ARSTRAT IO Newsletter



Information Operations

Newsletter

Compiled by: Mr. Jeff Harley

US Army Strategic Command

G39, Information Operations Branch

Table of Contents

ARSTRAT IO Page on Intelink-U

Table of Contents

Vol. 8, no. 03 (23 October – 2 November 2007)

1. Cyber Wars

2. Relying on Syrian Disinformation

3. Airmen And Marines Team For Djibouti Civil Affairs Engagement

4. US Websites 'Hijacked' By Chinese Hackers

5. Air Force's Future Lies In Cyberspace

6. House Panel Chief Demands Details of Cybersecurity Plan

7. Cyber Warriors

8. Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace

9. Defense Lauds Exceptional Technology Work

10. Bulgarian Cyber Attack

11. 23rd IOS Conducts Information Operations (IO) Weapons and Tactics Conference and Tactics Review Board

12. Exclusive: I Was a Hacker for the MPAA

13. Inside the Surge: How Ordinary Iraqis Are Turning the Tide of War

14. Taking Down Terrorist Web Sites (commentary)

15. Russian Hackers Cripple Yushchenko Website

16. The Great Firewall: China's Misguided — and Futile — Attempt to Control What Happens Online

17. 'Criminal' Botnet Stumps for Ron Paul, Researchers Allege

18. Boeing Teams with Northrop Grumman on B-52 Core Component Jammer

19. Cyber War Moves Up NATO Agenda

20. A Late Push for the Cyber Command

21. Countdown to Cyber Holy War?

22. Targeting Hearts and Minds: Canadians Woo Undecided among Afghan Public

23. Net Force

24. Army Global Information Operations Conference, 5 - 8 February 08

25. Building Knowledge Management System for Researching Terrorist Groups on the Web

Cyber Wars

By Bob Brewin, Government Executive, October 24, 2007

September seemed to mark a serious escalation in global cyber warfare. Media reports detailed what appeared to be Chinese attacks against Pentagon networks and government computer systems in Germany, France and the United Kingdom -- putting Defense Department officials on the offensive.

It began in early September when Financial Times reported attacks against Pentagon computer systems, and quoted unnamed Defense Department officials who pinned the blame on China's People's Liberation Army. In France, Germany, the U.K. and New Zealand, officials reported attacks and evidence of spyware traceable to China on government computer systems. In the U.K., Times Online reported that "China leads the list of countries hacking into government computers that contain Britain's military and foreign policy secrets."

At the same time, China has accused the United States and other Western powers of conducting a campaign of computer infiltration and subversion through the Internet, according to Vice Minister of Information Industry Lou Qinjian. In an article published by Reuters, Lou said Internet technology products exported to China by the United States and other countries contain "back doors" used for technological espionage.

Security experts say it's hard to determine exactly who is behind the recent global wave of cyberattacks, due to the diffuse nature of the Internet. While a set of attacks against one nation could seem to emanate from China, in reality those computers could be part of a botnet army controlled by a third country that hijacked Chinese computers, according to Kent Anderson, managing director of Network Risk Management.

Alan Paller, director of the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md., says it's wrong to call the latest round of attacks cyber war. Paller prefers the term "cyber espionage" or probes to determine the nature of network systems, rather than an all-out attack to take them down.

Government policies "keep attacks so secret that top government executives do not know how bad the problem really is," Paller says. After recent media reports, Pentagon officials acknowledged that they took e-mail systems in the Office of the Secretary of Defense offline last spring after hackers got into the network.

In an internal paper, Defense refuses to identify China as the source of attacks, but acknowledges, "We have seen attempts by a variety of state- and nonstate-sponsored organizations to gain unauthorized access to, or otherwise degrade, DoD information systems."

Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, says he does not know whether cyberattacks in September were mounted by amateur hackers or nations, but either way, they should serve as a warning. "If you practice poor computer security, you will pay a price for it," he says.

The Defense Department has redundant systems in place to defend its network against cyberattacks, but in the past year it has started to push development of offensive information warfare capabilities. If "we apply the principle of warfare to the cyber domain, as we do to sea, air and land, we realize the defense of the nation is better served by capabilities enabling us to take the fight to our adversaries, when necessary, to deter actions detrimental to our interests," Marine Gen. James Cartwright, commander of the Strategic Command, told the House Armed Services Committee in March.

In June, Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, head of the Air Force's cyber command, told the Defense Technology Forum in Washington that he intends to "redefine air power" and extend the service's "global reach and power into cyberspace." That includes both defensive and offensive operations, Elder added.

A report released in April by the Defense Science Board stated: "Adversaries need to be assured that their attacks against U.S. information systems will be detected, that U.S. functionality will be restored . . . and an adversary needs to know that the U.S. possesses powerful hard- and soft-kill [cyber warfare] means for attacking adversary information and command and support systems at all levels."

The Army and Air Force started pushing to acquire technology to go on the offense in cyberspace this year. In May, Army officials released a solicitation for a wide range of offensive information tools, saying, "technologies designed to interrupt these modern networks must use subtle, less obvious methodology that disguises the technique used, protecting the ability whenever possible to permit future use."

In a similar solicitation in April, the Air Force's 950th Electronic Systems Group said it wanted industry help to define technologies to "disrupt, deny, degrade or deceive an adversary's information system." The service also seeks tools that will help it map and access data and voice networks, conduct denial-of-service attacks and manipulate data on enemy networks.

Instead of going on the offensive, nations should instead develop a code of "best behavior" for the Internet, says Philip Coyle, senior adviser with the Center for Defense Information who served as assistant secretary of Defense and director of its operational test and evaluation office from 1994 to 2001.

The Internet is a global cyber commons, and launching attacks inside such a common infrastructure "is as irresponsible as shouting fire in a crowded theater," Coyle says. He believes national leaders such as President Bush and Premier Wen Jiabao should take an arms control approach to ratchet down cyber warfare. "It wouldn't be any easier to negotiate such arms control than it has been where nuclear weapons are concerned," Coyle says. "But it may become necessary just the same."

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Relying on Syrian Disinformation

By David Schenker, Counterterrorism Blog, 24 October 2007

On October 21, the Israeli daily Jerusalem Post ran a story that Lebanese MP and Druze Community leader Walid Jumblatt would meet secretly in New York with Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak to discuss regime change in Damascus. That night, the story was reported by Israel’s InfoLive TV, and Haaretz carried the same tale a day later. With the exception of the Jerusalem Post, these Israeli sources all attributed the story to an article that appeared on October 21 the Syrian Government’s online propaganda outlet Champress.

Today, in what appears to be the last chapter of this circular reporting, Champress is now citing an Israeli website () as confirmation of Jumblatt meetings with Israelis.

Amazingly, none of the Israeli media outlets mentioned that the Syrian press is government-controlled and operated, often unreliable, and typically used to discredit enemies of the Asad regime. Indeed, the Jerusalem Post merely described Champress as “a Syrian internet site.”

In giving the Champress story so much credibility, it appears that the Israeli press was somehow unaware that Jumblatt—a key leader in the Cedar Revolution that expelled Syria from Lebanon and advocates for an end to Syrian and Iranian interference in Lebanon—is public enemy number one in Syria. No doubt, the Israeli press missed the article earlier this year in Champress titled “Walid Jumblatt: Donkey of Mukhtara and Dog of [US Ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey] Feltman.”

The reliance on Champress as a credible source for a story that could carry important implications—in the case of Walid Jumblatt life or death—suggests a total lack of understanding of how the authoritarian state of Syria works. In Syria, media is a tool of state power. In this context, the Champress article was a Syrian-government attack on Jumblatt, who was visiting Washington, and making tough statements about Syrian assassinations of Lebanese parliamentary leaders. Israeli media outlets that recklessly carried this story only lent credibility to the Syrian attack.

Sadly, for those in Lebanon who advocate freedom and close relations with Washington, this latest episode will only confirm suspicions that Israel is backing the wrong side in the ongoing struggle for Lebanon’s independence.

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Airmen And Marines Team For Djibouti Civil Affairs Engagement

By 1st Lt. David Herndon CJTF-HOA Public Affairs, 25 October 2007

NAGAD, Djibouti— A culmination of smiles and laughter filled the air as Airmen and Marines provided live entertainment, toys and water to the residents of Nagad village, Oct. 23.

Nagad was the site of a Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa civil affairs engagement, teaming Airmen of the United States Central Air Forces’ Expeditionary Band and Marines of the 3rd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion.

The event marked the second time in October the two services joined together to provide humanitarian assistance to Djiboutian villages.

“I think it’s great that we can bring some of our culture to our friends here in Djibouti and share goodwill with our neighbors,” said Marine Capt. Christopher Crim, 3rd LAAD Batter B commanding officer. “Regardless of service, we are all on the same team, the American team, and we look to once again spread our goodwill to our friends who are so kind and gracious to host our efforts.”

The CENTAF Band’s mobile expeditionary performance group ‘Live Round,’ currently based out of Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, performed a blend of current and classic rock ‘n’ roll musical selections to entertain the crowd of nearly 200 villagers, primarily consisting of school-aged children.

“We all speak different languages, but music seems to be something that unifies us all,” said Air Force Master Sgt. Joseph Grasso, CENTAF Band superintendent. “It is important that we reach kids at this age so we can let them know what America is all about and what we hope to accomplish in the region, which is to deter extremism.”

For the Marines, who are deployed to CJTF-HOA from Camp Pendleton, Calif., this type of engagement is an additional mission to their primary duty of providing security to Camp Lemonier.

“Tactically, civil affairs engagements are important to us because they accomplish the important goal of ensuring the local population views our presence as a benefit to them,” said Lt. Col. A.F. Potter, 3rd Low Altitude Air Defense Battalion commanding officer. “Civil affairs engagements are not only about economics and security; they are also about friendship-building, mutual trust, and genuine commitment. Targeting these things will create security and foster stability.”

The band spent nearly two hours performing for villagers before 3rd LAAD Marines began passing gifts and water to village elders and children, an experience enjoyed by all.

“Everyone knows that the Americans are very open here in Djibouti,” said Idriss Akmed Khayre, Nagad Village chief. “[CJTF-HOA] military members do so much good for us and we appreciate it. I look forward to working with [CJTF-HOA] again in the future.”

According to Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Paul Eschliman, Live Round’s chief vocalist, the event served as a creative way for Airmen and Marines to work together to prevent conflict and extremism by fostering positive relationships in the local area.

“This type of event will pay long-term dividends that most wouldn’t believe,” said Eschliman. “Making friends now will help our relationships grow exponentially in the distant future.”

Civil Affairs engagements, similar to the Nagad concert, serve as opportunities for CJTF-HOA personnel to reduce the specter of conflict, war and extremism in the Horn of Africa.

“We know that simply throwing money at a problem will not yield the desired results,” said Potter. “We must be truly genuine in our efforts to make friends and civil affairs is our ounce of prevention.”

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US Websites 'Hijacked' By Chinese Hackers

From the Telegraph (UK), 20/10/2007

American websites have come under attack in China since President George W. Bush met the Dalai Lama in Washington this week.

Popular search engines are said to have been "hijacked" by computer hackers who had managed to redirect users to a Chinese website.

Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on internet searching, said that those attempting to use the search engines on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft websites were being sent on to a Chinese equivalent called Baidu.

Access to other popular American websites including YouTube was also reported to have been blocked.

There was speculation that the motive behind the "hijacking" might be retaliation against the United States for the warm welcome it showed the Dalai Lama.

On Wednesday, Mr Bush called for an end to "religious repression" in China as he defiantly became the first US president to appear in public with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader.

The Dalai Lama accepted the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honour awarded by the US, in a formal ceremony in Washington that served to further infuriate Beijing.

"It seems like China is fed up with the US, so as a way to fight back they redirected virtually all search traffic from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to Baidu, the Chinese based search engine," said a statement by Search Engine Roundtable.

The authors said it was not clear exactly how or why the searches were being redirected, but China is known for tightly controlling the internet and using a variety of filters to screen out search results for issues relating to dissidents or the Dalai Lama.

On Thursday Beijing lodged an official protest over the congressional award, summoning the US ambassador to the foreign ministry.

US officials recently complained of repeated attempts by Chinese hackers to access and disrupt Pentagon and US government websites.

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Air Force's Future Lies In Cyberspace

UPI, From Washinton Times, October 19, 2007

United Press International - Recent pronouncements by U.S. Air Force officials about their view of cyberspace as a "war-fighting domain" have attracted little attention, but the questions they raise for U.S. military policy and doctrine are profound.

"Cyber[space] is important to the nation," said Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert J. Elder, the military officer in charge of the Air Force's daily cyberspace operations, acknowledging the dependence of U.S. commerce and banking on the Internet. "But to the Air Force, it's really important."

Gen. Elder told a recent briefing organized by the Air Force Association that cyberspace was vital because it is the key to the U.S. military's fabled cross-domain dominance.

"When we talk about the speed range and flexibility of air power" to deliver satellite-guided strikes to affect the outcome of a battle on the ground, for example, "the thing that enables this for us is the fact of our cyber-dominance," the ability to move data and control signals through cyberspace, which, as the Air Force defines it, is the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

The Air Force is in the process of establishing a fully fledged Cyberspace Command alongside its space and air commands. But Gen. Elder, like other senior officials, denied that the move was a turf grab.

He elaborated on the consequences of the Air Force's view of cyberspace as a war-fighting domain by comparing it to the maritime and air domains, both which simultaneously were the venues for commerce and daily life, and potential vectors for military action by or against the U.S.

"We in the Air Force think the air is a war-fighting domain," he said. "But that doesn't mean we expect Delta or United [Airlines] to think it is."

He said that there was a diverse and overlapping series of authorities and legal frameworks for activities in cyberspace and that the full policy implications of seeing it as a war-fighting domain are yet to be worked through.

"We have had situations before where the intersections [with other agencies] ... have been difficult," he said.

