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U.S. Government. Hackers Are Spying On You: Inside the World of Digital Espionage. Winding through corridors lined with poison-tipped umbrellas, pistols fashioned from lipstick tubes, and bulky button-hole cameras, visitors to Washington’s International Spy Museum will soon be confronted by a modern, quotidian tool of the trade: a small black laptop. According to the computer’s owner, it was employed over a three-year period to briefly knock WikiLeaks offline, disable almost 200 jihadist websites, and develop a handful of sophisticated hacking tools.

The laptop, says International Spy Museum executive director Peter Earnest, will “provide historical context to the ... world of espionage and the intelligence community, in this instance through the scope of cyberterrorism.” But the laptop’s owner claims no affiliation with the intelligence community; nor can he, by any traditional definition, be classified as a spy. He’s a freelancer, a “patriotic hacktivist” who goes by the nom de guerre “the Jester”—or, in hacker argot, “th3j35t3r.” This Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry Birds | Danger Room. Darpa director Arati Prabhakar (left) with Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos. Photo: DoD The target computer is picked. The order to strike has been given. All it takes is a finger swipe and a few taps of the touchscreen, and the cyberattack is prepped to begin. For the last year, the Pentagon’s top technologists have been working on a program that will make cyberwarfare relatively easy. Today, destructive cyberattacks — ones that cause servers to fry, radars to go dark, or centrifuges to spin out of control — have been assembled by relatively small teams of hackers.

With Plan X, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking to change all that. But you can’t expect the average officer to be able to understand the logical topology of a global network-of-networks. “Say you’re playing World of Warcraft, and you’ve got this type of sword, +5 or whatever. Cyberweapons: Bold steps in a digital darkness? Article Highlights The United States rushed into the nuclear age eager to cement its technical superiority, disregarding warnings of key statesmen and scientists that a decades-long nuclear arms race would ensue. Before they go too far, policymakers should consider the implications -- both intended and unintended -- of cyberweapons. Though Israel and the United States may have vast resources to support sophisticated and creative cyberweapons programs, it is worth remembering that such advantage could be its disadvantage: Each new cyberattack becomes a template for other nations -- or sub-national actors -- looking for ideas.

As nations begin to develop cyberwarfare organizations, they run the risk of creating bureaucratic entities, which will protect offensive cyber capabilities that simultaneously subject their own publics to cyber vulnerabilities. Since the United States has the most to lose in this area, the safe approach is to direct cyber research at purely defensive applications. US Training Syrian Opposition In Cyber Warfare, Online Security. This still image taken from video off a social media website uploaded as December 29, 2011, shows a soldier (R) kicking a man (3rd R) after arresting him and subsequently putting him in the back of an armoured vehicle in Douma.

(photo by REUTERS/via Reuters Tv/Handout) Author: assafir Posted June 16, 2012 Along with the ongoing the arms race in Syria, there is a different kind of “war.” This other war might even be more dangerous, simply because it is more intelligent. Summary⎙ Print Haifa Zaaiter reviews Western reports on the US training Syrian dissidents as “cyberwarriors.” Author Haifa Zaaiter Posted June 16, 2012 TranslatorAl-Monitor Abu Ghassan, a US-trained cyber warrior, recounts to Time magazine how he "learned to fight Bashar Assad with an AK-47, a video camera and the Internet.

" In its report, Time mentioned Washington’s attempt to contribute to the Syrian opposition through an “invisible line” — cyber training. Drug-dealer tactics The CIA supports the Syrian opposition. Mutually Assured Cyberdestruction? Photo Washington IT took years after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima for the nation to develop a common national understanding of when and how to use a weapon of such magnitude.

Not until after the Cuban Missile Crisis, 50 years ago this October, did a consensus emerge that the weapon was too terrible ever to employ again, save as a deterrent and a weapon of last resort. Over the past decade, on a far smaller scale, the country’s military and intelligence leadership have gone through a parallel debate about how to use the . Because it is precisely targeted, often on an individual, it is used almost every week. And now we know that , for the past three years, has been going through a similar process about how America should use another innovative weapon — one whose destructive powers are only beginning to be understood. Does the United States want to legitimize the use of cyberweapons as a covert tool?

