trump dismisses as ‘ridiculous’ the charges that the Russians helped to place him, their avowed friend, in the White House. Few even among his foes suggest that he won solely thanks to the hackers. But the 2016 U.S. election has highlighted the extraordinary influence now wielded by the internet upon every aspect of our world.
The former U.S. Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger, that guru for all seasons, wrote presciently in his 2014 book World Order: ‘Presidential elections are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the internet . . whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction.’
What is most chilling, however, is the speed with which cyber conflict is now evolving.
America’s Information Operational Technology Centre was created in 1998 to spy on actual and potential enemies, corrupt their digital networks, even control their computers. Its early operations were unimpressive. During the 1999 bombing of Kosovo, its geeks made Serbian president Slobadan Milosevic’s telephone ring incessantly, which seems merely to have annoyed him.
Before one anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Americans took down an Al Qaeda website, blocking the planned release of a propaganda broadcast by Osama bin Laden. Afterwards, however, counter-terrorist chiefs bitterly protested that all that had been achieved was to alert Al Qaeda to the vulnerability of its communications.
Others, however, were much more successful. In 2008, the Israelis are alleged to have disabled the Syrian air defence system, allowing their bombers to hit President Assad’s nuclear facilities.
Beyond international hacking, even mainstream social media feeds are being manipulated, with some perpetrating outright lies in an attempt to influence the thinking of ordinary people.
This was noticeably evident in the U.S. election, when Trump’s man Michael Flynn — now designated National Security Adviser in the new administration — re-tweeted to his own 150,000 followers the crazy allegations that Hillary Clinton was involved in a sex-slave ring based on a Washington pizza parlour.
British historian Professor Sir Michael Howard argues that the new power of social media, and especially Twitter, to influence both politics and war ‘is comparable to that of the invention of breech-loading firearms’.
Most alarming is the way in which it’s being used to spread false information. Mendacious news stories — one, for instance, claiming that Clinton is a predatory lesbian — triggered huge amounts of Facebook and Twitter traffic.
While the internet and social media can do wonderful things for billions of people, the lack of adequate controls allows them to be exploited to devastating effect not only by politicians and aggressive nation states, but by pornographers, drug-traffickers and terrorists. They have also empowered terrorists to conduct worldwide dialogues with actual and prospective supporters. Thirty years ago, a would-be jihadi in Bradford would have been puzzled about how to sign up to a militant group. Today, ten minutes at a keyboard will provide him with propaganda and contacts.
American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who examined prisoners’ and corpses’ ‘pocket litter’, as the trade calls personal possessions, were amazed to discover the scale of terrorist internet exploitation.
But while this malign use of social media is deeply worrying, it is cyber-warfare that could have genuinely catastrophic consequences. And though the Russians have proved themselves uniquely aggressive, they were not first out of the stalls. American author Jim Bamford has written several books attacking the U.S. National Security Agency for allegedly triggering this dangerous phenomenon.
He cites the 2010 American insertion of the so-called Stuxnet computer virus into Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, disabling 1,000 centrifuges.
This, he argued, legitimised the 2012 Iranian retaliation against U.S. banks and the oil company Aramco, which in a matter of hours saw 35,000 computers partially wiped or totally destroyed.
Files on the computers were replaced with an image of a burning American flag. As a result, one of the most valuable firms on Earth found itself having to rely on typewriters and faxes.
It is America’s fault, Bamford claims, that the internet has now become a Wild West for aggressive nations. However Michael Hayden, from 1999 successively director of the National Security Agency and the CIA, responds that there had been considerable evidence of cyber-aggression by other nations before 2010.
In 2007, so-called ‘patriotic Russian attackers’ paralysed Estonia’s communications for days. More recently, North Koreans prompted a sensation by hacking and leaking Sony’s computer files on Hollywood stars, in revenge over a movie that satirised their country.
Far more sinister targeting is feasible: imagine the human tragedies that would result if a city hospital’s computers, power and back-up collapsed. Babies would die, life support systems would be switched off, and grievously sick and injured people would find themselves beyond aid.
Cyber-attack could achieve this, just as it can knock out power grids, broadcasters, air traffic control systems and GPS satellites.
