There are times when any single fear or advertised threat can be overstated. Let's take another look at the cyber threat from terrorists. My aim is not to dismiss the cyber threat, but to keep it in context. Otherwise, we will be saying that if the ATMs are down, the terrorists win. In fact, is there any doomsday scenario that would not place us at someone's mercy if the worst case came to pass? It makes for good theatre, but bad business investments. In fact, it is precisely this kind of theatrical dimension that plays into the politics of cyber threats, a theme taken up by Swiss professor Myriam Dunn Caveltyis in her course for the Center for Security Studies, in Zurich, and related book, Cyber-Security and Threat Politics (2007). She points out that cyber threats have been touted despite having many unknowable qualities. But wait, there's more.
The very systems considered critical -- whether for air traffic control or turning valves and power systems on and off remotely -- go down all the time without plunging us wholeheartedly into chaos. As James A. Lewis, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointed out in his 2002 assessment, "Assessing the Risks of Cyber Terrorism, Cyber War and Other Cyber Threats," the nature of their targets is such that cyber terrorists "would need to attack multiple targets simultaneously for long periods of time to create terror, achieve strategic goals, or to have any noticeable effect. For most of the critical infrastructure, multiple sustained attacks are not a feasible scenario for hackers, terrorist groups, or nation states." (pp. 3-4)
This brings us to another raising of the eyebrows. Why are today's most vigorous champions of the cyber threat suspiciously identical to the same people who made careers out of Y2K preparations -- until January 2, 2000, that is, when the world as we know it failed to come to an end?
Context is the bottom line in all this. I do not pretend there is no cyber threat. I only offer the thought that there is more to this story. Information technology experts need jobs, too, and they, like most specialists, tend to see the world in terms of their specialty. Y2K ended, but they still had bills to pay and mouths to feed. As Abraham Maslow said, "If your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." So, to these people, cyber supplies a nail-rich environment of ubiquitous threats.
Let's keep the cyber hammer without making it the only implement in our toolbox. A hammer makes a lousy screwdriver, and a poor drill as well. Our most serious adversaries appear more interested in drawing blood than in perpetrating denial-of-service attacks or spamming enterprise e-mail servers. Is it possible that they will suddenly abandon their spectacular attacks in favor of cyber assaults instead?
Perhaps. Anything is possible. But, as columnist George Will (2000) said in another forecasting context , "Serious people consider serious probabilities, not idle possibilities."
My argument is that the cyber threat has yet to attain the seriousness to displace more conventional attack pathways. Nor does it seem likely to. As Lewis noted in his study, above, criminals and bored teenagers remain the most likely sources of cyber attacks (p. 8).
Connections with Innovation
I do believe that the more sustainable terrorist groups must possess some of the same learning and administrative skills as any business that survives in a competitive world. So, if a cyber tool of terror drops into their hands, they would feel some due diligence obligation to experiment with it, up to a point. But, it is a tool not an end.
My favorite innovation in war was by Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great (Lamb, H., Alexander of Macedon, date and details not recalled. Book lost from family library.) His innovation to war fighting of the time was to make his soldier's spear three feet longer than his adversary's. As a result, Philip enjoyed great success whenever one of his phalanxes met another in battle. But I suspect neither he nor his son spent a disproportionate amount of time and budget in R&D on spears.
– Nick Catrantzos
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
What Comes After Jihad?
In a volatile world, only change is a constant. One day, the world may well view the notion of holy war, or jihad, as outdated as the duel or trial by ordeal.
What then? Look for another rally point for expression of violence. Look for xenophobia as trigger.
Xenophobia is the next incubator for nascent terrorist organizations, once the world tires of jihad. A recent article on how this just expressed itself in South Africa presents a grim view of how hackers – the machete-wielding kind – exact revenge for real or perceived injustices suffered at the hands of immigrants who, to the rest of the world, hardly appear to be cavorting in luxury.
The interesting but faint signal to detect here is a phenomenon stretching at least as far back as the sans culottes of France who warmed to the guillotine as instrument of social justice during the French Revolution. There are a number of commentators of the world scene out there who are making their living editorializing about why the world hates America and Americans.
Type in "why they hate us" in Amazon.com's search box and 463 entries materialize. We represent the modern world to people who want to cling to tradition. We are the only remaining super power, hence easy to blame for everything that goes wrong. We are prosperous, so we must be doing something at someone else's expense. We are ostentatious, shifting between the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen popularized a couple of centuries ago to just making more films and entertainment products that sell throughout the world, inevitably putting an American face into the world's face.