But there is nothing so simple about cyberattacks. Obama Ordered Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran. Hasan Sarbakhshian/Associated Press Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and , gave it a name: . At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. “Should we shut this thing down?” Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build .

Cyber and Drone Attacks May Change Warfare More Than the Machine Gun - Ross Andersen. The new look of drone-enabled war. Reuters. From state-sponsored cyber attacks to autonomous robotic weapons, twenty-first century war is increasingly disembodied. Our wars are being fought in the ether and by machines. And yet our ethics of war are stuck in the pre-digital age. But information warfare, warfare pursued with information technologies, distorts concepts like "necessity" and "civilian" in ways that challenge these ethical frameworks. How do you define information warfare? Taddeo: The definition of "information warfare" is hotly debated. Was Russia's attack on Estonia in 2007 the first broad-based state example of this? Taddeo: The attack on Estonia is certainly one example of it, but it's only one instance, and it's not the first.

But it's hard to point to a definitive first example of this. Interesting, but do I understand you correctly that you distinguish this new kind of information warfare from pre-internet information technologies like the radio and the telegraph? Losing the narrative | Need to Know. Drones are not a universal panacea to terrorism issues. But they can be effective – especially as part of a holistic campaign to undermine and displace violent extremist groups. That argument from effectiveness, however, is getting drowned out by the recent anti-drone reports and press coverage. In the last two weeks, U.S. universities have published two reports deeply critical of the US policy to use armed drones in Pakistan. Both reports have coincided with a sharp crescendo of opposition to the drones program within the U.S., as well as a high-profile tour to Pakistan by the anti-war group Code Pink.

Yet, drones remain a “least bad” option in some areas for countering terrorism – a message being lost in the uproar over their use. The U.S. government is losing the drones narrative. The Living Under Drones report has catalyzed a certain segment of the media through its rather eye-popping claims: drones, the report argues, has created a mass psychological trauma in the country. Confront and Confuse - By Micah Zenko. Ongoing rampant sexual assault within America’s armed forces is a tragedy. The 2012 Workplace and Gender Relations Survey of Active Duty Members (WGRA) found that an estimated 26,000 active-duty servicemembers were sexually assaulted last year, and recent allegations of sexual assault by officers assigned to prevent that very crime have lent the situation a sinister irony.

The U.S. military is clearly facing, in the words of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, “a crisis.” Last week, Gen. Mark Welsh, the Air Force chief of staff, declared that confronting the problem was his “No. 1 priority.” The estimated incidents of “unwanted sexual contact” within the military have increased since the previous survey in 2010 despite internal reforms. Unfortunately, however admirable the recent condemnations of sexual assault in the military, they’re unlikely to have much impact, because sexual assault in the military is not a military problem. Hidden History: America's Secret Drone War in Africa | Danger Room. An MQ-9 Reaper in Iraq in 2008. Photo: Air Force More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a U.S.

Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew the type’s first mission over lawless Somalia, the shadowy American-led drone campaign in the Horn of Africa is targeting Islamic militants more ruthlessly than ever. Thanks to media accounts, indirect official statements, fragmentary crash reports and one complaint by a U.N. monitoring group, we can finally begin to define — however vaguely — the scope and scale of the secret African drone war. The details that follow are in part conjecture, albeit informed conjecture.

Since 2007, Predator drones and the larger, more powerful Reapers — reinforced by Ravens and Scan Eagle UAVs and Fire Scout robot helicopters plus a small number of huge, high-flying Global Hawks — have hunted Somali jihadists on scores of occasions. Pages: 1 2345View All. Obama's Death Panel - By Bruce Ackerman. It has been a week since a drone attack rubbed out Anwar al-Awlaki, whose copious English-language sermons, YouTube videos, and anti-Western screeds served as a powerful vehicle for radical jihadism on the Internet. But a steady flow of leaks is only now revealing the scandalous way in which Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, was targeted for assassination.