He said there were "shades of gray from law enforcement [to] homeland security, [to] homeland defense to some kind of expeditionary operation [like Iraq]. Where do we say, 'We've crossed the line now' " into the war-fighting realm.

He said there also was tension between war-fighting objectives and intelligence-gathering ones.

Gen. Elder said partnership with such civilian agencies as law enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, which has the lead in securing the nation's critical infrastructure, including its cybercapacity, was key for the Air Force.

"What we're really trying to do with these partnerships is close the gaps" between military and civilian authorities and agencies, he said.

Some thought the laws governing cyberspace might need to be changed, he said. "Ultimately they may, but until we fully understand how it works between these very different areas of business law enforcement, homeland security, commerce, we can't just say, 'Here's what we should change.' "

Other Air Force officials see current U.S. military policy as too timid.

"Legislation, policies and international law are lagging the technology" in the cyberdomain, Lani Kass, a senior adviser to U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley, told another recent conference. "The United States is late to the fight."

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House Panel Chief Demands Details of Cybersecurity Plan

By Siobhan Gorman, Baltimore Sun, October 24, 2007

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee called on the Bush administration yesterday to delay the planned launch of a multi- billion-dollar cybersecurity initiative so that Congress could have time to evaluate it.

Rep. Bennie Thompson said he wants to make sure the new program is legal before it is launched. In an interview, the Mississippi Democrat said he had been told that President Bush might unveil the initiative as early as next week.

Known internally as the "Cyber Initiative," the program is designed to use the spying capabilities of the National Security Agency and other agencies to protect government and private communications networks from infiltration by terrorists and hackers. The Sun reported the existence of the program last month, but Thompson said the administration has refused to discuss the initiative with members of his committee, despite repeated requests.

In a letter this week to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Thompson demanded that his committee receive a briefing on details of the plan. He also warned that the "centralization of power" envisioned under the initiative raised "significant questions" that should be answered before the program is launched.

Thompson - whose panel oversees the Homeland Security Department, which would run the initiative - said he was unaware of the program's existence until it was revealed by The Sun in a Sept. 20 article.

A Homeland Security spokeswoman said Chertoff had received Thompson's letter, which was dated Monday, and would respond "in a timely fashion."

"We do agree that cybersecurity is a very important issue, and that is why since the beginning of this congressional session DHS has provided more than a half a dozen briefings to the House Homeland Security Committee on cyberthreats and related issues," said the spokeswoman, Laura Keehner.

Thompson said that if the administration continues to give his panel the silent treatment, he will consider issuing a congressional subpoena.

"You have to put sunshine on a program so sensitive as this," he said. The administration is saying that "'you have to believe us.' Obviously, as a nation of laws, we can't accept that."

Thompson said that because the program involves the NSA and similar agencies, questions about privacy and domestic surveillance would be of particular concern.

"What's the legal framework about which civil rights and civil liberties, as well as constitutional issues, will be protected?" he asked.

The Cyber Initiative is the second administration program in recent weeks to draw criticism from Congress after it was revealed in a news report. Last month, after a report in The Wall Street Journal, the administration was forced to put a new domestic satellite surveillance program on hold in response to congressional protests.

Few details about the Cyber Initiative are known because the administration has been extremely secretive about the program, much of which is highly classified. Current and former security officials have spoken about the initiative on condition of anonymity because it has not been announced.

The multiagency effort is being coordinated by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, a former NSA director.

Since last year, there have been a series of meetings among representatives from McConnell's office, the NSA, Homeland Security and the White House, said a senior intelligence official. And at the NSA, several dozen people, including members of the general counsel's office, have been working on the initiative for the past year, the official said.

Plans call for a seven-year, multi-billion-dollar effort with as many as 1,000 or more employees from Homeland Security, the NSA and other agencies, according to current and former government officials familiar with the initiative.

The first phase would be a system to protect government networks from cyberattacks, with a later phase designed to protect private networks that control such systems as communications, nuclear power plants and electric-power grids, said a former government official familiar with the proposal.

The NSA's new domestic role would require a revision of the agency's charter, according to the senior intelligence official. In the past, the NSA's cyberdefense efforts have been focused on the government's classified networks.

Officials have debated internally whether to locate these employees in one facility in the Washington area or in multiple posts around the country, the senior intelligence official said.

They have also discussed different ways to structure the program, said a former Pentagon official familiar with the initiative. Options include: creating a special office similar to the government response to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik; a White House coordination group modeled on the drug czar's office; and a "virtual" organization that coordinates activities among various agencies.

Seeking details, Thompson has made four separate pleas for briefings from Homeland Security, he said, including a direct request at a hearing last week to the department's top cybersecurity official, Greg Garcia.

Thompson said the House Intelligence Committee also had not received a briefing it requested from McConnell's office, but an Intelligence Committee aide said yesterday that the panel expects a "detailed briefing" this week.

Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat, has requested information, the aide said, on exactly what the initiative would do "and what the legal authorities are."

Thompson rattled off about a dozen questions he has about the program, including what authority the NSA has to participate in domestic monitoring and whether Fourth Amendment limitations on search and seizure would prevent the government from using the evidence it gathered to prosecute cybercrimes.

Questions about what each agency will be authorized to do have come under considerable discussion inside the administration, said current and former officials. Approval of the initiative was delayed because of continued difficulty with such issues.

The federal government's role in monitoring private-sector networks is "clearly the issue," the former government official said, adding, "If you want to work with them and put things on people's lines to monitor stuff, the general counsels of private-sector entities would say, 'You want to do what?'"

Policymakers have become increasingly alarmed at the vulnerability of trains, nuclear power plants, electrical grids and other key infrastructure systems, which rely on Internet-based controls that could be hijacked remotely to produce a catastrophic attack.

Recent attempted attacks on Pentagon and other government computer systems have heightened concerns about holes in government networks, as well.

Thompson noted that he has held several hearings on the emerging cyberthreat, as well as on Homeland Security's challenges in managing its own cybersecurity.

"We have tried to work with the department," Thompson said.

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Cyber Warriors

By Neil Munro, National Journal, October 29, 2007

SAN ANTONIO -- Deep in the heart of cyberspace, something new called a Network Warfare and Ops Squadron fights battles 24/7 from a building in a nondescript office park here at Lackland Air Force Base.

At one end of the room, a crew monitors the cyberspace highways for the first signs of a hacker infiltration, spreading virus, or network-jamming wave of spam. A second crew rapidly investigates every problem and scrambles other crews to counter each incursion with an armory of specialized software. And all of it is under the watchful eyes of a pyramid of officers and officials that ascends through the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice and eventually into the Oval Office.

Every day, every hour, the squadron reacts to myriad trivial or significant attacks on some of the 650,000 computers that allow the Air Force to pay its personnel, manage day care centers, buy fuel, direct fighter-bombers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and launch nuclear-tipped missiles should the order ever come.

But this squadron is very different from the traditional units of leather-jacketed, death-defying pilots soaring through the wild blue yonder. These warriors are mostly office-dwelling private contractors whose skills and actions are bound by a complicated tangle of software and U.S. law rather than the laws of aerodynamics and the limits of physical courage. Yet, these "airmen" play an increasingly important role in the Air Force and the Defense Department, because warfare has spread into cyberspace, just as it long ago spread into air and space.

That's why the Air Force has tapped Maj. Gen. William Lord to assemble the Air Force Cyberspace Command by next October, whose job will be to recruit, equip, and train a new corps of cyber-warriors perpetually ready to protect military networks from whatever threats emerge.

The new command, Lord said, must also prepare for an offensive role -- to infiltrate or wreck enemy networks and to manipulate enemy leaders, should that action ever be ordered by the president. One goal, he said, is to give future presidents the ability to deter cyber-attacks. The ability to say, "We're not going to blow up your cities, we're going to melt your cities," or at least their electronic infrastructures, can help counter cyber-attacks, Lord said. "It doesn't have to be a weapon that ever gets used," he added.

The Air Force already has individual air and space commands, and "this makes sense for them in a lot of ways," said James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Instead of blowing up power plants, they could get them to stop working" using cyber-warfare, he said.

The command will also help the Air Force compete with the other armed services for funding and leadership slots in future cyber-warfare commands, said Mark Rasch, a managing director at FTI, a D.C.-based cyber-security firm. These days, the Air Force isn't playing a prominent combat role in Afghanistan or Iraq, partly because few bombers are needed but also because the Army and Marines have developed their own smart missiles and unmanned surveillance aircraft. And the Navy has established the Naval Network Warfare Command in Norfolk, Va., which focuses on naval "information warfare."

The Air Force's cyber-command, Rasch said, "is an attempt to establish a pre-eminent, if not dominant, role in a new arena for war." The command will be a natural development for the Air Force, he said, much like the service's earlier electronic-warfare capabilities and space satellites.

In recent months, U.S. officials said they have seen a sharp increase in efforts by hackers, backed by foreign governments, to infiltrate or damage U.S. and other allied information networks. A particular concern is that a government might plant damaging software -- "malware" -- inside a network, or even in new mass-produced computer components. The malware would then surreptitiously send data back to its creators, or even damage the host network during a war or other crisis.

In 2006, hackers -- likely backed by the Russian government -- launched a wave of Internet-jamming attacks that crippled the government of Estonia. Also, Beijing is believed to have helped Chinese hackers infiltrate computer networks at the Pentagon and in government offices in Berlin, London, and Paris, according to computer-security experts.

Many of these cyber-attacks are monitored, and some are countered, at Lackland, where lunch-table conversations are "a lot of geekspeak" as the contractors, many of them former military members, cooperate and compete to identify new security threats, said Maj. Carl Grant, the commander of Lackland's 33rd Network Warfare Squadron. In 2006, the crews identified and dissected 29 "validated incidents" from among the hundreds of thousands of suspicious events visible on the networks, he said. "We're not arrogant enough to believe that we caught everything," Grant added.

The contractors don't live the regimented lives of military personnel, and they don't wear uniforms. But they all have to pass security and background checks. "We have to entrust them with the keys to all of the information on the networks," said Col. Mark Kross, who commands the 26th Network Operations Group, which includes Grant's squadron.

Lord's emerging Cyberspace Command is expected to include the Lackland operation and other classified programs as well as exotic aircraft, such as the U2 spy plane, EC-135 electronic-eavesdropping aircraft, EC-130E Commando Solo radio-broadcasting plane, and the EC-130H Compass Call radio-jamming aircraft.

Its headquarters will likely consist of several hundred staff overseeing perhaps 20,000 Air Force personnel. They will include software experts, lawyers, electronic-warfare and satellite specialists, and behavioral scientists, Lord said. "You have to reach out to a different kind of recruit," he noted.

The command will not direct combat operations, Lord said, but will supply capabilities to the Pentagon's combat commands, such as U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Central Command, which operate under the direction of the White House. Technically, the armed services do not initiate warfare; they assemble and train forces for use by the combat commanders and the president. Over time, who does what in cyberspace warfare will be decided after debate among government officials, the services, private contractors, and advocates, Lord said. "It's a dialogue we'll end up having."

But that debate is already quite advanced. In 2002, for example, President Bush and Congress gave the new Homeland Security Department -- not the Pentagon -- the task of defending the government's civilian computer networks.

Industry, meanwhile, greets these developments with a great deal of caution and skepticism. Generally, industry officials are reluctant to see government playing a role in the management of the Internet, which is now so vital for their business operations. For more than a decade, they have lobbied hard against online wiretaps, government-mandated hacker defenses, and making companies legally liable for cyber-security failures. The latest dispute emerged after a Chinese company announced it wanted to buy a minority share in 3Com, a Marlborough, Mass.-based company that supplies anti-hacker software to American companies, and some Air Force contractors. The federal government's Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States is now reviewing the proposed purchase.

Industry executives are winning most of these policy battles, in part because much of the public, along with civil libertarians, don't want government officials -- especially the military -- to regulate their use of the Internet. That's why a future U.S. Internet Command is unlikely, and why the White House has instead helped to establish cooperative government-industry centers to counter security threats to banks, electric power companies, railroads, and other vital industrial sectors.

"We're continuously reaching out to the private sector because the private sector owns and operates [90 percent] of the critical infrastructure," said Gregory Garcia, the assistant secretary for cyber-security and telecommunications at the Homeland Security Department. "DHS has the authority and credibility, and the trust of the private sector and other [civilian] agencies to help coordinate a national strategy for the protection of cyberspace."

The Defense Department, in contrast, and its subordinate services will mainly be tasked with protecting military networks, even if they do sometimes share resources with DHS, Garcia said. "We do recognize we are certainly facing a lot of the same threats and vulnerabilities, so it behooves us to work together," he added.

For example, the Estonian government, as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, asked the Pentagon for aid when the hackers jammed its networks in 2006. In turn, the Pentagon alerted its subordinate units and also coordinated with DHS and U.S. industry to respond, Garcia pointed out. "Together, we did a high-speed, real-time analysis of what was going on in the Estonian networks.... We were all on our monitors, on the phone, communicating through a variety of channels, in real time, day after day, as the attacks were happening."

And Gen. Lord noted: "As the world has changed, we have changed."

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Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace

By Anton Troianovski and Peter Finn, Washington Post, October 28, 2007

MOSCOW -- After ignoring the Internet for years to focus on controlling traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Kremlin and its allies are turning their attention to cyberspace, which remains a haven for critical reporting and vibrant discussion in Russia's dwindling public sphere.

Allies of President Vladimir Putin are creating pro-government news and pop culture Web sites while purchasing some established online outlets known for independent journalism. They are nurturing a network of friendly bloggers ready to disseminate propaganda on command. And there is talk of creating a new Russian computer network -- one that would be separate from the Internet at large and, potentially, much easier for the authorities to control.

"The attractiveness of the Internet as a free platform for free people is already dimming," said Iosif Dzyaloshinsky, a mass media expert at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Putin addressed the question of Internet censorship during a national call-in show broadcast live on radio and television this month. "In the Russian Federation, no control is being exercised over the World Wide Web, over the Russian segment of the Internet," Putin said. "I think that from the point of view of technological solutions, that would not make any sense.