Evidently, the world resents that. But we are not the only bad guys.
What a recent Reuters article on the South African violence brings to mind is another idea. Maybe old-fashioned xenophobia never goes away.
My own theory is that people are tribal, even in America. We all have a certain number of people we can accommodate comfortably into our lives. Say, for example, my upper limit is 30, while yours may be 50. [The exception may be for those of you with giant Rolodexes whom author Malcolm Gladwell defines as mavens in his Tipping Point.]
When we move, change jobs, or just start our own families, the personal total stays about the same, but many of the players change. We lose touch with people who no longer affect our lives, making room this way for others who are now take center stage.
And this takes place in a modern world and country, where the nuclear family has made us much less hidebound with clan, tradition, and feudal patterns or castes that distinguished other societies. But the rest of the world may well be much more clannish.
Recall that, in Saddam Hussein's ascendancy, his clan and tribal relationships meant that preferment went to kinfolk or tribesmen from Tikrit, Saddam's birthplace.
Add this tribal preoccupation, for which Africa is famous, to a natural tendency to find fault with outsiders, and what do you get? The kinds of mob attacks South Africa is seeing.
What do we watch for in all this? The victims.
How long will it be before some enterprising, organized, and martially proficient "defenders" emerge to offer protection to the victimized expatriates or tribal minorities in exchange for money or the kind of unwavering loyalty that is very easy to promise when one's back is to the wall and the only alternative is death or torture by mob violence?
– Nick Catrantzos
What then? Look for another rally point for expression of violence. Look for xenophobia as trigger.
Xenophobia is the next incubator for nascent terrorist organizations, once the world tires of jihad. A recent article on how this just expressed itself in South Africa presents a grim view of how hackers – the machete-wielding kind – exact revenge for real or perceived injustices suffered at the hands of immigrants who, to the rest of the world, hardly appear to be cavorting in luxury.
The interesting but faint signal to detect here is a phenomenon stretching at least as far back as the sans culottes of France who warmed to the guillotine as instrument of social justice during the French Revolution. There are a number of commentators of the world scene out there who are making their living editorializing about why the world hates America and Americans.
Type in "why they hate us" in Amazon.com's search box and 463 entries materialize. We represent the modern world to people who want to cling to tradition. We are the only remaining super power, hence easy to blame for everything that goes wrong. We are prosperous, so we must be doing something at someone else's expense. We are ostentatious, shifting between the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen popularized a couple of centuries ago to just making more films and entertainment products that sell throughout the world, inevitably putting an American face into the world's face.
Evidently, the world resents that. But we are not the only bad guys.
What a recent Reuters article on the South African violence brings to mind is another idea. Maybe old-fashioned xenophobia never goes away.
My own theory is that people are tribal, even in America. We all have a certain number of people we can accommodate comfortably into our lives. Say, for example, my upper limit is 30, while yours may be 50. [The exception may be for those of you with giant Rolodexes whom author Malcolm Gladwell defines as mavens in his Tipping Point.]
When we move, change jobs, or just start our own families, the personal total stays about the same, but many of the players change. We lose touch with people who no longer affect our lives, making room this way for others who are now take center stage.
And this takes place in a modern world and country, where the nuclear family has made us much less hidebound with clan, tradition, and feudal patterns or castes that distinguished other societies. But the rest of the world may well be much more clannish.
Recall that, in Saddam Hussein's ascendancy, his clan and tribal relationships meant that preferment went to kinfolk or tribesmen from Tikrit, Saddam's birthplace.
Add this tribal preoccupation, for which Africa is famous, to a natural tendency to find fault with outsiders, and what do you get? The kinds of mob attacks South Africa is seeing.
What do we watch for in all this? The victims.
How long will it be before some enterprising, organized, and martially proficient "defenders" emerge to offer protection to the victimized expatriates or tribal minorities in exchange for money or the kind of unwavering loyalty that is very easy to promise when one's back is to the wall and the only alternative is death or torture by mob violence?
