I decided to do some reading about cyber warfare after I had written 160,000 words of a draft novel and realized that one of my main characters was a hacker and I knew nothing about either hacking or any concepts of cyber war. So being a good wannabe writer, I did some searching, found a book on the subject and did my homework.
Noted policy wonk, counter-terrorism expert, noted detractor of Bush The Younger Richard Clarke joins forces with a younger hipper colleague Robert K Knake to deliver a slim, readable volume that pretty much encompasses everything you ever wanted to know about cyber warfare but were afraid to ask- and manages to do so without boring you to death. The first and most interesting way they manage to do this is with real world examples of how cyberwarfare has already been used. It's very 'inside baseball' and very cool. Case in point: right off the bat they lead with Israel's raid into Syria in 2007. The media reported it as a strike on a possible nuclear facility- what they didn't report was how it was that Israel penetrated into Syria so deeply- through the use of cyber warfare, according to Clarke.
(Personally, although Clarke has several decades of Washington experience with this stuff which makes him a credible and most likely knowledgable source, I tend to take stories about Israeli military operations with a grain of salt- not because I don't believe them, but because I doubt anyone actually knows the ENTIRE truth about them.)
What I was startled to remember were Russia's attacks against Estonia (in 2007) and their use of cyber warfare during the brief war with Georgia in 2008. Of course, I remember hearing about the latter- everybody does. I think the war in Georgia got it's fifteen minutes of fame during the 2008 Presidential Campaign as Americans everywhere breathed a sigh of relief when they realized Senator McCain was talking about Tblisi and not Atlanta. What I didn't realize was how Russia integrated cyber tactics in with their military operations, hackers effectively crippling Georgia's banking industry and governmental websites- that meant that Georgia's ability to communicate with it's military forces not to mention the outside world was severely compromised.
The attacks against Estonia were somewhat more subtle. When Estonians began to object to the presence of a large bronze statue commemorating the Soviet forces that fought there in World War II (to the Estonians it brought up less pleasant memories. Like the decades of Russian occupation) what Moscow insisted on calling 'patriotic' Russian Hackers went after Estonia's banking industry and websites a plenty, essentially shutting the country down. (I wonder how many equally patriotic hackers find themselves running afoul of Putin's new goons?)
All in all, the first half of the book contained quite a few 'Whoa, I didn't know that' moments which I enjoy immensely. Knowledge being power and all that jazz. The second half of the book threatened on more than one occasion to dip down into the realm of the dry, dusty and policy wonkish but Clarke keeps the readers' head well above water, pointing out that we have serious vunerabilities in our infrastructure that other countries (like North Korea or China) do not- so that if it came to an out and out fight, we might be kind of screwed. Banking, utilities, maybe (although I hope not) even air traffic control could all be easily attacked and severely damaged if someone wanted to- and with things like logic bombs, botnets or malware all too easily planted we could be a ticking time bomb right now and not even know it.
It's a powerful wake-up call for the American people and for our policymakers. They're a pretty sorry bunch of people right now but maybe some of them will stop promoting things like SOPA or PIPA and actually start contributing useful ways to deal with this issue- because Clarke has one thing dead to rights: this is going to be a HUGE issue. And we need to start planning for it- right now.
OVERALL: Awesome little read. Informative, lively and hums right along without drowning the reader in policy minutia. Provides a good wake-up call for policymakers. Will they listen? The sad part is, given how wonderfully Washington is working right now, probably not.
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