"Naturally, in this sphere, as in other spheres, we should be thinking about adhering to Russian laws, about making sure that child pornography is not distributed, that financial crimes are not committed," he continued. "But that is a task for the law enforcement agencies. Total control and the work of the law enforcement agencies are two different things."

Many people here say they believe Putin didn't mind a free Internet as long as it had weak penetration in Russia. But with 25 percent of Russian adults now online, up from 8 percent in 2002, cyberspace has become an issue of increasing concern for the government.

Some Russian Internet experts say a turning point came in 2004, when blogs and uncensored online publications helped drive a popular uprising in Ukraine after a pro-Moscow candidate was declared the winner of a presidential election. Days of street protests in the capital, Kiev, led to a new vote that brought a pro-Western politician into the presidency.

Today, the Kremlin is ready with online forces of its own when street action begins.

On April 14, an opposition movement held a march in central Moscow that drew hundreds of people; police detained at least 170, including the leader of the march, chess star Garry Kasparov.

Pavel Danilin, a 30-year-old Putin supporter and blogger whose online icon is the fearsome robot of the "Terminator" movie, works for a political consulting company loyal to the Kremlin. He said he and his team, which included people from a youth movement called the Young Guard, quickly started blogging that day about a smaller, pro-Kremlin march held at the same time.

They linked to one another repeatedly and soon, Danilin said, posts about the pro-Kremlin march had crowded out all the items about the opposition march on the Yandex Web portal's coveted ranking of the top five Russian blog posts.

"We played it beautifully," Danilin said.

In a lengthy article published online last fall, three Russian rights activists argued that a strident, vulgar and uniform pro-Kremlin ideology had so permeated blogs and chat rooms that it could only be the result of a coordinated campaign.

Putin's allies in the online world acknowledge that the Internet represents a challenge to the status quo in Russia, which has, since Soviet times, relied on state-controlled television to influence public opinion across the country's 11 time zones.

"You watch the first channel or the second channel and you can only see good things happening in Russia," said Andrei Osipov, the 26-year-old editor of the Web site of Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, referring to national stations that back the Kremlin. "The Internet is the freest mass media. . . . There is competition between state and opposition organizations."

The Kremlin is also increasingly allying itself with privately run online outlets that foster a new ideal for life in today's Russia, one that is consumerist and uncompromisingly pro-Putin.

The main champion of this ideal is 28-year-old businessman Konstantin Rykov. The pearl of Rykov's media empire is the two-year-old Vzglyad ("View") online newspaper, which features a serious-looking news section with stories toeing the Kremlin line and a lifestyle section that covers the latest in luxury cars and interior design. Surveys rank Vzglyad as one of Russia's five most-visited news sites.

"Rykov is a man who created a good business on the government's view that it has to invest in ideology," said Anton Nossik, an Internet pioneer in Russia now in charge of blog development for Sup, an online media company. Nossik said that Vladislav Surkov, Putin's domestic political adviser, organized private funding for Rykov's projects.

Kremlin officials deny any involvement. "It is a general habit of everyone to connect every popular occurrence and success with the Kremlin," deputy Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said when asked about Rykov. "In reality, it is not so."

In an interview, Rykov would not comment on his investors. A framed portrait of Surkov hung above his desk; Rykov is running for parliament on the list of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party in elections slated for December.

"The Vzglyad newspaper has created this appearance of a state publication for itself since the very beginning," Rykov said. "And from the perspective of business and selling ads, that's very good."

Allies of the Kremlin have also begun buying some of the companies that have helped make the Internet a bastion of free expression in Russia. Gazeta.ru, long the country's most respected online newspaper, was sold in December to a metals magnate and Putin loyalist.

And last October, Sup, which is owned by Alexander Mamut, a tycoon with ties to the Kremlin, bought the rights to develop the Russian-language segment of U.S.-based LiveJournal. The segment, with half a million users, is Russia's most popular blog portal.

"Mr. Rykov is pro-Kremlin. Mamut and Sup are pro-Kremlin. The social networks are all being bought by pro-Kremlin people," Ruslan Paushu, 30, a popular blogger who works for Rykov, said in an interview. "Everything's okay."

So far, Gazeta.ru has continued to publish articles critical of the Kremlin, and no widespread censorship has been reported on blogs run by Sup. But as the government wakes up to the Internet's potential, many of Putin's critics are growing nervous.

Prosecutors have begun to target postings on blogs or Internet chat sites, charging users with slander or extremism after they criticize Putin or other officials. Most such incidents have occurred outside Moscow, and federal officials deny that they signal any broader campaign to control the Internet.

"Personally, I am against developing and adopting a special law that would regulate the Internet," Leonid Reiman, minister of information technology and communications, said in a written response to questions. "The Internet has been always developing as a free medium, and it should remain as such."

But in July, Putin briefed his Security Council on plans to make Russia a global information leader by 2015. Russian news media reported that those plans included a new network apart from the global Internet and open only to former Soviet republics.

"To put it bluntly, we need to fight for the water mains," Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin's foremost political consultant, said in an interview. "We need to fight for the central networks and for the audience segments that they reach."

Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, special adviser to the chairmen of the Internet Governance Forum, a group convened by the United Nations, said some Russian officials he has spoken to are considering a separate Internet, with Cyrillic domain names, and appear to be studying China's Internet controls.

Peskov, the deputy presidential spokesman, said in an interview that a Russia-only Internet was still in the "investigative phase," adding, "I don't know if it's more than thinking aloud."

"It's not meant to get rid of the global network," he said. "It's a discussion of creating an addition."

For now, supporters as well as critics of Putin see the Kremlin doing something atypical: competing on more or less equal terms with its opponents.

"Certainly, there's the dark segment that is still saying words like 'prohibit' and 'limit,' " said Marat Guelman, who worked as a political consultant for the Kremlin until 2004, when he broke with the administration. But "what is happening on the Web vis-a-vis the authorities is very good," he added. "That is, they're trying to play the game."

That strategy is in contrast to the way Putin brought the independent television network NTV to heel at the beginning of his term, using highly publicized court cases and raids by heavily armed security forces.

Marina Litvinovich, a blogger who used to work for Pavlovsky, the Kremlin consultant, and now works for Kasparov's United Civil Front, said she is satisfied with the government's approach to the Internet because it forces Putin's allies to respond to criticism rather than simply ignore it.

She also argued that as the Kremlin consolidates political power, it has less incentive to come up with sophisticated online propaganda. "They're not really in need of particular creativity right now," she said.

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Defense Lauds Exceptional Technology Work

By Bob Brewin, Government Executive, October 22, 2007

A unit that upgraded a program that halved network intrusions and an information systems flight commander who oversaw the development of a communications gateway to support military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are first-place winners in this year's Defense CIO awards.

The Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations won the first-place team award for the overhaul of the Defense Information Operations Condition program, which led to a 58 percent decrease of intrusions on the Global Information Grid over the past year, according to John Grimes, assistant secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration and the Defense Department's chief information officer.

Capt. Theresa Thompson, information systems flight commander for the 39th Communications Squadron, which is stationed at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, won the Defense CIO individual first-place award for leading a team of 70 experts to provide a communications gateway for the European Command base closest to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thompson managed maintenance and operations of a $40 million information technology infrastructure, which served 3,500 military and civilian personnel at Incirlik. The systems supported forces operating in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Winning the second-place team award was the Future Capabilities Division, Strategic Command. In partnership with the Joint Forces Command and the Defense Information Systems Agency, the division led the Defense move to a service-oriented architecture. The ASD NII called the move an inventive and fast-track command and control data initiative in an operational environment, which included staging content on multiple servers and a Google-like search capability on the Defense classified intranet.

Taking the third-place team award was the Microsoft Windows Vista Security Team at the National Security Agency. ASD NII said the NSA team developed a unique relationship with Microsoft, persuading the company to produce a more secure out-of-the-box version of Windows Vista, with an eye also focused on end-user satisfaction.

The second-place individual award winner was Celine M. Johnson, chief of the Army's Local Network Operations and Security Center, which is part of the 507th Signal Company and 59th Signal Battalion. Johnson managed the first pilot of VIDITalk, a web-based video messaging system within Defense. Deployed soldiers and their families use VIDITalk to communicate via streaming video, without downloads or attachments, so that bandwidth is conserved and the risk of viruses is lowered.

Army Col. Brian Hamilton, division chief for command and control systems interoperability for the Joint Staff in the Office of Director for Command, Control, Communications and Computers, won the third-place individual award. He helped develop fundamental, key standards for the assessment of interoperability and network vulnerabilities, and helped integrate the Warfighter Mission Area into the Defense netcentric data strategy, according to ASD NII.

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Bulgarian Cyber Attack

From the Sofia Echo, 26 Oct 2007

Interior Minister Roumen Petkov presided at the October 22 launch of cybercrime.bg, a website to gather information about cyber-crimes in Bulgaria.

The ambitious project, part of the ministry’s efforts in fighting cyber-crime, was launched days after media reports about a major online bank fraud.

On October 18, commercial national television station bTV reported that a hacker had attacked the bank accounts of a businessman from the town of Vratsa. The report said that Vesko Kamenov, owner of Beton CB, had complained that money had gone missing from his bank account at the Vratsa branch of UniCredit Bulbank. An investigation found that between 11.30am and 2pm on September 14, four bank transfers to a total value of 47 860 leva were made from Kamenov’s accounts.

The hacker attack emanated from London, police said.

Kamenov’s office computer was hacked and full information about his bank account was copied. Using this information, the hacker ordered a transfer of 15 980 leva from Kamenov’s account to an account at Central Cooperative Bank, another transfer of 9780 leva to an account at Allianz Bulgaria, a 15 900 leva transfer to an account at First Investment Bank and a fourth transfer of 6200 to an account at DSK Bank.

The four people in whose names these accounts were held transferred the money to foreign banks, being paid commissions for doing so. BTV said that one of the four transferred money to two bank accounts in Kiev. Hours after the transactions, Kamenov discovered the fraud and alerted the authorities. His bank accounts were blocked, and later 6200 leva was returned by DSK Bank and 9780 leva by Allianz Bulgaria. Police were seeking to recover a further 6955 leva.

UniCredit Bulbank said that it was not responsible for the rest of the money because the transfer had been the result of a hacker attack.

Police said that a Trojan computer virus had been implanted in Kamenov’s computer on September 12, opening the way for the fraud. Kamenov’s computer lacked protection against such viruses, police said.

According to privacy experts at UniCredit Bulbank, clients are advised not to visit suspicious websites from the computer used for online banking services.

On October 20, Interior Ministry computer crimes section head Yavor Kolev gave details of a separate cyber-crime scheme, involving credit card fraud.

Consumers were sent e-mails with various offers. When the website mentioned in the offer is opened, a Trojan virus goes to work and all data from the user’s computer is copied. It was a trademark method of Russian hackers, Kolev said.

There was a peak in such fraud in June and July, prompting Interior Ministry computer fraud squad officials to hold meetings with banks in Bulgaria.

“We took some measures and now this kind of fraud is almost impossible,” Kolev said. Not only banks and clients have been targets this year.

Nearly 700 hacker attacks were registered against the polling system of Information Services, the company responsible for counting the votes after Bulgaria’s May 2007 MEP elections. At the 2006 presidential elections, the number of such attacks was close to 5000. In early September this year, the Agriculture Ministry website came under attack, when for some hours, access to the website was blocked by a hacker presenting himself as a Turkish citizen.

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23rd IOS Conducts Information Operations (IO) Weapons and Tactics Conference and Tactics Review Board

By Capt Diana Roberge, 23rd IOS, 26 Oct 2007

The 23d Information Operations Squadron conducted the 2007 Information Operations (IO) Weapons and Tactics Conference and Tactics Review Board (WEPTAC/TRB) from 15 – 19 Oct 07. The WEPTAC/TRB brought together worldwide IO subject matter experts to discuss the latest IO topics and develop IO tactics improvement proposals (TIPs) to increase blue force effectiveness in air, space and cyberspace. The 23 IOS takes Information Operations (IO) Weapons and Tactics Conference and Tactics Review Board the best of these TIPs to the January Combat Air Forces TRB at Nellis AFB, NV and advocates for their incorporation into Air Force test programs and official tactics manuals. This year’s TRB was a resounding success, resulting in four network defense, seven network attack, and four electronic warfare TIPs, as well as one influence operations TIP.

This year’s WEPTAC’s theme, “The Role of IO in the War on Terror,” was selected by the 23 IOS commander, Lt Col Stan Cole. There were a total of 26 briefings given over the course of 2 days, with representatives attending from 8 AF, USSTRATCOM, AF A3O-CN, Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, Air Force Information Operations Center (AFIOC), 67 NWW, Joint Operations Security Support Center and the USAF Doctrine Center to highlight a few. The highlight of the WEPTAC/TRB was the capstone speech by Col David Toomey, AFIOC/CC, during which he presented keen insights into the emerging role of IO and non-kinetic options in the War on Terrorism and future Air Force/Joint operations. He also highlighted the importance of integrating IO into the Air and Space Operations Center and educating the warfighter on IO capabilities.

The TRB presented an opportunity for the attendees to begin the process of drafting or vetting TIPS submitted since the previous year’s TRB. A TIP is an idea that anyone can draft (as a result of real world operations or exercise simulation) to improve IO capabilities or effects. TIPs may be submitted in a variety of ways, including through Major Command Weapons and Tactics shops or direct to the 23 IOS via the Squadron’s SIPRNET website. If you have an idea for a TIP or know of an information operations capability that could be improved, please visit the 23 IOS SIPRNET website at .

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Exclusive: I Was a Hacker for the MPAA

By David Kravets, , 22 Oct 2007

Promises of Hollywood fame and fortune persuaded a young hacker to betray former associates in the BitTorrent scene to Tinseltown's anti-piracy lobby, according to the hacker.