– Nick Catrantzos
Monday, February 18, 2008
Why this Blog, Why Now
Security professionals saw 9/11/01 as a tragedy and a wake-up call. My own security practice within a global investigative and security consultancy at the time experienced a huge, unprecedented spike in business and in publicity. From relative obscurity, I found myself having back-to-back appointments scheduled with the media by my president’s secretary because no one else in the office could speak to the larger issues of enterprise security. Yet, just getting more security business was not enough. By the end of the year, I had decided to give notice and began a migration back to the public sector by first joining a contractor for the State Department which was working exclusively on anti-terrorism and Homeland Security projects. On facing my resignation, my company president told me, “If it’s just about money, that’s easy to solve.” It wasn’t, however.
Nor, almost seven years later, is it now. September 11, 2001 fired the irreversible salvo in the Long War of throw-back barbarism against what passes for civilization and modern life. At the time, it was not only professional guardians who heard the call to action. American flags sold out of every store and waved jauntily on what looked like every other car. Military recruiters saw unprecedented lines of volunteers. A wounded population seemed mobilized and missionized, ready to take on any adversary with the kind of resolve and courage unseen since the Minutemen of the Revolutionary War. Security was also about to come into its own, with the Wall Street Journal predicting the advent of the CSO: the Chief Security Officer, who was predicted to become to every institution what the Chief Financial Officer or Chief Technology Officer had become – key executives with a place at the decision-making table of the enterprise.
Things never work out quite as predicted. Americans lose interest or even lose heart in any war lasting more than three or four years. We then begin to question not only our leaders, but also ourselves. We stop digging foxholes and lean back on our couches to psychoanalyze. And when our adversaries refuse to accommodate our proclivity for professional fault finding and apologizing and hand wringing, we look closer to home to blame more convenient, more cooperative villains: ourselves. We look for root causes, convinced that if we can understand it all, the sheer force of a good heart and open mind will wash away the hatred and end hostile action without more needless bloodshed. But we are wrong.
Security is a basic need we must address long before we arrive at the point of comfortable speculation about ultimate causes and motives. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I would say security comes between love and hunger. It is easy to give it top priority when taking enemy fire. But when further removed from direct attack, we all have a tendency to lower our guard – a tendency any shrewd adversary will count on and exploit. Now, more than ever, security is a matter of survival – for individual, for organization, for institution, for enterprise, for nation, even for way of life. We need to pay attention to safeguarding our people and assets, our operations and interests. We are now in a world where security may not always seem necessary, but where it is sometimes indispensable. And it is precisely in this context that we must ask ourselves:
“All secure?”
– Nick Catrantzos
Nor, almost seven years later, is it now. September 11, 2001 fired the irreversible salvo in the Long War of throw-back barbarism against what passes for civilization and modern life. At the time, it was not only professional guardians who heard the call to action. American flags sold out of every store and waved jauntily on what looked like every other car. Military recruiters saw unprecedented lines of volunteers. A wounded population seemed mobilized and missionized, ready to take on any adversary with the kind of resolve and courage unseen since the Minutemen of the Revolutionary War. Security was also about to come into its own, with the Wall Street Journal predicting the advent of the CSO: the Chief Security Officer, who was predicted to become to every institution what the Chief Financial Officer or Chief Technology Officer had become – key executives with a place at the decision-making table of the enterprise.
Things never work out quite as predicted. Americans lose interest or even lose heart in any war lasting more than three or four years. We then begin to question not only our leaders, but also ourselves. We stop digging foxholes and lean back on our couches to psychoanalyze. And when our adversaries refuse to accommodate our proclivity for professional fault finding and apologizing and hand wringing, we look closer to home to blame more convenient, more cooperative villains: ourselves. We look for root causes, convinced that if we can understand it all, the sheer force of a good heart and open mind will wash away the hatred and end hostile action without more needless bloodshed. But we are wrong.
Security is a basic need we must address long before we arrive at the point of comfortable speculation about ultimate causes and motives. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I would say security comes between love and hunger. It is easy to give it top priority when taking enemy fire. But when further removed from direct attack, we all have a tendency to lower our guard – a tendency any shrewd adversary will count on and exploit. Now, more than ever, security is a matter of survival – for individual, for organization, for institution, for enterprise, for nation, even for way of life. We need to pay attention to safeguarding our people and assets, our operations and interests. We are now in a world where security may not always seem necessary, but where it is sometimes indispensable. And it is precisely in this context that we must ask ourselves:
“All secure?”
– Nick Catrantzos
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