The revelations should shock even those who believe that a fair-minded reading of the law and evidence provides a strong basis for killing Awlaki. For it is becoming increasingly clear that the White House conducted nothing resembling a fair-minded process. Only three years ago, President Barack Obama repudiated John Yoo's secret torture memos; but he is now repeating the same mistake -- and is making a worse blunder. At least this is what the leaks flooding the media suggest.

Let's begin with some of the facts leaking out of the administration. This is all the more true because the president himself plays a passive role. Why Drones May Bring a Renaissance, Not Erosion, of Privacy - Alexis C. Madrigal. Drone technology can easily erode the scraps of privacy we have left, but the creepiness of the eyes in the sky could force us to rethink our current legal framework for data collection.

You know that animal feeling you get when you're being watched? That horror-movie tingle along the back of the neck, that neolithic desire to look around and find the pair of eyes that belong to the creature that's stalking you? Well, you should probably experience that every day on the Internet, but you don't. That's always exasperated privacy advocates who wonder why we all don't care more about people tracking across the interweb. But that may change, if Stanford's Ryan Calo, who researches privacy at the Center for Internet and Society, is right. Calo believes that drones could be a catalyst to update and increase our privacy protections.

Flying drones are everywhere these days. Let's look at one example of how drones change the privacy equation. Calo, for one, is not despairing. Images: 1. The US and its UAVs: A Cost-Benefit Analysis. 10 Ways to Fix the Drone War - By Rosa Brooks. How could I have missed this! On March 23, the Drone Report website called me one of the " top ten leading voices in drone media . " So, okay: I didn't know there was a "drone media," and I'm not entirely sure being a member of the "drone media" is a compliment.

But assuming it is, I am determined to live up to the honor. To that end, I'm soliciting your help, dear readers. Although I've raised a lot of questions and leveled a lot of criticisms, I'm feeling a little low on solutions. Readers, please comment on these ideas (and others not listed), either in the comment section or by sending me an email . If you help me out, you will become an honorary member of the Drone Media. 10 Ideas for Ensuring Oversight, Transparency, Accountability, and the Rule of Law in U.S. 1. 2. 3. The false fear of autonomous weapons | Need to Know. Last month, Human Rights Watch raised eyebrows with a provocatively titled report about autonomous weaponry that can select targets and fire at them without human input. “Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots,” blasts the headline, and argues that autonomous weapons will increase the danger to civilians in conflict. In this report, HRW urges the international community to “prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons” because these machines “inherently lack human qualities that provide legal and non-legal checks on the killing of civilians.”

While such concern is understandable, it is misplaced. For starters, as HRW concede in their report, no country, including the U.S., has decided to either develop or deploy fully autonomous armed robots. So if the Pentagon doesn’t want fully autonomous weapons, why is there such concern about them? Part of the reason, arguably, is cultural. In war zones, too, many decisions to kill are at least partly automated. Yes, Sometimes Drones Are Actually Effective. In Yemen, drones can work if they're part of a larger strategy, but not if they are the strategy. U.S. military handout image of a predator drone. (Reuters) The public debate about the American use of drones continues unabated, focused mostly on the morality of drone warfare. Sunday, for example, the New York Times ran one stories on the moral case for drones and one on the moral hazard they represent. These two angles to the debate -- whether drones impose an intolerable moral hazard, or whether they allow policymakers to counter terrorism while minimizing harm -- are important.

The morality of decisions that our leaders make is important, especially when there is a question of whether those decisions clash with our values. And when drones are widely reported to result in unintended civilian casualties (how many is disputed) the moral case cannot be ignored. Apart from morality, the other side of the debate about drones is their effectiveness. American Security Project. National Strategy for the Arctic Region. ForgingConsensus US Nuclear Posture.

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