In an exclusive interview with Wired News, gun-for-hire hacker Robert Anderson tells for the first time how the Motion Picture Association of America promised him money and power if he provided confidential information on TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search site.

According to Anderson, the MPAA told him: "We would need somebody like you. We would give you a nice paying job, a house, a car, anything you needed.... if you save Hollywood for us you can become rich and powerful."

In 2005, the MPAA paid Anderson $15,000 for inside information about TorrentSpy -- information at the heart of a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought by the MPAA against TorrentSpy of Los Angeles. The material is also the subject of a wiretapping countersuit against the MPAA brought by TorrentSpy's founder, Justin Bunnell, who alleges the information was obtained illegally.

The MPAA does not dispute it paid Anderson for the sensitive information, but insists that it had no idea that Anderson stole the data. "The MPAA obtains information from third parties only if it believes the evidence has been collected legally," says MPAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaltman.

The MPAA's use of Anderson is one of a series of controversies the movie industry is confronting in its zero-tolerance war on piracy. MediaDefender, a California company that tracks and disrupts file sharing of movies and music, was reported to Swedish authorities last month by The Pirate Bay, after an internet leak revealed the extent to which MediaDefender pollutes file-sharing services with fake, decoy content. And an executive at a national theater chain successfully pressed New Jersey authorities in August to prosecute a teenager for filming 20 seconds of a movie at a theater to show to her little brother later.

Anderson's account shows that the content industry may be willing to go to significant -- and some say ethically questionable -- lengths in its war against online piracy, and that it is determined to keep its methods secret.

"It was an understanding," Anderson says of the deal, "that it was hush-hush."

Anderson's brief Hollywood career began in the spring of 2005, after a online advertising venture with TorrentSpy founder Bunnell turned sour.

Looking to profit in other ways, Anderson approached the MPAA with an e-mail offering to help the movie studios' lobbying arm beat piracy, which the industry says costs it billions in lost sales each year. Among other things, Anderson proposed to implement an anti-piracy marketing campaign for the MPAA.

But he says he also offered to provide inside information on TorrentSpy, which, along with The Pirate Bay, is among the most popular BitTorrent destinations for downloaders looking for free movies and music.

"It was an opportunity to make money, because I knew how these networks operated," he says.

On June 8, 2005, within weeks of sending his unsolicited e-mail, Anderson says he was put in touch with the MPAA's Dean Garfield, then the organization's legal director. Anderson says he told Garfield that he had "an informant that can intercept any e-mail communication."

Anderson didn't tell Garfield he was the "informant," and that he'd already hacked into TorrentSpy's systems. The hacker, then 23 and living in Vancouver, British Columbia, claims he had cracked TorrentSpy's servers by simply guessing an administrative password. He knew the password was weak -- a combination of a name and some numbers.

"I just kept changing the numbers until it fit," he says. "I guess you can call it luck. It took a little more than 30 tries."

Once inside, he programmed TorrentSpy's mail system to relay e-mail to a newly created external account he could access.

There's a trace of pride in his voice as he details the hack. "The e-mails weren't forwarded using the mail command. They were sent actually before it reached anyone's mailbox," he says. "So it was more like interception before delivery. I could even stop certain mail from reaching their box."

In this manner, Anderson says, he sucked down about three dozen pages of e-mails detailing banking, advertising and other confidential information. "Everything they were talking about was sent to my Gmail," he says. "Everything they sent, anything sent to them, I got: invoices; in one case they sent passwords."

Among the purloined files was the source code for TorrentSpy's backend software, says Anderson. Anderson alleges this interested the MPAA, which he says wanted to set up a fake BitTorrent site of its own. According to Anderson, the MPAA said, "We'll set up a fake Torrent site. We'll contact the other Torrent sites. We'll get their names, address books, contact information and banking information.... (They) wanted to run this as a shadow portion of the MPAA."

MPAA spokeswoman Kaltman says the MPAA had no such plans, and says the accusation that the MPAA wanted to set up a phony Torrent site is "patently false."

On June 30, 2005, after Anderson collected the data, Garfield sent Anderson a contract to sign. The contract, seen by Wired News, says the information the MPAA was seeking would "include, but is not limited to, the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the owners of ."

The contract also requested information on The Pirate Bay, and called for Anderson to look for "evidence concerning and correspondence between these entities."

The contract prohibited both parties from disclosing "the existence of this agreement to anyone," and said the MPAA would pay $15,000 for services to Anderson's business, Vaga Ventures. Finally, the contract dictated that the confidential data would be obtained "through legal means."

But according to documents filed in support of TorrentSpy's wiretapping countersuit: "Dean Garfield expressly told the informant (Anderson), on behalf of the MPAA, regarding the information that he requested, 'We don't care how you get it.'"

It continues: "(T)he MPAA knew, or had reason to know, that such information was obtained from plaintiffs unlawfully and without authorization."

The details of Anderson's conversations with Garfield could not be independently verified, and Garfield -- now the MPAA's executive vice president and chief strategic officer -- did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

But MPAA spokeswoman Kaltman says the organization's contract with Anderson clearly required any information to be obtained lawfully.

Anderson says he signed the secret pact, and immediately sent in what he says was stolen information.

But once Anderson turned over the data and cashed the MPAA's check, he quickly realized that Garfield had no further use for him. "He lost interest in me," he says. Anderson felt abandoned: During negotiations with Garfield, the hacker had become convinced he was starting a long-term, lucrative relationship with the motion picture industry. "He was stringing me along personally."

Hollywood's cold shoulder put Anderson's allegiance back up for grabs, and about a year later he came clean with TorrentSpy's Bunnell in an online chat. "'I sold you out to the MPAA,'" Anderson says he told Bunnell. "I felt guilty (for) what happened and I kinda also thought at that point the MPAA wasn't going to do anything."

"He was kinda blown away," recalls Anderson.

Bunnell declined to comment for this story.

The MPAA sued Bunnell and TorrentSpy shortly after Anderson's chat. Bunnell then countersued the MPAA under the federal Wiretap Act. Bunnell alleged that Anderson's e-mail surveillance amounted to wiretapping under the law, and that the MPAA was exposed to vicarious liability for the crime.

As Bunnell's star witness, Anderson was not sued "because he took steps to advise us of his wrongdoing and to cooperate. We've made a decision to go after the bigger wrongdoing, the MPAA," says Bunnell's attorney, Ira Rothken.

But U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper in Los Angeles dismissed Bunnell's lawsuit Aug. 21 on the grounds that Anderson's intrusion did not violate the federal wiretapping statute. Attorney Rothken says he did not sue under the federal computer-hacking law, because it doesn't allow for vicarious liability.

Last week Rothken filed a notice of his intent to appeal Cooper's decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. For now, the court's decision has put the brakes on Bunnell's lawsuit against the MPAA, and freed the movie industry to use the purloined e-mail in its lawsuit against TorrentSpy for alleged copyright infringement.

That suit is ongoing and contentious. Cooper ruled last May that TorrentSpy must begin saving the internet addresses and download activity of its U.S.-based users, and turning over the information to the MPAA in pretrial discovery. In response, TorrentSpy began blocking U.S. users, and made changes on its site to protect user privacy -- drawing a fresh burst of outrage in legal filings by MPAA lawyers earlier this month.

The MPAA's Kaltman says the court's decision to throw out Bunnell's lawsuit against the MPAA left no doubt that Garfield's relationship with Anderson was aboveboard. Kaltman points out that the court took note of the contract language between the MPAA and Anderson that represented any data from Anderson as being lawfully obtained.

But Paul Ohm, a University of Colorado Law School scholar specializing in computer crime, is skeptical. "It's hard to say with a straight face that you can obtain that legally," said Ohm. "Ethical red bells should have been going off."

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Inside the Surge: How Ordinary Iraqis Are Turning the Tide of War

By Michael Yon, New York Post, October 28, 2007

This week, the U.S. announced that military deaths in Iraq had fallen dramatically, to the lowest levels since March 2006, a sign that the surge of troops is working. Officers say increased cooperation from Iraqi civilians - who are tired of the terrorism and violence - has helped stem attacks.

This comes as no surprise to Michael Yon, a writer who has blogged from Iraq since 2004. Yon, who is supported by donations to his Web site (michaelyon-), writes about his own observations on the ground this year, embedded with U.S. troops.

Statistics in reports about faraway places can blunt the reality of what those numbers mean. But when it is a bomb in a road you are about to drive on, it takes on a whole new cast, as I found yet again when I spent most of May in Anbar Province.

I visited a former labor camp nicknamed “Coolie Village," or what remained of it, after a truck bomb locals attributed to al Qaeda had flattened it. Not surprisingly, the anger and frustration in response to this mass murder helped the villagers overcome their fear of the thugs who had taken hold of their community.

In mid-May, 2007, the Iraqi Army and Police had conducted a “Combined Medical Exercise" in the village of Falahat, and Iraqi doctors saw about 200 villagers. Two days later, the Iraqi Police opened an outpost at the old Falahat train station. That was just about the same time I was driving out to stay with a small team of Marines who were assigned as “MiTT 8" (Military Training Team 8.)

The men of MiTT 8 were living with their Iraqi protégées in filthy shipping containers on a highway. Several months ago they were attacked by a car bomb. But at about 9 a.m., while I was traveling to their location with Marines in a Humvee, some Falahat villagers went to the new police station to report the presence of a culprit they knew was placing bombs on the road.

It happened that quickly.

Within mere days of opening the station, people spoke up. The Iraqi Police (some of whom freely admitted to having been recent insurgents) called the tip into the Iraqi Army living with the Marines of MiTT 8. Our Humvee pulled up to the small MiTT 8 compound, where we met Staff Sergeant Rakene Lee, who was dressed for combat, and who was to take the Humvees and lead the mission to the suspected bomb site. The Iraqi Army was already blocking the road.

The patrol I was with had nearly run into an IED, except for a tip from Iraqis in another village, making what could have been my last dispatch.

Justice to power

All across Iraq, people are fed up with the abuse of power, even when it wears the badge of a police officer, even when it's a local hero.

When I was in the city of Hit this May, I saw firsthand a dramatic example. Many people in Hit directly attribute the resurrection of their city in large part to the courage of Iraqi Police General Ibrahim Hamid Jaza, who took an aggressive stand against the al Qaeda Iraq (AQI) terrorists who had brazenly made Anbar province a home base and slaughterhouse with their marketplace car bombs, beheadings and reputation for hiding bombs intended to kill parents in the corpses of dead children they'd gutted.

Between shooting people for using the Internet, watching television or other “moral transgressions" such as smoking in public, AQI's claim of fundamentalist piety proved to be a thin veneer, quickly eroded by blatant drug, alcohol and prostitute use. The people of Anbar rejected AQI, but AQI was still strong and well-armed, so rejection was only a first step.

General Hamid was one of the brave souls who took an early stand and went for their throats. In doing so, he demonstrated that the terrorists were also vulnerable. Some soldiers began to jokingly refer to the general as “Bufford Pusser" because Hamid literally carried a big stick. But AQI wasn't laughing; they beheaded Hamid's son on a soccer field in the center of Hit in 2005.

About a year ago coalition forces selected Hamid to be the district chief of police, confirming his status as a true hero to many Americans and Iraqis.

But recent signs suggested that Hamid might have flown too close to the sun. Details of his corruption began to accumulate. It was a stunning development when, without warning or notice, the U.S. military arrested and detained the general Tuesday afternoon.

They had no choice, the evidence was clear. Furthermore, the people of Anbar had risked reaching out to the Americans, expressing a concern about Hamid and sharing intelligence to support it. They expected U.S. soldiers to help solve the problem. And although some feared the arrest would cause the city to erupt in violent clashes, what happened next is powerful testimony for how much the area has changed. The next day, Hamid's supporters, and there were many, gathered in the market square and held an organized and peaceful protest demonstration, after which they all went back home.

Stench of evil

From Anbar, I traveled back to Baghdad then to Diyala, where al Qaeda had announced to the world it would base its caliphate in the provincial capital Baqubah. I was embedded with soldiers who formed the spear point of the largest offensive operation since the invasion of Iraq, and I watched as people from all walks of life came forward to share information that saved the lives of American and Iraq soldiers and cleared the streets of the al Qaeda operatives.

In one of my first reports from the still unfolding Operation Arrowhead Ripper, I wrote:

Locals, who are increasingly helpful in pointing out and celebrating the downfall of AQI here, said that during the initial Arrowhead Ripper attack the morning of June 19th, AQI murdered five men. [U.S. soldiers] found the buried corpses behind an AQI prison, exactly where they'd been told to look for the group grave. Locals also directed [soldiers] to a torture house. Peering through the window, American soldiers saw knives, swords, bindings and drills. AQI is well-known for its macabre eagerness to drill into kneecaps, elbows ribs, skulls and other parts of victims.

During the operation's initial phase, U.S. soldiers encountered about 130 serious IEDs on the way in, but suffered only one fatality in the attack; Iraqis were pointing to the bombs before they could detonate.

Over many embeds, stretching out over the course of three years, I've seen massacres occur before my eyes, and I've heard more stories about the brutality (and inanity) of al Qaeda than I can or want to remember.

But one stands out, from June of this year, when I was with U.S. and Iraqi forces in a small abandoned village near Baqubah. There, in a series of shallow graves, were the remains of murdered people, among them the discarded bodies of little children whose heads had been cut off. The stench was horrific. Even the stock animals were killed and left to rot in the sun. There was no human or animal left alive in the village. The graves also were riddled with bombs, many of them massive enough to destroy a tank.

Captain Baker, Scorpion Company Commander (5th Iraqi Army), whose men had the gruesome task of digging up all the graves, told me al Qaeda had taken the village of al Hamira, which had the apparent misfortune of being located near a main road, making it ideal for launching attacks on soldiers. Days after, an Iraqi man told me in a room full of American and Iraqi military officers, that al Qaeda had “invited" parents they wanted to “influence" to lunch, and then brought in the body of their baked son. I do not know if the stories were true, and no proof was offered, but other Iraqis in the area told similar stories and all seemed to believe it. And, of course, I had just seen the decapitated heads of children in al Hamira village and smelled their rotting bodies. The stench of al Qaeda will forever remain with me.