After 9/11, the U.S. National Security Agency hired several thousand super-bright young men and women, average age 31, to work on the new internet black arts. Hayden says: ‘It wasn’t lost on any of the new recruits that we were offering them the opportunity to legally do stuff that would be felonies in any other [situation] . . . they had a “no target impossible to penetrate” mentality’.
The Chinese, Russians, Israelis, North Koreans and British did the same, of course. The CIA’s first act when Barack Obama became president in 2008 was to warn him to ditch his BlackBerry phone.
Hayden said later: ‘We were telling the guy who was soon going to be the most powerful man in the most powerful country on earth that if he used his smartphone, a countless number of foreign intelligence services were going to listen to his phone calls and read his emails. We didn’t feign outrage or claim some moral high ground. We simply explained, “That’s just the way it is.” ’
In 2013, the NSA geek Edward Snowden revealed from his Moscow sanctuary the stupendous scale of U.S. and British eavesdropping through the NSA and our own GCHQ at Cheltenham, including Chancellor Angela Merkel’s iPhone. That part caused outrage among naïve Germans.
The internet revolution has come upon us so swiftly, says Henry Kissinger, that nobody has yet worked out how to control it, or even to comprehend its consequences for mankind. ‘No government, even the most totalitarian, has been able to arrest the flow or to resist the trend to push ever-more of its operations into the digital domain.’
The old distinction between war and peace has almost disappeared: we live somewhere between the two. Since our politicians have not explained this to us, let me try: If one nation fires weapons at another, this represents a definable hostile act. Today, however, rival nations skirmish and wrestle relentlessly in silent and invisible cyber-space.
With no bombs falling, it is difficult for any government to explain to its people what is happening, or who its aggressor might be.
Thus hackers push ever further and harder against the institutions and facilities of those whom they deem enemies. That is what Vladimir Putin’s cyberwarriors do today, because his mischief-making — for the time being — seems cost-free.
President Obama has been accused of weakness for passivity in the face of Russia’s outrageous games during the election. But the U.S. leader understands how perilous is the path towards escalation.
Several recent learned papers by strategic gurus sketch scenarios for cold cyber-war turning into hot shooting war. The Americans and Chinese possess capabilities for knocking huge holes in each other’s air defence systems, for example.
In a crisis over Taiwan, for instance, both nations would be tempted to launch pre-emptive cyber-strikes — out of fear of the dire consequences for their own security if they did not.
Therein lies the roots of many of history’s great wars, precipitated by one government or another attacking, because it fears the cost of inaction.
The old distinction between peace and war is probably gone for ever. Our children and grandchildren will pass their lives neither in perfect safety, nor in inevitable peril. Most will go to work, watch football, marry and holiday just as they always have done.
Out of sight, however, in the cyber powerhouses of the great nations, an unending struggle will be waged against terrorists and between states. This will spasmodically explode into open violence, which we should fervently hope can be contained.
Historian Sir Michael Howard suggests that soon nuclear weapons will increasingly seem as redundant as horsed cavalry became a century ago. Nations are far more likely to unleash their cyber-weapons which, in our computer-dependent society, could potentially be as catastrophic as bombs.
We need not despair in the face of the cyber threat, but we must acknowledge its reality. This is the future. Like drones and atomic bombs, it cannot be uninvented. We must simply learn to defend ourselves, and especially our disturbingly vulnerable and absolutely computer-dependent infrastructure.
Ideally, a start must be made towards international regulation of the worldwide web, but that is easier said than done. Who can imagine Vladimir Putin sacrificing a jot of the influence he has achieved through hacking other nations’ computers, such as he could never attain through Russian economic or even conventional military power?
In 1959, American novelist Richard Condon published a best-selling novel, The Manchurian Candidate, about a Chinese communist plot to exploit brainwashing to propel their secret nominee into the White House.
That fictional scheme failed. Yet today we are about to see Russia’s preferred candidate become leader of the United States.
Even if ‘The Muscovite President’ does not represent solely a hackers’ triumph, cyber-attack has contributed significantly to his rise. If that does not trouble you, it certainly frightens me.
And, perhaps scariest of all, we are only at the nursery stage of the internet-war era.
Mailonline
