The Security Blog

The "news" that Russia and other countries is seeking to create a treaty, and potentially an enforcement agency, to prevent, mitigate and control cybercrime and cyberwars is not that new.

Since at least 1995 Russia has attempted to create a formal framework to control and prevent such activity and  is implying that US resistance to such work is a proof that the US encourages and fosters such attacks and crime.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

While it is certainly understood why a government for a country which is not leading in a specific area – for example here – computer technology, would push other states to put a muzzle on their utilization and in such doing, prevent a perceived benefit from being capitalized on, some may not understand what would cause the US to be against such a move.

Allow me to suggest a few reasons why the notion is both ludicrous and abhorrent to a free society.

Firstly, unlike the case when referring to Nuclear and to Chemical nonproliferation, there is nothing to "have" or to "store". In contrast to the need to process, create, and securely store ordnance or dual-use items, where the case is Cyber warfare, any and every computer can be, and sometime is, an "instrument of war". Only in very controlled societies, such as Russia or Iran, can access to computing infrastructure be so restricted as to carefully control who, when, where, and how has access to a desktop.

Secondly, the definition of war is far from being universal. Some innocent action, automatically performed by routers, for example, might be seen as "offensive" while some, clearly suspicious in nature, such as network-mapping may have completely civilian reasons and need.

Thirdly, as is the case with nearly all cyber-activity, national borders have no meaning, or very little meaning, in this regard. Who would be the aggressor if the activity resulted from a server owned by a Danish company, hosted in the US, traveling over Japanese-owned bandwidth, and controlled by a Romanian? What laws of war have been broken here?

Fourthly, and despite the fact I expect a disagreement over this point, there is a lack of a definition of what constitutes an attack. Would 100,000 pings be one attack or 100,000? Would one attack by 50,000 zombies be one action or 50,000? What if those 50,000 were in 12 different countries? What if they were controlled by an individual from the victim country itself? Would that still be "war"?

The next point is something that can be, and indeed has, been defined successfully Russia demands that we would

…ban a country from secretly embedding malicious codes or circuitry that could be later activated from afar in the event of war.

As I said, this is not new. For over forty years, Dr. Colonel Roger Schell (USAF, Retired) has called for the use of more secure (up to A1 classified) systems in order to counter the threat of Subversion. Dr. Schell certainly knows what he is talking about, and has seen instances of other countries sponsoring such subversion activities – in code or hardware – in devices used in the US. For a country such as Russia, and to a lesser extent, the US, reliance on imported circuitry is de rigueur. The only reason that the US is less reliant on such technologies is that the US military has a specific rule disallowing the use of certain items and code in many sensitive systems. While Russia has similar rules, its industrial base has not fully been able to provide 100% answer to the in-county manufacturing of all needed circuitry, so far. This fact has caused Russia, which is certainly top-notch in its mathematical thinking capacity, to be more dependant on circuitry made elsewhere for some of its critical systems – especially those that have dual-use, i.e. not just military, purpose – such as SCADA networks throughout the country.

Russia is indeed speaking out of both sides of its mouth when it argues that the European convention of cybercrime allows investigation into a case without first informing local authorities – while all the while demanding such super-sovereign ideas be included in a global treaty.

Let’s face it. Cyber activity is the reason why 1984 – like scenarios do not work. I am proud to live in a country that understands that the Internet is a Genie which can not be re-bottled.

Permalink

Two further, conflicting, usages of electronic data are emerging in the Iranian situation.  In the first, a website is using digital picture evidence to show how Lebanese, arabic-speaking, and non-Iranian-military forces are being use to repress the freedom seeking protesters in Iran.

The site lebasshakhsi.blogspot.com/ is providing pictorial evidence (some examples above) of "security forces" who are Lebas-Shakhsi (without uniform) beating peaceful demonstrators.  It follows those pictures with documentary evidence to the foreign nature of those forces.    Being foriegn here, in addition to the terms emphasised above means a few different things.  For example:

• That the regime was prepared ahead of time for "troubles" with these elections and even expecting trouble;
  
• That the regime believed it could not reliably call on its own, Persian, forces to fire on their fellow citizens;
  
• That the Lebanese-based Hizballah forces were willing to potentially sacrifice their own fighters to do favors for the Iranian regime; and
  
• That Hizballah has no particular like to the average Persian in the street, and willing to beat them and kill them.
  

[-----------------------------------------------------]

On the opposite side, the Iranian Regime has sites, such as xxxxx (name withheld per request) that use a technique called "crowdsourcing" to show faces of individual protesters and to ask the public to "come and tell us who they are".  Of course, using language such as

Unfortunately,… hypocrites, monarchists and counter-revolutionary and terrorist groups in cyberspace and the media are nothing but [trying to] disrupt the country social security and not for any other purpose to achieve this aim to …"

to try and encourage voluntary snitching on protesters.  That, if followed by a "call to their national responsibility"

Therefore, all users hereby and Iranian families are expected if [they know of] the personal data of any of the following photos and any news and information including photos, films, articles, news, email, web address, or complaints about the flow of disturbance of trade and [of the ] demand of each group in cyberspace actions [which] are destructive to stimulate activity through the site [...should email the information to the authorities]

Conflicting use of digital information.

Permalink