The level of brutality against ordinary Iraqis throughout Diyala, often directed against women and children, is what prompted many Sunni insurgent militia groups to come forward and work with Coalition forces. Some groups, such as the 1920 Revolution Brigades, were formerly allied with al Qaeda, or at least willing to facilitate or ignore their attacks against Shia or Coalition forces.

The 1920s are deadly, and they had been worthy adversaries for us, but when al Qaeda control turned to indiscriminate murder of innocent civilians, the 1920s joined forces with the U.S. and Iraqi Armies and together they practically mopped the streets of AQI in Baqubah. Before heading to Anbar in May, I'd spent some time with the soldiers of the 1-4 Cavalry as they converted an abandoned seminary in a dangerous Baghdad neighborhood into their new home and headquarters as COP (Combat Outpost) Amanche. I wrote about some early encouraging signs of how the neighbors might respond to the presence of American and Iraqi soldiers so close by. I ended an April dispatch with a photograph of LTC James Crider, commander of the 1-4 CAV, with this caption: “And so we find it here, in the Garden of Eden, in God's hands through the 1-4 Cavalry from Kansas: the last hope against genocide in the land between two rivers."

In late September I received an e-mail update from LTC Crider, which he allowed me to publish on my Web site. In it, he wrote: “One other example, recently we had seven IEDs discovered or detonated in a single seven day span. On every one, we got a phone call from a local national telling us exactly where it was or we were called immediately after and told who placed it. For the record, not one IED was effective."

Map quest

Today, I'm staying at a small outpost called JSS (Joint Security Station) “Black Lions" with the 1-18th Infantry battalion. Al Qaeda are so diminished in this area, according to the commander here, LTC Patrick Frank, that they are maybe 3 percent of the problem. But JAM (the Madhi Army created by cleric Muqtada al-Sadr) is the big problem around JSS Black Lion.

A soldier was blown up and killed about 400 meters away on Thursday evening. LTC Frank told me the other day that his best weapon system is his cell phone. Calls come to him (through his interpreter) every day and into the night, with information from locals about the whereabouts of wanted JAM members. Many local people are clearly fed up with the violence. Some even send e-mails with Google Earth maps showing exactly where suspects are, and they are doing it in real time.

“We'll be sitting there in the TOC (tactical operations center or HQ) and an e-mail comes in and it's literally a map (or a photo of one) with detailed descriptions of wanted men and/or caches. And the information is turning out to be true. I have never seen anything like this before," Frank says.

“It's becoming almost bizarre how specific the informants are becoming. Informants have called up saying they are with bad guys right now and giving their location. Our guys show up and arrest everyone. Hours later, the U.S. soldiers let the informants go. JAM and AQI are getting slammed in many areas because local people are sick of the violence and local people trust Americans to help them end it."

Where all this can end was suggested to me on Wednesday, when I was at a large Sunni-Shia reconciliation meeting where more than 80 local leaders attended and signed an agreement.

Whether it can be sustained here, or spread to other areas, is in question. But the resolve of Iraqi people to end the scourge of sectarian violence that has stalled and scarred their country is not.

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Taking Down Terrorist Web Sites (commentary)

By James D. Zirin, Washington Times, October 29, 2007

Thomas X. Hammes is a retired Marine colonel. He is the author of a seminal book on conducting counter-insurgency warfare. The work is called "The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century."

Recently, he made an intriguing proposal on how to battle jihadists on the Internet (a virtual agora where Islamist militants appear to consort with alarming frequency). This is what he said:

"For the last few years, individuals and private organizations that are pro-Israeli have been in a daily fight to shut down or deface anti-Israeli Web sites. Unofficial and informal, this Internet Hagana has had considerable success. They cannot shut down all hostile sites because they keep popping up, but at least they have not completely ceded the field to the Internet jihadists.

"While we have a few Americans who take similar action against mufsidoon (evildoers) Web sites, why don't we encourage Americans/western 'geeks' to go after these Web sites? Exploit them, disrupt them, shut them down, post false information, and create distrust. This will not be a government-controlled or directed effort. Essentially, I am suggesting a leaderless effort that allows Americans to use their creativity, technological skills, and the rabid dedication some people will apply to such a project. The mufsidoon are coming after all American citizens; this is a way some Americans can fight back.

"Some will object that such actions will simply encourage Islamists to attack American sites. But our sites — government and private — are already subject to tens of thousands of attacks per day.

"Obviously, such action won't solve the overall strategic issues but it will insure the terrorists no longer have a sanctuary on the Internet."

It's relatively easy for terrorists to start a Web site. All they need do is contact an Internet service provider or "host" offering access to the World Wide Web. If they want to include a blog for interactive communication, there are a host of companies offering free software on the Internet. Terrorist Web sites are troubling. Such sites can recruit the susceptible, rouse the faithful, raise the funds, activate the dormant, instruct the soldier and even order the attack. A number of sites invite the visitor to download a clip of a beheading, a suicide bombing or an execution. Some even make available instruction manuals on how to make a bomb.

It is next to impossible to shut down a terrorist Web site. Hosting companies with a First Amendment bias usually resist any request to censor content. If a site is knocked off the Web, it can easily reappear under another Web name or with another host — possibly one residing offshore. For various legal reasons, our counterterrorism forces may lack authority to shut down these sites in the absence of a specific plan for an attack or commands to commit acts of violence. Moreover, for strategic reasons related to intelligence gathering, they may be reluctant to do so. So if remedial action is to be taken, it must be taken by private citizens, technological gunslingers reminiscent of the vigilantes of the Wild West.

At least one such vigilante has answered the call. Joseph G. Shahda, a Lebanese-Christian engineer out of Boston has knocked at least 40 militant Islamist Web sites off the net, and is working on scores more. His approach is simple. He contacts the Internet service provider that sponsors the Web site. Most hosts cooperate once they are satisfied of the terrorist content. And, presto, the site is down — often to re-emerge with a new "host" somewhere else in cyberspace. "These sites are very, very dangerous," Mr. Shahda told the New York Times, "and I think we should keep going after them."

Terrorist Web sites are no laughing matter. The New York Times reported last week that a 21-year-old American militant named Samir Khan, who was born in Saudi Arabia, grew up in Queens and works his blog from his parents' home in North Carolina, is a cyber cheerleader for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Samir is an infantryman in what al Qaeda calls the "Islamic jihadi media." Samir's blog has propagated bin Laden's message of hate to the faithful, featured "glad tidings" from a North African Islamist cutthroat whose gang killed 31 Algerians, posted a screed in English arguing for violent jihad and published links to secret sites where horrific bloodshed is portrayed in excruciating detail, including a suicide bomber attack on an American outpost in Iraq. Mr. Khan claims 500 regular readers of his blog, and the number may be growing.

Mr. Khan was recently thrown off the net following complaints to his service provider that he was operating a terrorist Web site, so he simply moved his blog to Muslimpad, a sketchy site which recently moved from Texas to Amman, Jordan.

Law enforcement officials don't quite know what to do about bloggers like Mr. Khan or with vigilantes like Mr. Shahda. If Mr. Khan is removed from the Internet, they lose the opportunity to gain intelligence, find out what he is up to and who visits his site. Elements of the Joint Terrorism Taskforce regularly read Mr. Khan's blog and say it has been a lodestar for gathering valuable intelligence information. But if they do nothing, they take the chance that he might become a command and control way station identifying a target or conveying a signal to attack.

It is also interesting to contemplate what criminal acts blogger Samir Khan may have committed, although treason and providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization are the offenses that most quickly come to mind. But such charges are hard to prove. The Constitution provides that, "No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." And, ironically, the only online terrorism case that has gone to trial involved a student accused of soliciting funds and supporters for Hamas. It ended in an acquittal.

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Russian Hackers Cripple Yushchenko Website

From Ukrainian Journal, 30 Oct 2007

KIEV, Oct. 30 – The official website of the President of Ukraine was shut down on Tuesday apparently due to a well-coordinated cyberspace attack, mostly from Russia, that had persisted for three days.

The presidential computer network registered at least 18,000 attempts from Russian hackers, but also commanding computers around the world, to penetrate its system before falling down on Tuesday.

“The attack has been persisting for the past three days,” a source at the Ukrainian presidential office told Ukrayinska Pravda, an online newspaper.

The Eurasian Union of the Youth, a Moscow-based organization vehemently supporting the policy of Russian President Vladimir Putin, announced on Tuesday its assets had been behind the attack.

The Russian organization also vowed to shut down the website of the Ukrainian Security Service, or SBU, in the near future. The SBU website has been operating Tuesday without any visible disruptions.

Cyberspace has been emerging as a new theatre of conflict for governments around the increasingly networked world, with Russia and China frequently cited as the most active parties.

Earlier this year, for instance, Estonia accused Russia of orchestrating a massive attack that temporarily crippled government networks, a claim Russia denied.

Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, raised reports of Chinese infiltration of German government computers during her visit to Beijing earlier this year.

A part of Pentagon computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, the US defense secretary, was shut in June apparently due to the attack from hackers believed to be affiliated with the Chinese military.

Russia and China officially deny any involvement.

That’s why the statement by the Eurasian Union of the Youth, a well-established organization extremely loyal to the Russian government, is remarkable.

The latest developments show that the Russian organization has been using sophisticated computer assets capable of disrupting a government computer network and eager to do so for political reasons.

The Eurasian Union of the Youth, which advocates for closer ties between Ukraine and Russia and other former Soviet republics, has been vehemently opposing Ukraine’s accession to NATO. The Union was an active party seeking to stop joint NATO-Ukraine naval exercises earlier this year.

The Union said the cyber attack on the website of President Viktor Yushchenko was “in response to an attack by Orange fascist regime of Yushchenko” against its own website.

The Union also threatened to disable the website of the Ukrainian security service unless Yushchenko dismisses Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, SBU’s pro-NATO chief.

“We suggest Yushchenko in advance to remove Nalyvaychenko,” the Union said. “In this case there will be definitely no attack from us on the SBU’s website.”

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The Great Firewall: China's Misguided — and Futile — Attempt to Control What Happens Online

By Oliver August, Wired Magazine, 10.23.07

I didn't know I was a surveillance target until the day I walked into a hotel in China's Fujian province. I was pushing past half a dozen workmen changing lightbulbs in the glum but busy lobby when a uniformed man stepped in front of me. Blue jacket, creased trousers, braided epaulets, peaked cap: government security officer. Politely, he asked whether I would mind answering a few questions. He stood erect, with the manicured swagger of a corporate CEO. Next to him, a gangly plainclothes colleague gave me a so-you-thought-we-wouldn't-catch-you look.

How had they known I would be here? The only people who had my itinerary were my editors in London. A few days earlier, I had sent them an email outlining my trip, and I'd been updating them daily by phone. I could only assume that the authorities had been monitoring my email and calls. I had been chasing down leads on the whereabouts of Lai Changxing, China's most-wanted man. Lai had cheated the government out of $3.6 billion by smuggling oil, cars, and cigarettes. Embarrassed, Beijing wanted to hinder any reporting of his case.

The two officers in the hotel demanded to see my passport and asked what I knew about Lai. Then they withdrew to a corner of the lobby to confer. Eventually, they took me to a police car, drove me to the airport, and put me on a plane to Beijing.

It was, in short, impressive evidence of the government's ability to monitor and control electronic communication. And my experience only hinted at the Chinese government's appetite for control. Beijing has recently added a new weapon to its arsenal of surveillance technologies, a system it believes to be a modern marvel: the Golden Shield. It took eight years and $700 million to build, and its mission is to "purify" the Internet — an apparently urgent task. "Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state," President Hu Jintao said in January.

The Golden Shield — the latest addition to what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall of China — was supposed to monitor, filter, and block sensitive online content. But only a year after completion, it already looks doomed to fail. True, surveillance remains widespread, and outspoken dissidents are punished harshly. But my experience as a correspondent in China for seven years suggests that the country's stranglehold on the communications of its citizens is slipping: Bloggers and other Web sources are rapidly supplanting Communist-controlled news outlets. Cyberprotests have managed to bring about an important constitutional change. And ordinary Chinese citizens can circumvent the Great Firewall and evade other forms of police observation with surprising ease. If they know how.

Like its namesake, the Great Firewall consists of hundreds of individual fortifications spread out along a vulnerable frontier. At its core is a giant bank of computers and servers. Traffic generated by China's 162 million Internet users is routed through the shield, which checks all requested URLs against a blacklist of tens of thousands of Internet addresses. The list includes pages offering political information deemed dangerous by the government, like BBC News and Voice of America. Access to these sites is blocked (at least in theory), and when users attempt to view one of them, they are punished with an involuntary time-out lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Search engines are similarly restricted. If you enter the characters for "democracy" or "Tiananmen Square massacre" into you will generally get zero results. This is a technological breakthrough for the Chinese government. Until recently, it could not interfere with the inner workings of search engines and instead blocked entire sites, not just individual pages of a site.

The Golden Shield hardware — supplied by Cisco and other US companies — is supplemented by human censors who are paid about $170 a month. They sit at screens in warehouse-like buildings run by the Public Security Bureau. These foot soldiers in China's information war monitor domestic news sites, erasing and editing politically sensitive stories. Some sites provide the censors with access so the authorities can alter content directly. Others get an email or a call when changes are required. Similar methods are applied to blogs. Sensitive entries are erased, and in the most egregious cases blogs are shut down altogether.

The censors also monitor email traffic, looking for politically sensitive content like calls for protest marches and anti-government tracts. Because it would be impossible to screen millions of Internet users, they home in on watchlists of potentially suspicious emailers — known dissidents, suspicious foreigners — and notify investigators of possible violations.

