National Cyber Range: Building Attack Tools for Mass Destruction

[Joanne98]

A quintessential hallmark of an authoritarian regime, particularly one that operates within highly-militarized, though nominally democratic states such as ours, is the maintenance of a system of internal control; a seamless panopticon where dissent is equated with criminality and the rule of law derided as a luxury ill-afforded "during a time of war."

In this context, the deployment of new offensive technologies which can wreck havoc on human populations deemed expendable by the state, are always couched in a defensive rhetoric by militarist aggressors and their apologists.

While the al-Qaeda brand may no longer elicit a compelling response in terms of mobilizing the population for new imperial adventures, novel threats--and panics--are required to marshal public support for the upward transfer of wealth into the corporate trough. Today, "cyber terror" functions as the "new Osama."

And with Congress poised to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, an Orwellian bill that would give the president the power to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any "critical" information network "in the interest of national security" of course, the spaces left for the free flow of information--and meaningful dissent--slowly contract.

DARPA--and Cybersecurity Grifters--to the Rescue

But protecting critical infrastructure from hackers, criminals and terrorists isn't the only game in town. The Pentagon is planning to kick-start a new office, Cyber Command, armed with the capacity to launch devastating attacks against any nation or group deemed an official enemy by Washington.

As Antifascist Calling reported last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's "geek squad," is building a National Cyber Range (NCR). As Cyber Command's research arm, the agency's Strategic Technology Office (STO) describes NCR as


DARPA's contribution to the new federal Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative (CNCI), providing a "test bed" to produce qualitative and quantitative assessments of the Nation's cyber research and development technologies. Leveraging DARPA's history of cutting-edge research, the NCR will revolutionize the state of the art for large-scale cyber testing. Ultimately, the NCR will provide a revolutionary, safe, fully automated and instrumented environment for our national cyber security research organizations to evaluate leap-ahead research, accelerate technology transition, and enable a place for experimentation of iterative and new research directions. ("National Cyber Range," Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Strategic Technology Office, no date)

According to a January 2009 press release, the agency announced that NCR "will accelerate government research and development in high-risk, high-return areas and work in close cooperation with private-sector partners to jump-start technical cyber transformation."

Given the Pentagon's proclivity to frame debates over defense and security-related issues as one of "dominating the adversary" and discovering vulnerabilities that can be "exploited" by war planners, one can hypothesize that NCR is a testing range for the creation of new offensive weapons.

Amongst the "private-sector partners" chosen by the agency to "develop, field, and test new 'leap ahead' concepts and capabilities" are:

BAE Systems, Information and Electronic Systems Integration Inc., Wayne, N.J. ($3,279,634); General Dynamics, Advanced Information Systems, San Antonio, Texas ($1,944,094); Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel Md. ($7,336,805); Lockheed Martin Corp., Simulation, Training and Support, Orlando, Fla. ($5,369,656); Northrop Grumman, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems Division, Columbia, Md. ($344,097); Science Applications International Corp., San Diego, Calif. ($2,821,725); SPARTA, Columbia, Md. ($8,603,617).

While little-known outside the defense and intelligence establishment, SPARTA describes its "core business areas" as "strategic defense and offense systems, tactical weapons systems, space systems." Its security and intelligence brief includes "intelligence production, computer network operations, and information assurance."

Investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in The Shadow Factory that SPARTA "hired Maureen Baginski, the NSA's powerful signals intelligence director, in October 2006, as president of its National Security Systems Sector." According to Bamford, the firm, like others in the netherworld of corporate spying are always on the prowl for intelligence analysts "to pursue access and exploitation of targets of interest."

Given their spooky résumé, information on SPARTA's contracts are hard to come by. Indeed, the firm claims that under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act they are exempt from providing the public with information because their products involve "the operation, or use of... intelligence activities... related to national security, command and control of military forces, equipment that is an integral part of a weapon or weapons system, or systems which are critical to the direct fulfillment of military or intelligence missions." How's that for openness and transparency! One can only hazard a guess as to the firm's role in devising DARPA's "leap-ahead" National Cyber Range.

Continued>>>
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/05/national-cyber-range-building-attack.html

[Joanne98]

1. Here's the bill. It's horrifying

A bill to ensure the continued free flow of commerce within the United States and with its global trading partners through secure cyber communications, to provide for the continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet communications for such purposes, to provide for the development of a cadre of information technology specialists to improve and maintain effective cybersecurity defenses against disruption, and for other purposes.

