Cyberwarfare: A New Front in the Obama Adminstration?

It looks private companies are bidding for another national security sector to service to.

The NYT reports:

"And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning.

Nearly all of the largest military companies — including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies.

The companies have been moving quickly to lock up the relatively small number of experts with the training and creativity to block the attacks and design countermeasures. They have been buying smaller firms, financing academic research and running advertisements for “cyberninjas” at a time when other industries are shedding workers." [May 30, 2009]

The rest of the article can be viewed here.

Why did I say "another national security sector" in my opening sentence?

Tim Shorrock in his very revealing book "Spies for Hire" described the fairly disturbing fact that a significant percentage of the United States' intelligence and national security services have been privatized. Bill Clinton expedidiated defense privitization but it reached an apex under the Bush administration to fight the Iraq War in particular. The infamous defense company, Blackwater, of course was a result of this trend and it looks like Obama will continue the privatization policy.

Shorrock in particular warns against the shoddy oversight that results from contracting out security and intelligence services. It is the military-industrial complex at its extreme, a development that former President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against.

Here are some important passages that I am quoting from a salon.com article "When War Goes Corporate" by Chalmers Johnson on this subject:

"If there's one generalization to be made about the NSA's outsourced IT [information technology] programs, it is this: they haven't worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures … In 2006, the NSA was unable to analyze much of the information it was collecting … As a result, more than 90 percent of the information it was gathering was being discarded without being translated into a coherent and understandable format; only about 5 percent was translated from its digital form into text and then routed to the right division for analysis."

"As numerous studies have, by now, made clear, the abject failure of the American occupation of Iraq came about in significant measure because the Department of Defense sent a remarkably privatized military filled with incompetent amateurs to Baghdad to administer the running of a defeated country."

I cannot formulate a substantiated opinion on the merit of contracting to private companies to offensively and defensively fight cyber attacks on the United States. But Shorrock's book should alarm Americans on the dangerious nature of these private defense companies in a "private-public partnership". They are not truly beneficial for the United States' national security and defense. Privitizing cyberwarfare services to private companies might not be any different.

You can purchase Shorrock's book from amazon.com at this site.