title: "Cyberwar"? Ha! You make me laugh! link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/cyberwar-ha-you-make-me-laugh/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 314 created: 2009/06/01 01:00:59 created_gmt: 2009/06/01 01:00:59 comment_status: open post_name: cyberwar-ha-you-make-me-laugh status: publish post_type: post

"Cyberwar"? Ha! You make me laugh!

Ah. “Cyberwar”. It’s all the rage. Again. This article really got me going this evening.

MELBOURNE, Fla. � The government’s urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts.

This isn’t political. I voted for The Guy. But IT is my world. My area of professional expertise.

This is a con job, as big a boondoggle as the trillion dollar contractor smorgasbord that is the occupation of Iraq ever was. The following comment to the article says it better than I ever could:

The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning.

Oh man. Now I want to vomit.

The following comment says it better than I ever could:

What a joke. Computer security is ultimately the responsibility of the systems administrator and operator. Raising it to such a level of national policy over-sexifies the problem. Computer security is not about handing out contracts to companies to monitor computer security. As a network engineer, I just scratch my head. Then again, as a former DoD intelligence analyst, I remember the knee-jerk fashion which our government runs. We need a strategic overview of our vital computer systems, just like we need a strategic overview of our vital plumbing systems…

– ac, NY, NY

As another commenter put it (although not in these words), this is what you get when you deploy retail box operating systems on desktops used for national security operations. This is what you get after more than a decade of “leadership” by political hacks who wouldn’t know a mandatory access control from a mandatory minimum term. This is what you get when you recruit “top young talent” who can’t keep a bunch of Chinese farmboys from reading our most secret e-mail messages. This is what you get when you have people calling the shots who think the Crackberry is advanced technology, and Twitter is a collaboration solution for grown-ups.

Here we go again. Another billion or so dollars down a rathole.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo