Be careful what you wish for

Here are some excerpts from an online article:

“This is the age of information warfare…a report, entitled The Information Operations Roadmap, commissioned and approved by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and seen by the Sunday Herald, (suggests) new developments in America’s approach to warfare (including):

“…the Pentagon says it will wage war against the internet in order to dominate the realm of communications, prevent digital attacks on the US and its allies, and to have the upper hand when launching cyber-attacks against enemies.”

There are so many ironies here that it is hard to know where to start…

The most obvious irony is that it was this same U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in the 1960s that provided the initial “seed money” that ultimately lead to the Internet of today that they now suddenly seem so frightened of.

The next interesting irony is that one of the reasons the DOD funded that early research was that they were interested in the new concept of a “distributed communications network.” Passing by all the technical mumbo-jumbo, what this meant was that one of the goals of that early research was to create a communications network that was invulnerable to attack.

At the time, of course, they were thinking of a nuclear attack by the Russians. The idea was to create a communications that had no central core, say like a telephone system’s exchange or a TV station’s broadcast equipment. You can “knockout” a telephone system by sabotaging the exchange or a broadcast station by taking out the antenna.

On the other hand, a “distributed network” has numerous sources of information --- think millions here! --- that all have multiple cross-connections and redundant inter-connections. The system was specifically designed so that if one information source or two sources or even three sources were knocked out, the system would simply bypass the knocked out sections and still be completely functional. In other words, the system was supposed to be self-repairing.

So DOD, be careful what you wish for, because you in fact got it! And now you seem to be all in a dither about how to cope with it…