Information spied online is collected in counties and major cities and matched up with other surveillance data. In my case, the effectiveness of this technique was obvious. Police minders always seemed to know where I was traveling and when I was back in Beijing. Sometimes they'd call as soon as I landed at the airport, telling me I had yet again broken the rules by traveling without permission or conducting interviews without authorization.

Evading them, however, was surprisingly easy. I bought additional phone numbers, a tactic I picked up from Lai. I also learned dozens of tricks to avoid arousing suspicion online. But the cat-and-mouse game was unrelenting. A year before my book on Lai was published, I told an official about it. Maybe I mixed up my tenses, mistakenly suggesting I had already finished it. "Yes," the official said. "I enjoyed the book." I was too stunned to ask how he might have got his hands on the still-incomplete manuscript. But then, I didn't really have to: When I had arrived at my office in Beijing one morning some eight weeks earlier, I had found the cables on my computer changed around. The modem wire was rolled up in a coil, the power cable unplugged, and the printer attached to the wrong port. It appeared someone had been poking around my hard drive. When I lifted up the computer to fix the mess, I found a piece of paper. On it was my office address, written in an unfamiliar scrawl.

For all its ambition, the gears of the giant surveillance machine keep getting fouled with sand. On one side of the Great Firewall, a small industry is sprouting up, dedicated to evading blocks and monitors. Libertarian software engineers, enterprising students, banned religious groups, and regular for-profit companies compete with one another to launch new downloadable tools that outfox the censors. They exploit proxy servers, deploy encryption technology, and ferret out holes in the wall. I have spent many afternoons in the Internet cafés of Beijing's Haidian University district, learning from the students who live in this world. For a dollar an hour, they will help anyone hack the system: set up secure SSH and VPN connections, use a circumvention tool called UltraSurf developed by the banned Falun Gong group, access unregulated Chinese peer-to-peer networks. Their techniques confirm John Gilmore's adage: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

From these students I learned that censorship is not only easy to subvert, but sometimes it subverts itself. Each week, for example, Beijing's propaganda department updates a list of banned stories. Available to senior journalists at government-controlled news outlets, the list includes scandals, protests, and sackings across the country. Newspapers are not allowed to report on them, but some journalists post the lists online, telling you all you need to know.

The system is self-defeating in other ways as well: Twelve national government bodies share responsibility for the Internet, and all of them have separate political and commercial interests. In some cases, departmental budgets are financed through revenue from online businesses, so it's often in their interests to loosen restrictions. Furthermore, the Great Firewall is besieged by bureaucratic infighting and incompetence that results in exceptions and loopholes.

One day, I received an official summons from the Public Security Bureau, asking me to present myself at the national headquarters. When I turned up, I saw hundreds of bikes covered in dust, as if their riders had gone into the building and never come out.

I was met by two uniformed officers who led me to a windowless room. They came straight to the point: Had I been in touch with Wang Dan, an exiled dissident living in Boston? Yes, I said. I had exchanged emails with him — but had not yet published a story (so how did they know?). Was I aware, they continued, of the rule requiring foreign journalists to ask for official permission to interview Chinese citizens? "Yes," I said. Then the conversation took an unexpected turn. "There is a problem," I told the officers. "Wang Dan has become an American citizen." The officers were silent. "In the future," I said, "which government department should I ask for permission to email and interview him?" Confused and sheepish, they let me leave, and I found myself back by the dusty bikes. So these were the bureaucrats guarding the mighty Great Firewall? Even police departments working in the same building were not talking to each other. Otherwise they would have known that Wang Dan was in fact still carrying a Chinese passport, as I later found out.

Government attempts to suppress coverage of another persona non grata, Lai Changxing, were equally futile. Although excised from the official state media, Lai was well-covered by dozens of Web sites. Hunted by the government, he was cheered on anonymously online. Bloggers compared him to the characters in All Men Are Brothers, a 12th-century book of tales about outlaws who outwit greedy, abusive officials. "Lai is like an ancient bandit," I read on a discussion board. "He only takes from the rich."

After almost two years underground, Lai eventually sought asylum in Canada. Again, independent Web sites carried the news. "Lai has a million-dollar home in Vancouver," was the headline on one site. At this point, newspapers gave up their silence and began to report on the Lai case, too. New media was drawing away millions of readers, so newspaper owners lobbied censors and officials to give them more leeway to defend their commercial interests.

As Chinese citizens become aware that their most potent advantage over censorship is their sheer numbers, more and more grievances are aired online — sometimes with significant consequences. The first cyber-rebellion to have a major political impact took place in 2003. Sun Zhigang, a young migrant worker in Guangzhou, died in police detention after failing to produce identity documents during a street check. Sun's friends protested his death on discussion boards, and soon other sites picked up a campaign demanding police accountability and reform of the laws affecting migrant workers. Before the unprepared system monitors could react, an avalanche was in motion. Tens of thousands of Chinese became involved in a national conversation, despite the risk of punishment. Emboldened, the mainstream media jumped in and reported the Sun case. The government opted not to crack down on these violations, rightly sensing that doing so would have been more politically costly then letting the debate run its course. A few months later, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao abolished the law requiring China's 120 million migrants to have special identity papers. (Singapore, with just 2.4 million regular Internet users and very deep pockets, might have a chance at quelling Internet-fueled popular revolts. But China comprises a fifth of humanity. Any attempt to impose iron-fisted control over a network this big seems certain to trigger economic paralysis.)

Since the Sun case, dissent has regularly roiled the Internet in China. Last year, 13 retired senior officials, including Chairman Mao's former secretary, protested a decision to close down a liberal weekly. In a joint letter published online, they wrote that the government suffered from the "delusion that it can keep the public locked in ignorance." The weekly was reopened.

This year, the pace of protests has increased. In March, the government provoked an outcry online by banning eight controversial books. Their authors published petitions — widely emailed and blogged — criticizing Long Xinmin, the chief censor. Within a few weeks their books were returned to shop shelves, an unprecedented move. Long defended the necessity of censorship, saying, "Advanced network technologies such as blogging and webcasting have been mounting new challenges to the government's ability to supervise the Internet." A month later, Long was fired. Hu Fayun, one of the eight temporarily banned authors, told The Times of London: "The traditional no-talk' style of control by the government has been broken by the Internet. Different voices can be found there."

Why can't the government block coverage of Lai and other sensitive subjects? Besides the seemingly insurmountable technical challenges, one important answer is this: online business. Rigorously policing encryption technology would undermine ecommerce, which is vitally important to the government's crusade to lift the economy. If all encrypted credit card details and other sensitive corporate information had to pass through surveillance bottlenecks, whole sections of the economy would be harmed. When forced to choose, the government seems to trust that raising incomes is a better way of securing power than spying on dissidents.

Of course, China is hardly a Jeffersonian paradise. Thousands languish in prison because of harmless online activities. A recent example is Zhang Jianhong — blogging as Li Hong — who was sentenced to six years for posting political essays. Cases like his justify strong criticism of China. But they don't prove that its monitoring system is successful on a national scale. Furthermore, the government is increasingly relying on physical rather than electronic surveillance. Internet cafs are now required to write down the ID numbers of all users so police can track them down no matter how clever their online disguises. But again, there are physical limits. Police cannot chase after millions of Internet caf&233; visitors.

Today, anyone in China can send a sensitive message if they are minimally savvy, and that fact is transforming the political discourse. True, technology has not led to the overthrow of the Communist Party, as some had predicted — the party has even harnessed the Internet for its own purposes. But this does not mean that Beijing has insulated itself against political change driven by technology. Its critics have unfettered access to mass communications, and the Internet — not the Communist Party — is the main influence on public opinion. No shield, golden or otherwise, can protect them from the public. China's leaders should know this. Their predecessors built the Great Wall of China to keep out Mongol invaders. It proved as useful as every other fixed fortification in history, and the Mongols still invaded Beijing and overthrew the political elite.

How to Breach the Great Firewall of China

Go in disguise

Use proxy servers and other software that can mask your location and identity. Among the most popular apps are Psiphon, Freegate, TOR, and UltraSurf.

Scramble messages

Use encryption for email. Top software tools include Hushmail and Cryptomail, which take advantage of so-called pretty good privacy — PGP — encryption.

Post on the down low

Avoid online discussion groups for obviously controversial subjects. Post sensitive messages in lifestyle or sports Web sites, which are rarely monitored.

Search overseas

Try the international version of a Web site rather than the China-based one. Google's US-based search engine (in Chinese) isn't blocked, for example.

Watch your language

Avoid controversial terms (e.g., "democracy," "Dalai Lama"), or at least don't put them in the title of your blog post. Body text is much less likely to be monitored.

Log On to Skype

The P2P freeware uses 256-bit encryption for phone calls, staying below government radar. Use the international version (not the Chinese one) to avoid spyware.

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'Criminal' Botnet Stumps for Ron Paul, Researchers Allege

By Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired Magazine, 10.31.07

If Texas congressman Ron Paul is elected president in 2008, he may be the first leader of the free world put into power with the help of a global network of hacked PCs spewing spam, according to computer-security researchers who've analyzed a recent flurry of e-mail supporting the long-shot Republican candidate.

"This is clearly a criminal act in support of a campaign, which has been committed with or without their knowledge," says Gary Warner, the University of Alabama at Birmingham's director of research in computer forensics. "The question is, will we see more and more of this, or will this bring shame to the campaigns and will they make clear that this is not a form of acceptable behavior by their supporters?" Warner pointed to provisions of the federal Can-Spam Act.

Ron Paul spokesman Jesse Benton says the campaign has no knowledge of the scam. Warner himself says that he has no reason to believe that the Paul campaign had anything to do with these messages.

Some participants in the online political world have long suspected Paul's technically sophisticated fan base of manipulating online tools and polls to boost the appearance of a wide base of support. But the UAB analysis is the first to document any internet shenanigans.

The finding is significant, because Paul's online support -- as gauged by blog mentions, friends on social-networking sites such as MySpace and popularity in online polls -- has garnered him wide mainstream print and television coverage, despite his relatively poor performance in offline polling.

The spamming allegations are based on a slew of e-mails captured by contributors to the university's Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project, a research venture that receives 2.5 million spam messages a day, and selects about 100,000 a week for analysis. The project receives its spam from other researchers with ties to ISPs, and in some cases from "trap" addresses that have never been used for any other purpose.

They were received by the lab following the latest televised Republican debate Sunday afternoon, and had 16 different subject lines, including "Ron Paul Wins GOP Debate! HMzjoqO" and "Ron Paul Exposes Federal Reserve! SBHBcSO." The random string of characters at the end is a common spammer's technique to circumvent bulk e-mail filtering.

The spam went to "several hundred" e-mail addresses harvested for the university project, says Warner.

The e-mails had phony names attached to real-looking e-mail addresses. When lab researchers examined the IP addresses of the computers from which the messages had been sent, it turned out that they were sprinkled around the globe in countries as far away from each other as South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Nigeria and Brazil.

"The interesting thing was that we had the same subject line from the same IP address, and it claimed to be from different users from within the United States," Warner says.

One e-mail was designed to look as if it came from within a major Silicon Valley corporation, he notes. But when the researchers looked up the IP address, the computer from which the note was sent was actually in South Korea. Another e-mail that was designed to look as if it came from Houston was sent from Italy.

That pattern led Warner to conclude that the messages had been laundered through a botnet -- also a standard spammer practice, though a decidedly illegal one.

The body of a message examined by Wired News covered familiar Paul campaign themes, such as ending the war and eliminating the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Reserve. It also read:

Ron Paul is for the people, unless you want your children to have human implant RFID chips, a National ID card and create a North American Union and see an economic collapse far worse than the great depression. Vote for Ron Paul he speaks the truth and the media and government is afraid of him.

Last week, the prominent conservative blog Redstate banned new Paul supporters from posting on its site because of their "shilling" for the candidate in conversations that had nothing to do with politics. Other sites have disabled their online polls, because they suspected that they were being gamed by Ron Paul supporters.

Notwithstanding such charges, Paul's third-quarter haul of $5 million in campaign contributions seems to show that he does have a larger base of support than offline polls indicate.

Dan Hubbard of security company Websense reviewed one of the messages captured by the university. He believes that there was some type of spam-laundering in use -- though not necessarily a botnet.

"I have not seen a malicious-code sample yet that is sending these mails, therefore I would say it's likely that either they are using a botnet, or they are using open relays," he says, referring to unsecured e-mail servers that will accept anonymous e-mail and forward it back out to the internet.

Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said in an e-mail, "This is the first I've heard about this situation."

"If it is true, it could be done by a well-intentioned yet misguided supporter or someone with bad intentions trying to embarrass the campaign," he wrote while ferrying his boss to tape an appearance on The Tonight Show. "Either way, this is independent work, and we have no connection."

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Boeing Teams with Northrop Grumman on B-52 Core Component Jammer

From Defense Daily, Vol. 236, No. 23, , October 31, 2007

Oct 31, 2007 Boeing has joined forces with Northrop Grumman to offer the Air Force an affordable and comparatively low-risk solution to installing powerful jamming pods on the B-52H bomber aircraft so that the venerable platform could disrupt enemy air defense radar from standoff distances in addition to its normal strike roles, according to representatives from both aerospace giants.

The Air Force calls this concept the B-52 Core Component Jammer (CCJ). While the CCJ is currently not a program of record, the service has previously expressed its desire in pursuing this capability to meet the pressing requirement to be able to jam long-range surveillance radars from afar so that strike aircraft can penetrate defended airspace (Defense Daily, Nov. 9, 2006 and Nov. 16, 2006). The previous program envisioned to address this capability gap, the B-52 Stand-Off Jammer (SOJ), was cancelled after its costs rose significantly (Defense Daily, Sept. 27, 2006).

This week discussions are expected within the Pentagon that could have an impact on the CCJ's future.

"We just wanted to come and say we are ready," Scot Oathout, Boeing's director of B-52 Programs, told Defense Daily. "We have been working this and we are ready to support the Air Force if this actually becomes a program."

