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Just like Color Revolutions, Cyber Conflicts can Still Get People Killed

By Martin Berger – New Eastern Outlook – 18.12.2018

As it has been clearly demonstrated by the history of mankind, whenever new weapons are invented, they would invariably give an edge to the most developed state at of the era, allowing it to pursue further expansion of its dominance on the international stage.

Immediately after the creation of nuclear weapons, they were immediately tested in the course of monstrous attacks on peaceful citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the closing phases of the Second World War. Those tested resulted in a massive euphoria among the American ruling elites that immediately decided to bomb one of their allies in this war, namely the USSR back into the stone age. However, by the time the United States accumulated a nuclear arsenal sufficient for the destruction of the USSR, Moscow managed to build its own nukes at the cost of heroic efforts of its people, which allowed Russia’s population to escape a terrible fate.

In recent decades, the broad possibilities of the Internet and various media platforms allowed Washington to take down those states that would try to pursue a policy of their own through the use of so-called “color revolutions.” This meddling resulted in the entire Middle East getting submerged in a political chaos, which created preconditions for a number of armed conflicts in the course of which hundreds of thousands of civilians lost their lives. It goes without saying, of course, that the military-industrial complex of the United States and its NATO allies received super-profits from those by increasing their arms sales.

These days, new advances in IT technologies, along with new inventions in the field of biological, chemical and space warfare are further fueling the deranged fantasies of American military strategists. Many of the hawks that are occupying high-profile positions within the US society are literally prepared to use any sort of weapons in vain hopes of securing primacy over the entire world, even if it means destroying half of the world’s population in the process.

As many analysts believe, the war of tomorrow will not be waged with bullets and bombs as it will be taking place in the entirely different dimension – on the Internet. The hackers of today are capable of taking down any control system, hydroelectric power plant, or even a nuclear reactor. Therefore, a total of 19 hackers can inflict significantly more damage than the notorious 19 terrorists that [purportedly] hijacked four civilian jets on September 11, 2001, staging the most terrifying terrorist attacks in the history of the United States.

Many countries have already begun the arms race in cyberspace, and it’s hardly a secret that the US and UK are occupying leading places in it now. Suffice it to recall that the war in Iraq actually began in 2002 with powerful cyber attacks against the Iraqi government. By exploiting latest advancements in the field of cyber weapons, the CIA and the Pentagon infiltrated the information system of government agencies in Iraq, directly addressing each of the leaders of the ruling Ba’ath party and high-profile military figures, bombarding them with faxes, emails and phone calls. The attackers urged them to stage a coup d’etat and surrender all of the state and military secrets to US, ordering troops to desert after the initial outbreak of hostilities, thus sabotaging and undermining the power of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi state.

To provide themselves with an excuse to further develop and deploy their cyber capabilities, Washington initiated a massive public hysteria over the alleged meddling of Russia into the internal affairs of the United States, Britain and other Western countries. However, no special commission created to investigate those allegations in the United States and Britain has been able to provide any credible information to back these accusations up, forcing the US government to admit that those accusations were nothing but hearsay.

At the same time, alongside all sorts of fake publications in the Western media, one can come across reports of cyber attacks being used by the United States and Britain as a tool of meddling. For example, Norway has recently released documentary evidence that the Norwegian military intelligence in cooperation with US intelligence agencies would hack Russian communications networks for obtaining military strategic information on Russia’s defenses. This information is confirmed by the report of the US National Security Agency (NSA) on cooperation with the Norwegian military intelligence.

As part of the cyber command of the US armed forces, a special “Russian group” was created, as it was reported last July by the commander of the US cyber command, Genera Paul M. Nakasone. Pentagon’s contractor COLSA has recently announced recruitment of an additional bunch of agents tasked with monitoring Russian social networks; hiring people with strong command of the Russian language.

According to the Newsweek, the FBI hacked computers in more than a hundred countries in 2015, and it turns out one of those was Russia.

It’s also curious that the Trump administration has recently reversed an Obama-era memorandum dictating how and when the US government can deploy cyberweapons against its adversaries.

Further still, NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg announced the inclusion of national cybernetic elements, which are often described as offensive task teams within the NATO chain of command in early October. He also confirmed that NATO was planing to pursue cooperation with Kiev in the field of offensive cyber operations staging. However, Ukraine is hardly the only state that is going to become a base for all sorts of so-called “white hats”. With the help of the United States, five centers of cyber operations have already been deployed across Europe – in Finland, Estonia, Poland, Germany and France.

One can often come across reports that the NSA and US cyber command can exercise near-godlike omniscience over the Internet. The so-called cyber-troopers that they employ are drawn from all four branches of the military. Many deploy overseas, but many of them also drive to work each day in the suburban sprawl between Washington, DC and Baltimore at the National Security Agency on the Army’s Fort Meade.

However, Russia is hardly the only target that will become the victim of those malicious activities, as Washington may start spreading disinformation, panic, plant frustration with the ruling elites, and stage new revolutions in most any state that will find itself in the way of American designs.

This is the world we’re living in today. To many, it resembles the calm before the storm. As countries accumulate huge destructive capabilities, Western policymakers are just waiting for a pretext to unload them.

Along with that. There is also a growing understanding that there can be no winners in modern wars, but only losers.

Just recently, Robert Hannigan who used to occupy the position of director of CHQ announced that the situation in cyberspace has become so tense that it can trigger the Third World War at any given moment. That’s why he’s convinced that we need to come to some kind of international agreement about what’s acceptable and what isn’t on the Internet, before it’s too late.

Against this backdrop, it’s obvious that Russia has made an important step at the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly, proposing that the international community develop a convention on combat cybercrime and develop rules of engagement in the information space. In the same aspect, the adoption by the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly (the document was supported by a total of 88 states) of a Russian resolution draft on countering the use of information and communication technologies for criminal purposes deserves particular attention, since it has the potential of cooling the heads of a number of Western strategists that are keen to see the world drawn into a conflict, cyber or not.

December 18, 2018 - Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | CIA, NATO, NSA, United States