Blog Wars - Views from the Front Line

Part 5 – The Future Of Web Warfare

As the recently declassified Information Operations Roadmap shows us, the USA at least is tooling up with an eye to fighting open warfare online. The document itself is heavy going, but the objective is clear:

“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.”

For the casually cynical web user, the notion of a US military presence on a par with the US Navy suddenly cropping up on the Internet could easily be a cause for some alarm. Do we really need the internet to become a militarised zone? Maybe not, but then that assumes the web isn’t tooled up already.

According to the Federal Reserve, estimates for the amount of financial damage caused by the ‘I Love You’ virus stand at between five and fifteen billion dollars, that’s a heck of a hit financially and with terrorists always looking for new ways to damage Western society, a few well placed and hard to shift viruses could cause immense harm to the economy and disruption to the lives of millions.

Another example is the Echelon system, initially set up during the Cold War by the USA and UK and now scanning almost all email traffic in the Western world. The existence of Echelon is still officially denied, although Members of the European Parliament are making a case that the UKs involvement in the scheme constitutes a breach of human rights. With spies, terrorists, cops, robbers, soldiers, deserters, hackers, crackers, slackers and civilians all existing side by side on the internet it is only a matter of time before things start to heat up in cyberspace.

The weapons of web warfare already exist and while we have yet to see them used with real menace, there can be no doubt that if we do see full scale online war between nations there’s going to be a lot more at stake than just our ping to the WoW servers.