"Between us, we think we can help them get there with the right solution," he continued. "You have the [electronic attack] expertise and the aircraft expertise married together. It is the perfect match."

Boeing built the B-52H, the last of which rolled off the production line in the early 1960s. Although old by chronological standards, both Air Force and industry officials have said these aircraft have a lot of life left in them, noting that the anticipated service life of them goes out to 2040.

Northrop Grumman built the jamming pods for the Navy's EA-6B Prowler jamming aircraft and is supplying them for the sea service's EA-18G Growlers that will replace the Prowlers.

Officials from Boeing and Northrop Grumman said the CCJ program would benefit from the experience of both companies working together on programs like Growler, which uses Boeing's F/A-18 airframe.

"Similar to what we did with the Navy, [we are] bringing together the two experts for a low-risk, on-schedule, affordable program," Pat McMahon, vice president of Northrop Grumman's Electronic Support & Attack Solutions, told Defense Daily. "When we teamed before, we have shown that we can be successful. At this point, we want to be there for the Air Force, if this is what they choose to do."

Boeing is the team leader.

The CCJ would be one piece in the U.S. military's future airborne electronic attack architecture that will consist of modified fighter jets with jamming pods to serve as escorts, air-launched decoys and perhaps penetrating unmanned aircraft. It involves fitting 40-foot jammers in pods on the wingtips of the B-52s. The modifications would not impact the bomber's ability to carry bombs and missiles and deploy them.

Oathout and McMahon said the CCJ would leverage the work that the Air Force Research Laboratory has done with low-band phased-arrays since the SOJ was terminated in late 2005.

"The Air Force has kept things going," he said. "They have had great progress and very good results in that investment they have done over the last several years."

The CCJ, he continued, "is a tremendously lower risk program than the Stand Off Jammer program...Electronic attack or electronic warfare programs are not low risk. We all know that, [but] I think we have gotten this as low as we can. You don't get second chances, Budgets are tight. We have to bring forward the right solution."

The CCJ team says modification work on the B-52s would be completed at Boeing's Support Systems facility in Wichita, Kan., and at Northrop Grumman's facility in Bethpage, N.Y.

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Cyber War Moves Up NATO Agenda

By Tom Young, What PC? (UK), 01 Nov 2007

Nato countries’ defence ministers met last week to finalise the organisation’s first policy covering cyber attacks on member states’ critical national infrastructure.

After hacking campaigns against Estonia in May, and Whitehall and the Pentagon in October, the profile of electronic warfare is on the rise.

Computer-based spying and the hacking of military systems have been a staple of conflicts since the Cold War. But the attacks are getting bigger and more organised, tilting at the age-old counter-espionage target of destabilising a country from afar.

Estonia was subjected to a systematic campaign to bring it to its knees following removal of a Soviet war memorial, according to Mihkel Tammet, director of communications and IT at the country’s Ministry of Defence.

“These attacks were not aimed at ruining our databases or stealing our information. They were assaults on the service industry and our nation’s infrastructure,” said Tammet.

And they were co-ordinated and well-funded, he said.

First the attackers tested the bandwidth of Estonia’s ISPs. Then, over a period of three weeks, deluges of spam disrupted government systems, news portals and banking sites.

Assaults on the financial sector were particularly effective. The two main banks, representing three-quarters of the industry, saw their online services disabled for almost 24 hours.

“Estonia is 97 per cent dependent on internet banking and cash is not common, so many people had serious problems,” said Tammet.

The disruption of news web sites maximised the psychological impact by making it hard for people to find out what was going on.

Critically, the situation cannot be blamed on Estonia’s poor cyber defences. The government has good links with industries and ISPs, and was prepared for the attacks.

“Few countries would have been as good as Estonia at keeping networks running for those three weeks,” said Anil Suleyman, head of Nato’s Computer Incident Response Capability, speaking in a personal capacity.

The developed world has a lot to learn from Estonia’s experience, not least because future attacks may be more severe thanks to the increasing use of botnets - networked groups of infected computers that generate vast quantities of spam.

Cyber attacks will be a key part of future conflicts. And the potential for using computers as a first-strike weapon is also not being ignored, according to James Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

“There are perhaps 20 nations developing these skills to gain military advantage,” said Lewis.

“In warfare these tactics could be far more serious. Nations will need to be able to defend themselves against a sustained cyber campaign.”

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A Late Push for the Cyber Command

By Tom Roeder, The Gazette, October 28, 2007

Colorado Springs is lobbying hard to get its hands on Air Force Cyber Command — a new and fast-growing unit that could be a payday of sizable proportions for whatever city lands it.

The city is late out of the starting blocks in its effort to get the contractor-heavy unit, charged with protecting the United States from computer attacks while planning how to hack into enemy networks.

But local officials say they’re building steam.

Air Force Cyber Command is temporarily housed at Barksdale Air Force Base, La. Colorado lawmakers including Sens. Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard want it moved to Colorado Springs, where it would be close to Air Force Space Command and U.S. Northern Command.

They’re battling lawmakers from Louisiana who are lobbying to have the Air Force remove its interim designation from the headquarters at Barksdale, and delegations from Nebraska and California who want the command in their states.

Compared with other military units that have moved to Colorado Springs in recent years, Cyber Command is minuscule, with roughly 400 uniformed airmen in its ranks. But as it grows, the command will require legions of highly paid computer contractors, and authorities in Louisiana are estimating it could wind up accounting for 10,000 civilian jobs — directly and through related businesses — if the Air Force permanently stations it there.

The Air Force says the command will grow, but by how much and when remains unclear.

Leaving the command in Louisiana doesn’t make sense, said Colorado Springs booster Wes Clark, a retired Air Force general and vice president of the defense contractor Science Applications International Corp., which works with four local military facilities.

Clark said keeping the nation’s top computer command in a place that’s susceptible to hurricanes would be a bad plan. The command, he said, should be located near Air Force Space Command, which manages satellites that are the backbone of the military’s computer networks.

Clark said it could be a good fit at Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, an inside-the-mountain fortress that could protect sensitive computers from attack. The mountain is especially attractive because it’s on “warm standby” status and is primarily used for training since its missile warning and air defense work was moved to nearby Peterson Air Force Base.

Other alternatives here include Peterson, as well as Schriever Air Force Base, a secure site on the eastern plains where the Air Force now has many of its most sensitive satellite functions housed.

All members of Colorado’s congregational delegation signed a letter urging the Air Force to put Cyber Command here.

“We believe that the Pikes Peak region would make an ideal location for the Air Force’s newest command, offering significant operational benefits, economic advantages and an unparalleled quality of life,” they said.

Salazar said the area could easily house the command.

“Colorado and Colorado Springs have become the crown jewel of our space and air systems, therefore it would make sense for Cyber Command to be a part of those centers,” he said.

U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn said it would be hard to beat out Louisiana, which has worked for more than a year to keep the command that was provisionally placed at Barksdale, and Nebraska, which started its campaign for the command months ago.

“We got started a little bit late,” Lamborn said.

Lamborn’s new position on the House Armed Services Committee could help the Colorado Springs bid, but the rookie representative lacks seniority to push much of an agenda and sits in the minority caucus.

Clark said Colorado Springs and other places got in the competition for Cyber Command late because it became apparent only recently that the Air Force would consider locations outside Louisiana. Nebraska and Louisiana had a leg up because they house units that will become part of Cyber Command.

Air Force spokesman Ed Gulick said the service expects to pick Cyber Command’s home by the end of the year.

“While a number of basing locations for a permanent command staff are being considered and evaluated, no final decisions have been made,” he said.

Brian Binn from the Greater Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce said the Pikes Peak region has so many selling points that it could quickly leap ahead in the cyberspace race.

A big consideration, Binn said, should be the wellstocked defense contractors in the region who will play such a vital role in getting the command up and running.

But other competitors have cards to play. Nebraska is home to U.S. Strategic Command at Offut Air Force Base in Omaha. California is offering Beale Air Force Base north of Sacramento, a highly secure facility that isn’t far from the high-tech centers of the Silicon Valley.

Louisiana comes to the table with a power slate of congressional Democrats and a pile of cash incentives, including up to $50 million to build a high-tech think tank near Barksdale.

Concern about Nebraska’s efforts to attract more military jobs is so rampant that Colorado Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien recently told a meeting of business leaders in Denver that Omaha wanted to steal U.S. Northern Command and Air Force Space Command from Colorado Springs.

Local leaders said the commands are staying put, but Omaha’s aggressive sales tactics are making people nervous.

The Pentagon wouldn’t comment on any specific bid for the new command.

Even if Colorado Springs doesn’t get the command’s headquarters, it could still fall in line for a piece of the burgeoning command’s forces, Gulick said. After its headquarters gets settled in, the command is expected to form wings and squadrons to carry out its missions, he said.

Wherever Cyber Command settles, it will have a crucial role in the Air Force’s future.

“Network warfare,” which will fall under the command, is the catchphrase of the decade for military planners who want to use improved communications to give commanders better battlefield information.

But “network warfare” also exposes a major military vulnerability for U.S. forces, which are increasingly reliant on technology and have a computer in every truck.

Clark said those factors should make Colorado Springs leaders keep up the pressure to move the command here, and to make a play for other service’s cyber warfare initiatives, which are sure to follow.

“If we don’t get Air Force Cyber Command, then we need to start looking at Army cyber command,” Clark said.

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Countdown to Cyber Holy War?

By Marc Sheppard, American Thinker, 1 Nov 07

DebkaFile, the Israel-based military intelligence website, is reporting that they intercepted Arabic language website announcements on Monday declaring an imminent "cyber jihad on the west," and warns that:

"On Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda's electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites. On Day One, they will test their skills against 15 targeted sites expand the operation from day to day thereafter until hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold numbers of anti-Muslim sites."

According to Tuesday's alert, counter-terrorism sources reported that the first announcement was followed by an apparent crash of some of al Qaeda's websites, which were thought to have been brought down by American intelligence cyber-operatives. The sites were back online the following day, however, "claiming their Islamic fire walls were proof against infidel assault," and attempting to recruit would-be "virtual martyrs" to join in the electronic reprisal.

Debka's piece wraps up with:

"The electronic war they have declared could cause considerable trouble on the world's Internet"

If this represents a legitimate threat (while often right on the money, some of Debka's reports have proven to be bogus in the past) then to call their conclusion understated would certainly be an understatement -- so much so that I'm forced to wonder whether its true payoff was somehow lost in its Hebrew to English translation.

After all, while this supposed impending exchange represents a clash over information dissemination sites only, it may, in fact, signify the opening battle in a much larger declared war. In that case, al Qaeda's hacking abilities may now be much greater than previously imagined. If so, future conflicts might well include attacks against financial, power (including nuclear), transportation, hospital, communication and military networks, just to name a few perchance vulnerable targets.

And cyber-terrorism is by no means limited to the disabling of the enemy's systems and defenses through malware the likes of viruses, worms and Trojans. Potential physical targets can be easily assessed for weaknesses by surveying them quite accurately through compromised information networks.

In other words, this is serious stuff.

As such, should this menace described by Debka turn out to be anything less than legitimately assessed by their "experts," then I dare say that their less-than-stellar reputation for accuracy may soon enormously overshadow their knack for delivering cutting-edge, real-time and often exclusive Middle East military news.

Frankly, while I don't cherish either eventuality, I am, needless to say, rooting for the latter.

I guess the next 10 days will tell. Stay tuned.

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Targeting Hearts and Minds: Canadians Woo Undecided among Afghan Public

From the Canadian Press, 30 Oct 07

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - There's a behind-the-scenes battle going on in Afghanistan that has nothing to do with tanks, guns, suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices - at least not on the surface.

But In this country where a nod from an influential cleric or village elder can turn an enemy into an ally, the stakes are high in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.

Much of the work of the Canadian Forces in this struggle for popular support is done behind the scenes, and "targeting officers" play a pivotal role.

"What we do is look at all potential people we want to influence," said Capt. Patrick Hannan of Sorel, Que., a targeting officer for the Canadian Forces in Kandahar.

"Targeting doesn't mean always to destroy things or to kill people, like we do with the Taliban," he explained.

"The most complicated part of it is to identify people we want to influence and changing the behaviours in a village we want to be more pro-government."

"What I do is I propose to the general what effect and what means can be selected to achieve that effect."

The non-lethal targeting is done with the use of Afghan advisers as well as information garnered from soldiers out on psychological operations, local media, tribal councils known as shuras, and the engagement of local leaders.

The problem, Hannan said, is just how many members of the Afghan public are in the undecided camp. As in the case of some elections, the undecided make up the vast majority of the "hearts and minds" that remain to be captured.

"The Taliban and us are fighting to get the support of 80 per cent of the population," Hannan said.

"I would say there's 10 per cent hard-core Taliban and whatever you do and tell them, they will never change their mind. Some 10 per cent are hard-core loyal to the government and whatever the Taliban do - they'll stay loyal.

"The rest, they just want to have a secure environment and jobs."

Although Hannan believes that many Afghans look favourably on Canada and other coalition forces, the fact is that after almost 10 years of Russian occupation followed by seven years of civil war, public opinion tends to be fickle.

"They'll go on the side that will bring security," he said.

"So if you dominate an area, they'll support you. If you leave the area and the Taliban come in, they don't want to get beaten, hanged or intimidated. They'll just go on the Taliban side."

"Personally, what I see is people don't want to go back to the old regime where they have no freedom."

A new front may be opening up in this effort to gain public support.

It is expected that there will be a battle over influence in the Arghandab district, which sits between Kandahar city and districts to the north. The location puts the district on an infiltration path for the Taliban into the city.

Mullah Naqib, the Kandahar strongman who ruled the Arghandab district, died of a heart attack earlier this month.

He had been a supporter of Canada's military presence in Afghanistan, warning against a pullout of Canadian troops when their current mission expires in February, 2009.

His death raises doubts about security on the city's northern flank. Canadian troops are currently focused on the river valley that leads to Kandahar from the southwest.

