@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex Read Online Free

adversaries, break in to them, and when necessary disable and destroy them.
Cyber warfare
, like
cyberspace
, is an amorphous term. But it applies to a spectrum of offensive activities. Just as espionage is an inextricable part of traditional warfare, so too is spying on a computer a prerequisite to attacking it. To be sure, the United States has spent far more time and money spying on computers and stealing information than it has taking down critical infrastructures and destroying physical facilities through a computer connection. But it has done that, too. And it will do it more often, and more effectively. Indeed, cyber warfare—the combination of spying and attack—was instrumental to the American military victory in Iraq in 2007, in ways that have never been fully explained or appreciated. The military, working with US intelligence agencies, used offensive cyber techniques (hacking) to track down people in the physical world and then capture or kill them.
    But just as protecting cyberspace is not the exclusive domain of government, waging war in cyberspace is becoming a private affair. A burgeoning industry of cyber arms merchants and private security forces is selling its goods and services both to the government and to corporations that will no longer endure relentless espionage or the risk of cyber attack. The armies of nations will inevitably meet one another on the cyber battlefield. But the armies of corporations will meet there, too.
    Governments don’t operate in cyberspace alone. Defending computer networks, and launching attacks on them, requires the participation, willing or otherwise, of the private sector. The vast majority of computer networks in the United States are privately owned. The government cannot possibly protect or patrol all of them. But most of the world’s communications travel through equipment located in the United States. The government has a privileged position to exploit those networks, and an urgent need to protect them. To those ends, a military-Internet complex has emerged.
    Like the military-industrial complex before it, this new cooperative includes the makers of tanks and airplanes, missiles and satellites. But it includes tech giants, financial institutions, and communications companies as well. The United States has enlisted, persuaded, cajoled, and in some cases compelled companies into helping it fend off foreign and domestic foes who have probed the American electrical grid and looked for other weaknesses in critical infrastructures. The NSA has formed secret arrangements with marquee technology companies, including Google, to monitor private networks for threats. It has shared intelligence with major banks and financial institutions in order to prevent a catastrophic cyber attack on Wall Street.
    But the government also has attempted to force some companies into letting the NSA place monitoring equipment on its networks. And it has paid technology companies to install backdoors in their products that it can use to spy on foreign intelligence services and monitor military movements. Those clandestine access points also allow the military to launch cyber attacks in foreign countries. Without the cooperation of the companies, the United States couldn’t fight cyber wars. In that respect, the new military-Internet complex is the same as the industrial one before it. The government doesn’t fight wars alone. It relies on companies to design weapons, move and feed troops, build and maintain aircraft, ships, and satellites. The United States became the most formidable military in world history through a mutually beneficial alliance with corporations. It aims to do so again in cyberspace.
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    The United States is rapidly building its capacity to dominate cyberspace. In 2014 the government planned to spend more than $13 billion on cyber defense programs, mostly to protect government computers and networks, and to share threat intelligence with private