Ryan Singel writing for Threat Level believes that the Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet
With the rise of the internet nation states have begun to lose control of their citizens and have introduced ever more draconian laws to try and claw some of that control back.
The War on Terror was framed as a Cold War for the 21st Century and a fog of fear was spread over the population but that fog gradually lifted as people realised that they were not at risk from Al Qaeda. Even when a nutcase tried to ignite explosives in his underpants on an aircraft and politicians and the news media spewed rhetoric about this dangerous new tactic of the terrorists and how something had to be done most people soon went back to their lives as if nothing happened.
The powers that be needed a new threat with which to control the people and the Chinese hacking of Google and others provided them the framing to do it.
Western civilisation is now under the peril of being destroyed by China in the form of computer hackers.
Google’s allegation that Chinese hackers infiltrated its Gmail servers and targeted Chinese dissidents proves the United States is “losing” the cyberwar, according to McConnell.
But that’s not warfare. That’s espionage.
We do not need as Mike McConnell to ‘reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable.’
The ‘Google hacking situation’ was first and foremost the infiltration of the servers of private industry not an attack on the United States itself. The IT security of American companies is an issue where the US government can be of assistance by offering advice or notifying of specific threats that they’ve become aware of, but not through monitoring and controlling the internet.