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28 Aug 14. Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. Richard A. Clarke warned America once before about the havoc terrorism would wreak on our national security — and he was right. Now he warns us of another threat, silent but equally dangerous. Cyber War is a powerful book about technology, government, and military strategy, about criminals, spies, soldiers, and hackers. This is the first book about the war of the future — cyber war — and a convincing argument that we may already be in peril of losing it. Cyber War goes behind the “geek talk” of hackers and computer scientists to explain clearly and convincingly what cyber war is, how cyber weapons work, and how vulnerable we are as a nation and as individuals to the vast and looming web of cyber criminals. From the first cyber crisis meeting in the White House a decade ago to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the electrical tunnels under Manhattan, Clarke and coauthor Robert K. Knake trace the rise of the cyber age and profile the unlikely characters and places at the epicenter of the battlefield. They recount the foreign cyber spies who hacked into the office of the Secretary of Defense, the control systems for U.S. electric power grids, and the plans to protect America’s latest fighter aircraft. Economically and militarily, Clarke and Knake argue, what we’ve already lost in the new millennium’s cyber battles is tantamount to the Soviet and Chinese theft of our nuclear bomb secrets in the 1940s and 1950s. The possibilities of what we stand to lose in an all-out cyber war — our individual and national security among them — are just as chilling. Powerful and convincing, Cyber War begins the critical debate about the next great threat to national security. (Source: Cyber Security Intelligence/ein news/amazon)
28 Aug 14. Want to Be the Next Intelligence Whistleblower? Imagine a CIA agent who witnessed behavior that violated the Constitution, the law, and core human-rights protections, like torturing a prisoner. What would we have her do? Government officials say that there are internal channels in place to protect whistleblowers and that intelligence employees with security clearances have a moral obligation to refrain from airing complaints publicly via the press. In contrast, whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea, Manning and Edward Snowden—as well as journalistic entities like the Washington Post, The Guardian, and the New York Times—believe that questionable behavior by intelligence agencies should sometimes be exposed, even when classified, partly because internal whistleblower channels are demonstrably inadequate. Reasonable people can disagree about whether a particular leak advances the public interest. There is always a moral obligation to keep some secrets (e.g., the names of undercover agents in North Korea). But if official channels afford little protection to those who report serious wrongdoing, or fail to remedy egregiously unlawful behavior, the case for working within the system rather than going to the press falls apart. As Hilary Bok, writing as Hilzoy, pointed out in 2008, while defending a Bush-era whistleblower:
It is generally better for all concerned if whistle-blowers operate within the system, and it is dangerous when people freelance. But there’s one big exception to this rule: when the system has itself been corrupted. When you’re operating within a system in which whistle-blowers’ concerns are not addressed—where the likelihood that any complaint you make within the system will be addressed is near zero, while the likelihood that you will be targeted for reprisals is high—then no sane person who is motivated by a desire to have his or her concern addressed will work within that system. That means that if … you want whistleblowers to work within the system, y