Version History

3To ensure the continued free flow of commerce within the United States and with its global trading partners through secure cyber communications, to provide for the continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet communications for such purposes, to provide for the development of a cadre of information technology specialists to improve and maintain effective cyber security defenses against disruption, and for other purposes.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

April 1, 2009

Mr. ROCKEFELLER (for himself, Ms. SNOWE, and Mr. NELSON of Florida) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation


A BILLCommentsClose CommentsPermalink

To ensure the continued free flow of commerce within the United States and with its global trading partners through secure cyber communications, to provide for the continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet communications for such purposes, to provide for the development of a cadre of information technology specialists to improve and maintain effective cybersecurity defenses against disruption, and for other purposes.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.
(a) SHORT TITLE- This Act may be cited as the ‘Cybersecurity Act of 2009’.

(b) TABLE OF CONTENTS- The table of contents for this Act is as follows:


Sec. 1. Short title; table of contents.

Sec. 2. Findings.


Sec. 3. Cybersecurity Advisory Panel.


Sec. 4. Real-time cybersecurity dashboard.



Sec. 5. State and regional cybersecurity enhancement program



Sec. 6. NIST standards development and compliance.


Sec. 7. Licensing and certification of cybersecurity professionals.



Sec. 8. Review of NTIA domain name contracts.


Sec. 9. Secure domain name addressing system.


Sec. 10. Promoting cybersecurity awareness.


Sec. 11. Federal cybersecurity research and development


Sec. 12. Federal Cyber Scholarship-for-Service program.


Sec. 13. Cybersecurity competition and challenge.


Sec. 14. Public-private clearinghouse

Sec. 15. Cybersecurity risk management report.CommentsClose CommentsPermalink



Sec. 16. Legal framework review and report.

Sec. 17. Authentication and civil liberties report.


Sec. 18. Cybersecurity responsibilities and authorities


Sec. 19. Quadrennial cyber review.

Sec. 20. Joint intelligence threat assessment.


Sec. 21. International norms and cybersecurity deterrence measures.



Sec. 22. Federal Secure Products and Services Acquisitions Board



Sec. 23. Definitions.


SEC. 2. FINDINGS.
The Congress finds the following:


(1) America’s failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the country.

(2) Since intellectual property is now often stored in digital form, industrial espionage that exploits weak cybersecurity dilutes our investment in innovation while subsidizing the research and development efforts of foreign competitors. In the new global competition, where economic strength and technological leadership are vital components of national power, failing to secure cyberspace puts us at a disadvantage.

(3) According to the 2009 Annual Threat Assessment, ‘a successful cyber attack against a major financial service provider could severely impact the national economy, while cyber attacks against physical infrastructure computer systems such as those that control power grids or oil refineries have the potential to disrupt services for hours or weeks’ and that ‘Nation states and criminals target our government and private sector information networks to gain competitive advantage in the commercial sector.’.

(4) The Director of National Intelligence testified before the Congress on February 19, 2009, that ‘a growing array of state and non-state adversaries are increasingly targeting-for exploitation and potentially disruption or destruction-our information infrastructure, including the Internet, telecommunications networks, computer systems, and embedded processors and controllers in critical industries’ and these trends are likely to continue.

(5) John Brennan, the Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism wrote on March 2, 2009, that ‘our nation’s security and economic prosperity depend on the security, stability, and integrity of communications and information infrastructure that are largely privately-owned and globally-operated.’.


(6) Paul Kurtz, a Partner and chief operating officer of Good Harbor Consulting as well as a senior advisor to the Obama Transition Team for cybersecurity, recently stated that the United States is unprepared to respond to a ‘cyber-Katrina’ and that ‘a massive cyber disruption could have a cascading, long-term impact without adequate co-ordination between government and the private sector.’.

(7) The Cyber Strategic Inquiry 2008, sponsored by Business Executives for National Security and executed by Booz Allen Hamilton, recommended to ‘establish a single voice for cybersecurity within government’ concluding that the ‘unique nature of cybersecurity requires a new leadership paradigm.’.

(8) Alan Paller, the Director of Research at the SANS Institute, testified before the Congress that ‘the fight against cybercrime resembles an arms race where each time the defenders build a new wall, the attackers create new tools to scale the wall. What is particularly important in this analogy is that, unlike conventional warfare where deployment takes time and money and is quite visible, in the cyber world, when the attackers find a new weapon, they can attack millions of computers, and successfully infect hundreds of thousands, in a few hours or days, and remain completely hidden.’.

(9) According to the February 2003 National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, ‘our nation’s critical infrastructures are composed of public and private institutions in the sectors of agriculture, food, water, public health, emergency services, government, defense industrial base, information and telecommunications, energy, transportation, banking finance, chemicals and hazardous materials, and postal and shipping. Cyberspace is their nervous system--the control system of our country’ and that ‘the cornerstone of America’s cyberspace security strategy is and will remain a public-private partnership.’.http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s773/text

Booz Allen Hamilton is supporting it!

[arcadian]

2. I posted a story from the NY Times about this today

People just don't care, it's not sext enough. To many a computer is still a magic box that they little understand.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=5742312&mesg_id=5742312