By IPS Correspondents
SEATTLE, Jun 4 1996 (IPS)

After the Mexican army overran the headquarters of the Zapatista guerrillas in the Chiapas jungle last year, a news photo clearly showed a computer monitor in the abandoned office of Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos.

Beyond the World Wide Web sites that supporters set up for the group in the United States and Mexico, the Maya guerrillas were pioneers in the use of the Internet as a weapon of insurgency, according to U.S. Army Intelligence.

A 1994 U.S. Army Intelligence report asserts that “Subcomandante Marco [sic] of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Mexico utilises a portable laptop computer to issue orders to other EZLN units via a modem, and to foreign media contacts in order to maintain a favourable international propaganda image.”

And the Pentagon should know.

As global computer networks capture the hearts and minds of the international media, the world’s most powerful military has come to attention for the Internet. And terms like “cyber-warfare” and “information assets” have been drafted into the lexicon of U.S. strategic planners.

“Increasingly, covert action and offensive information warfare techniques are converging,” warns a recent report of the U.S. Congress.

“The U.S. government,” the House Intelligence Committee reports, “may wish in the future to employ some offensive information warfare capabilities that are principally resident in the Department of Defence and outside the clandestine service as part of a covert action.”

Cutting through the euphemisms, Jean Guisnel, author of ‘War in Cyberspace’, succinctly states that in the United States and other industrialised countries, “information warfare is a concrete reality”.

“Intelligence services surf the Internet day and night, grind up and dissect the information moving over it, poison and disinform as much as possible, loot data bases and electronic correspondence, and, in the midst of indifference, endanger our elementary liberty to communicate freely,” Guisnel wrote recently in a Paris newspaper.

Interest in cyber-warfare was heightened by a recent U.S. government report that estimated that 65 percent of the 250,000 attempts by “hackers” to penetrate Department of Defence (DoD) computer systems in 1995 were successful.

Citing the military’s own investigations that revealed lax security and failure to detect or pursue attackers, the report said that only one in 150 attacks is actually detected and reported.

Despite the thousands of successful hacker attacks on DoD computer, the Pentagon insists that its classified material remained secure.

A Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection is expected to convene soon, led by Attorney General Janet Reno and representatives from DoD, domestic law enforcement, and private industry. Beyond its primary focus on conventional terrorist attacks, it will also likely discuss defence against information warfare.

(The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said that some 120 countries currently have or are developing computer attack capabilities.)

Research and simulation exercises conducted for senior government and industry officials by the RAND Corporation, a think tank that works with the U.S. government, also have sounded alarms over the potential vulnerability of U.S. information and military infrastructure to what its report calls “strategic information warfare.”

The Internet’s growing importance as an international arena for discussion and debate also makes it an increasingly attractive channel for intelligence gathering and offensive measures.

A study by DoD analyst Charles Swett opened internal and public debates on use of the Internet by the U.S. military for eavesdropping and covert operations.

“It has become increasingly clear that numerous government agencies are in fact monitoring the Internet in much the same way that they monitor the international media,” says Aftergood, who posted Swett’s paper on the Internet.

“I’m not talking about interception and eavesdropping, which they probably do as well, but rather simply keeping an eye on what is going on the Internet,” he adds.

The CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Aftergood notes, recently started to including postings from UseNet newsgroups, “which I thought was some kind of sign both that the Internet is coming of age and that the intelligence community is aware of it”.

Some cyber-warfare involves overt diplomacy in parallel to shooting wars, as occurred during a recent border conflict between Ecuador and Peru. But Swett recommends that the U.S. military investigate the uses of cyberspace for disinformation and psychological operations (psyops).

“Offensive information warfare is all bottled up in black [secret] information,” said a source privy to government discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Everybody knows the U.S. has capability, they just don’t know how much or where it’s being done now.”

In psyops on an international medium with no fixed boundaries, however, “blowback” could pose a risk of contaminating domestic information. An effort to disrupt a foreign stock market, for example, could end up hurting investors and distorting markets in the aggressor nation as well.

The Internet is also a promising medium for less-sensitive national security communications, 95 percent of which depend on the public switching network. Swett also suggests investigating it as a means for communicating with irregular forces working with the U.S. military.

Decentralisation makes it hard for any military or political force to monitor or control communications on the Net. But it also renders defence against sabotage of computer networks connected to it more difficult.

Ultimately, if the Internet is not secure enough, governments and corporations can construct their own networks using the Internet communications protocols. These Intranets, as they have been dubbed, are growing tremendously in popularity, with the CIA and U.S. State Department reportedly constructing ones for their international communications.

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