Bruce Schneier: Has U.S. started an Internet war?

I&#x27;ve long suspected 90% of the budgets and bills they are trying to pass is to help them <i>offensively</i> against other countries. And yet, 100% of their arguments in public were that they are needed for <i>defense</i>.<p>The government seems to be lying about a lot of things it&#x27;s doing in your name. You may be okay with it, but just don&#x27;t act surprised when the retaliation begins, which of course the US government will make it seem like <i>they</i> started it, and now they need even more money and you having fewer liberties to help in the &quot;cyberwar&quot; that they started.<p>And just like that the &quot;cyberwarfare industry complex&quot; will keep expanding just like the &quot;military industry complex&quot; for decades to come, if nobody wants to do anything to stop it before it can&#x27;t be stopped anymore, and its budgets will keep increasing year after year, with no one daring to touch them.

Some facts about Bruce Schneier <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneierfacts.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneierfacts.com</a>

Corporations are people, assassin drones make war, the military has stockpiled cyber weapons… when did the real world turn into Shadowrun? And can we please get dragons and elves out the deal?

Does the world need a Geneva convention on cyber warfare? I&#x27;m beginning to believe so. Unfortunately we (humanity) might need something catastrophic to occur first.

This is a reasonable thesis (and it seems the hits just keep on coming from Snowden), but parts of the exposition ring a bit false. If these people are really capable of total observation of all traffic through a random router in Beijing, how is it that they&#x27;ve missed all the APT stuff? We&#x27;ve been told that we had to basically throw out some components of the new stealth planes and start the design over because Chinese hacking. This seems like an adversary that would be vulnerable to the capabilities described here.<p>If they simply didn&#x27;t think stealth fighter designs were worth protecting, then yes I think Schneier is correct that they need to think a bit more defensively.

I&#x27;m not entirely sure that <i>this</i> is what has me worried. The government <i>should</i> be using the same tools I could rent from Russian botnet owners and a geolocation service.<p>What has me scared is that the people directing this don&#x27;t actually understand it all. They don&#x27;t understand Big Data analysis and why that requires <i>all</i> the phone records. They don&#x27;t understand how boring a concept geolocation is, or in fact how boring a database of possible attack vectors is.<p>It&#x27;s all magic - magic they can control if they just pass another law abolishing some silly, antiquated civil rights that only pertained in the age of musketry.

Related blog post from awhile back: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freedom-or-safety.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;when-will-the-first-hacker-be-killed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;freedom-or-safety.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;when-will-the-first-hacker...</a><p>This is tricky business. It is not so clear where the boundaries are.<p>Sidebar: anybody who writes a lot will understand the feeling you get when, after writing an article, you suddenly understand a topic in a way that you did not before putting your thoughts together. One of the things I got from my article that I didn&#x27;t expect was that, whatever else they are, <i>computers are weapons</i>.<p>Weird concept.

A quote from the leaked document:<p>&quot;Malicious Cyber Activity: Activities, other than those authorized by or in accordance with U.S. law, that seek to compromise or impair...&quot;<p>It&#x27;s a nice way to render the U.S. incapable of being malicious.

This reads like the backstory to a Terminator movie.

I&#x27;d argue that China started the war, and the US is going to escalate it. At least a decade before the US had an organized plan for fighting a digital war, China had organized, very large, and very effective hacking efforts underway targeting the US government and US companies.

They&#x27;ve probably not started a war. I honestly believe it takes a bit more than that. (Admittedly, they should not be doing stuff in the category of &quot;might start a war&quot; without the knowledge&#x2F;consent of the general public.)<p>However, this whole &quot;foreign entity&quot; business did just start them a domestic war - with the entire US internet industry, which they have just entirely thrown under the bus with regards to their foreign customers (which, it is worth pointing out, outnumber their US customers by a sizable multiple).

If so, then the US has fired the first shot and hit...its foot.

Started? Not so much (I think)...rather made some stupid decisions so that it went public.<p>To me the real question is: Who is fighting (nationalities, companies, individuals)? AND: Are the combatants attacking who they think are their targets or just some enemy so that we are entering a circle where informational warfare is simply being carried out for the sake of being able to do it?<p>I can imagine one party going for another when indeed they have the same goals...

In the embedded video, I quite enjoy the barely-masked contempt in Greenwald&#x27;s face when he answers the interviewer&#x27;s last question.

Is all this secrecy just &quot;security through obscurity&quot; which is well know to be unreliable. In other words, would we be better off just letting everyone (citizens and enemies) know exactly what you are doing (e.g. tapping phones or not)?<p>The benefits are certain but the costs are uncertain.

It&#x27;s MAD 2.0

Unless we start spending less than 1% of our GDP or so on Pentagon Inc, I don&#x27;t mind this. What&#x27;s the point of having a $12 Billion aircraft carrier if a Chinese hacker can hack it? Or having a $700 Billion a year military if a kid with telnet can hack your power grid? I mean to say that war has been shifted to computer networks and we need to be ready.<p>I just think it can be done without tracing all the phone calls my aunt makes.