A tribal council will determine his replacement but the process could take months.

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Net Force

By Robert S. Dudney, Air Force Magazine, November 2007

The Air Force, having openly declared its intent to dominate cyberspace, is now getting blowback in Washington. This is strange, given that USAF is a pace-setter in the virtual world and lives or dies by what happens there.

USAF’s cyber stature is not in doubt. It has waged cyberwar in three recent conflicts. It has signed out a new mission statement putting cyberspace on par with air and space as a combat domain. It has activated a provisional major command dedicated to cyber warfighting. It has poured billions into the mission.

For all that, its actions arouse concerns. What is USAF up to? Where is it going? The service clearly has a big stake in cyberspace, but many in the defense world fret about its aggressiveness.

Lt. Gen. Robert J. Elder Jr., commander of 8th Air Force and the service leader on cyberwar issues, reports that questioners often challenge him about USAF’s motives and willingness to cooperate with other services and agencies. “They say, ‘The Air Force put this [cyberspace] in its mission statement; do you think you own it?’ ” Elder notes.

To this, Elder has a ready response: “No, we don’t own it.” USAF does, however, have a deep interest in what goes on in this vast netted world of data banks, sensors, and command and control elements. That is precisely as it should be, and the Air Force should ignore the complainers and press on toward its goal.

That goal is hardly a military secret. In a May 23 speech, Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne stated, “In the future it will be vital that we ... dominate cyberspace.”

The basis for this belief can be discerned in “Victory in Cyberspace,” a study released in October for the Eaker Institute, the research arm of the Air Force Association. The author, defense analyst Rebecca Grant, expertly traces the development of cyber networks and how they largely define today’s Air Force. She writes that, in the 1990s, cyber power advanced from being a limited, intelligence-based tool to an actual combat instrument.

Grant emphasizes that USAF relies on digitized information to power its advanced combat systems and magnify targeting, attack, and other capabilities. “In fact, the Air Force’s formation, over the past decade, of secure networks for expeditionary operations has become central to the way it fights,” she says.

The flow of data to command and control networks or airborne battle networks is the fuel of USAF might in the physical world. Cyber networks make possible what is termed “cross-domain operations.” Simply put, execution of key tasks in “physical” air and space depends on “virtual” cyber functions.

Striking mobile targets, for example, would be impossible without networks in cyberspace to swiftly distribute images and signals.

Conversely, Grant warns, cyberspace looms as a potentially fatal Achilles’ heel. The military—especially USAF—has entrusted more and more of its warfighting “valuables” to these networks, she says, in search of faster communications and data transfer. That has created vulnerabilities.

In Grant’s estimation, any adversary who can impair access to cyberspace can greatly diminish the speed, range, and flexibility that USAF currently provides to a joint force commander.

The networks comprise physical, virtual, and cognitive “social” systems. If any fail, combat capability would suffer. Thus, writes Grant, “defending the ability to use established cyberspace systems that enhance the application of air and space power amounts to Job One” for airmen.

The Grant study suggests that, in a tactical sense, the bulk of USAF’s work focuses on defeating intruders via detection and deflection, before they can paralyze cyber systems, alter stored data, or steal classified information.

Even so, effective defense of the networks requires offensive cyber weapons, too. These are among the most highly classified of instruments, but their use would be obvious. Elder told an Eaker Institute audience on Oct. 6, “We’re probably going to leave a little message that goes on the screen, that says, ‘This computer network attack brought to you by the United States Air Force.'"

Former USAF Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper, another Eaker panelist, likened the Air Force approach to dominance of the air through defensive and offensive counterair operations, noting that both are vital to success.

Still, Grant writes, three decades of experience suggests that cyberspace, with its multitude of public connections, never can be completely secured. That means the Air Force must prepare ways to continue fighting even when under virtual attack.

Claims of the critics notwithstanding, the Air Force wants as much help as it can get. It seeks to team with a large number of partners—military, civilian, law enforcement, commercial—in hopes of maximizing US defensive strength.

Example: USAF will fund 200 airman billets at the headquarters of the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, Md. They will support NSA’s network intelligence work in return for reciprocal NSA help in various areas.

The Air Force also seeks to establish a dedicated cyber unit in the Air National Guard in every state, Elder says.

In the end, though, none of these partners will be able to guarantee the security of USAF’s access to cyberspace. The Air Force itself must take the lead.

We are proud of the Air Force for moving out and meeting this challenge head on. In a sense, USAF has consciously made itself dependent on cyber systems that can be attacked and defeated more readily than is the case with its physical systems. Thus, it is now up to the Air Force to make sure the dangers are kept in bounds. The Air Force is uniquely placed to master the challenge. The technology and techniques are available.

“It’s time to get started,” Jumper told the Eaker Institute audience. “It’s time for us to organize ourselves and get started on this problem in a formal way.... This isn’t about ownership. This is about starting down a path,” at the end of which lies effective dominance of a critical new warfighting domain.

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ARMY GLOBAL INFORMATION OPERATIONS CONFERENCE, 5 - 8 FEBRUARY 08

1. THE US ARMY SPACE AND MISSILE DEFENSE COMMAND/US ARMY FORCES STRATEGIC COMMAND (SMDC/ARSTRAT) AND HEADQUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY G3/5/7 (DAMO-ODI) INVITE YOU TO THE FIFTH ARMY GLOBAL INFORMATION OPERATIONS (IO) CONFERENCE FROM 5-8 FEBRUARY 2008. THE CONFERENCE WILL BE AT PETERSON AFB, COLORADO SPRINGS, CO 80914. A MAP TO THE CONFERENCE FACILITY IS POSTED TO THE CONFERENCE REGISTRATION WEBSITE.

2. THE PURPOSE OF THIS CONFERENCE IS TO BRING THE ARMY IO COMMUNITY TOGETHER TO DISCUSS AND CAPTURE THOUGHTS ON HOW THE ARMY CAN OPERATIONALLY SUPPORT USSTRATCOM'S GLOBAL IO MISSIONS.

3. THE MACRO OBJECTIVES FOR THE CONFERENCE ARE 1) INTEGRATION AND COORDINATION OF ARMY IO IN SUPPORT OF USSTRATCOM AND OTHER COMBATANT COMMANDS, 2) IDENTIFY STRATEGIC ARMY IO GAPS AND SEAMS, AND 3) IDENTIFY POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS.

4. THE FOLLOWING AGENDA OVERVIEW IS PROVIDED FOR YOUR INFORMATION. ADDRESSES ARE REQUESTED TO SUBMIT TOPICS FOR BRIEFINGS. UPDATES TO THE AGENDA WILL BE POSTED AT THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE. MONDAY (4 FEBRUARY 08) AND FRIDAY (8 FEBRUARY 08) ARE DESIGNATED FOR TRAVEL:

- 5 FEBRUARY (TUESDAY): BRIEFINGS FOCUS ON USSTRATCOM, FUNCTIONAL COMPONENTS, AND IO CAPABILITY REQUIREMENTS.

- 6 FEBRUARY (WEDNESDAY): BRIEFINGS FOCUS ON ARMY IO, MAJOR CHANGES, AND IO CAPABILITY REQUIREMENTS.

- ARMY IO CAMPAIGN PLAN AND CNO EXORD UPDATES

- CYBER AND EW (CEW) PROPONENCY

- RESTRUCTURE OF ARMY IO (FM 3-0, FM 5-0 AND FM 3-13 REWRITES)

- CORE IO CAPABILITIES BRIEFS

- O-6 EXECUTIVE SESSION (TBD)

- 7 FEBRUARY (THURSDAY): BRIEFINGS FOCUS ON ARMY AND OTHER SERVICE IO, MAJOR CHANGES, AND IO CAPABILITY REQUIREMENTS.

- OTHER ARMY SERVICE COMPONENT COMMAND (USASOC, USARCENT, USARPAC, USAREUR, USARSO, USARNORTH, USFORSCOM) ARE INVITED TO PROVIDE IO RELATED BRIEFINGS THAT OUTLINE RECENT AND/OR PROPOSED USSTRATCOM AND/OR ARMY IO SUPPORT

- 8 FEBRUARY (FRIDAY): MORNING BRIEFS (TBD). AFTERNOON TRAVEL.

5. BRIEFINGS MAY BE SENT VIA SIPRNET TO: LTC FRANK GRAY, FRANK.GRAY@SMDC-CS.ARMY.SMIL.MIL, MR. JOSE CARRINGTON, JOSE.CARRINGTON@SMDC-CS.ARMY.SMIL.MIL, OR MR. TK HUNTER, THOMAS.HUNTER@SMDC-CS.ARMY.SMIL.MIL; JWICS BRIEFINGS CAN BE SENT TO GRAYF@ARMY.. PRESENTATIONS MUST BE RECEIVED NLT WEDNESDAY, 30 JANUARY 08.

6. CONFERENCE DETAILS

A. REGISTRATION FOR THIS CONFERENCE MUST BE COMPLETED NLT WEDNESDAY, 30 JANUARY 08. THE CONFERENCE REGISTRATION WEB SITE IS .

B. CONFERENCE SECURITY REQUIREMENTS: PERSONNEL ATTENDING THIS CONFERENCE MUST HAVE A TOP SECRET CLEARANCE AND BE CURRENTLY INDOCTRINATED FOR SCI ACCESS. PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOUR SPECIAL SECURITY OFFICE (SSO) FORWARDS AN SCI VISIT NOTIFICATION TO PLA: SSO ARSTRAT OR JPAS SMO: W4XQAA2. CONTRACTORS MAY HAVE THEIR FSO/CSSO FAX THEIR CLEARANCE INFORMATION TO UNCLAS FAX: 719-554-1872. PLEASE INCLUDE THE DATES OF VISIT, PURPOSE OF VISIT AND CONFERENCE POC (MR. CARRINGTON, DSN 692 – 8880). THE SECURITY POC FOR THE SCI VISIT CERTIFICATION IS MS. TRACY CROWELL AT 719-554-1884. VISIT REQUESTS MUST CONTAIN THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION:

VISITORS' FULL NAME:

SSN:

DOB AND POB:

RANK/GRADE:

SERVICE/ORGANIZATION:

SECURITY CLEARANCE LEVEL, INVESTIGATION TYPE AND DATES COMPLETED:

PURPOSE OF VISIT: ARMY GLOBAL IO CONFERENCE

PERIOD OF VISIT: 5 – 8 FEBRUARY 2008

SMDC/ARSTRAT POC(S):  LTC GRAY (719) 554-8877 AND MR. CARRINGTON, (719) 554-8880.

C. ATTENDEES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING YOUR OWN LODGING RESERVATIONS. PETERSON AFB BILLETING, HOTEL INFORMATION AND AREA MAPS ARE POSTED TO THE ABOVE WEB SITE. COMMERCIAL LODGING RESERVATIONS FOR PERSONNEL ON OFFICIAL TRAVEL ORDERS MUST BE MADE THROUGH THE PETERSON AFB LODGING OPERATION AT (719) 556-7851 OR DSN 834-7851. ON-BASE LODGING MUST BE AT FULL CAPACITY PRIOR TO OFF-BASE UTILIZATION.

D. THERE WILL BE A $25.00 CONFERENCE FEE COVERING DAILY REFRESHMENTS AND A WEDNESDAY WORKING LUNCH AT THE O’CLUB. A NO HOST SOCIAL IS PLANNED FOR THE EVENING OF TUESDAY, 5 FEBRUARY 08 (TBD).

7. - OTHER COCOMS (USSOCOM, USCENTCOM, USPACOM, USEUCOM, USSOUTHCOM, USNORTHCOM, AND USJFCOM) ARE INVITED TO PROVIDE IO RELATED BRIEFINGS THAT OUTLINE RECENT AND/OR PROPOSED USSTRATCOM AND/OR ARMY IO SUPPORT

8. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE FOLLOWING CONFERENCE POCS WITH ANY QUESTIONS:

LTC FRANK GRAY, SMDC/ARSTRAT G3/IO, DSN: 692-8877; COMM: 719-554-8877;

FRANK.GRAY@SMDC-CS.ARMY.SMIL.MIL

MR. JOSE CARRINGTON, SMDC/ARSTRAT G3/IO, DSN: 692-8880; COMM: 719-554-8880; JOSE.CARRINGTON@SMDC-CS.ARMY.SMIL.MIL

MR. TK HUNTER, SMDC/ARSTRAT G3/IO, DSN: 692-8874; COMM: 719-554-8874; THOMAS.HUNTER@SMDC-CS.ARMY.SMIL.MIL

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Building Knowledge Management System for Researching Terrorist Groups on the Web

By Yilu Zhou, Jialun Qin, Guanpi Lai, Edna Reid, Hsinchun Chen, University of Arizona

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, terrorist organizations have found a cost-effective resource to advance their courses by posting high-impact Web sites on the Internet. This alternate side of the Web is referred to as the “Dark Web.” While counterterrorism researchers seek to obtain and analyze information from the Dark Web, several problems prevent effective and efficient knowledge discovery: the dynamic and hidden character of terrorist Web sites, information overload, and language barrier problems. This study proposes an intelligent knowledge management system to support the discovery and analysis of multilingual terrorist-created Web data. We developed a systematic approach to identify, collect and store up-to-date multilingual terrorist Web data. We also propose to build an intelligent Web-based knowledge portal integrated with advanced text and Web mining techniques such as summarization, categorization and cross-lingual retrieval to facilitate the knowledge discovery from Dark Web resources. We believe our knowledge portal provide counterterrorism research communities with valuable datasets and tools in knowledge discovery and sharing.

Ed Note: Due to size the article is posted on the ARSTRAT G39 Intelink webpage.

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The articles and information appearing herein are intended for educational and non-commercial purposes to promote discussion of research in the public interest. The views, opinions, and/or findings and recommendations contained in this summary are those of the original authors and should not be construed as an official position, policy, or decision of the United States Government, U.S. Department of the Army, or U.S. Army Strategic Command.

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