"[Obama] repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons—even under the most careful and limited circumstances—could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks. “We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said."
Welcome to politics. Syria, currently best known for massacring their own citizens, chaired the UN human rights council a few years ago.
International politics is always going to consist of covert actions on one hand coupled with righteous moral statements on the other. See, for example, the USSR talking about protecting the eastern bloc from western imperialist exploitation by, well, dominating and exploiting their countries.
Meanwhile, I'm sure we'll hear from Republicans that this is a case of Obama's flawed moral leadership, in between insisting that we bomb Iran immediately.
At the end of the day, it's about results. The people who released stuxnet presumably think it makes a war less likely by postponing a confrontation with a nuclear Iran. They might be wrong but they were doing what they thought would lead to the best outcome.
any evidence for that? In my understanding the USSR was dominating eastern bloc countries, hindering their democratic economic development by enforcing archaic hierarchical undemocratic regime. Exploiting? I haven't heard about that. Countries were pretty autonomous in all things unrelated to ideology/politics.
I find it disturbing that so many people are so very willing to ignore or defend the atrocities of communism in the 20th century.
Just after the end of WWII the Soviets adopted a "plunder" policy with regard to occupied Eastern European countries. Forcing them to produce huge quantities of raw materials and industrial goods to be used within the USSR, extracting as much wealth from the beleaguered post-war economies as the US and allies pumped into Western Europe with the Marshall plan. They also set up "state owned" Eastern Block companies such that the USSR maintained majority ownership (up through the mid-1950s).
This pattern continued through the 1950s as the Soviets retained near direct control over Eastern Bloc economies and morphed in the 1960s into COMECON which merely provided political cover for the same sort of plunder policies up until industrial production in Eastern Europe started to become significant in the 1970s.
In October of 1956 the Hungarian people rose up and threw off their violent totalitarian government. One day later Soviet tanks were in the country's capital (in direct violation of the terms of the Warsaw Pact), within the next month 2500 Hungarians were killed and ten times as many were arrested, hundreds of which were deported to gulags in siberia or executed.
In January of 1968 Czechoslovakia elected a reformist government, which instituted many liberalizing reforms. In August Soviet tanks and forces from the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations invaded, toppled the government, and killed any Czechs or Slovaks who stood in their way (though few were foolhardy enough to throw themselves against an army of 2,000 tanks and 200,000 soldiers).
The formalization of Eastern Bloc countries as effective satellite states of the USSR came about with the codification of the Brezhnev Doctrine in the 1960s, though it only legalized the status quo.
I feel like I harp on this a lot, but a quick reminder: that's not communism. I know there isn't really a better name for the ideology/policies of the USSR (and other "communist" states) but I think it's worth (repeatedly) pointing out the huge and longstanding misnomer, since they have very few and very tenuous and/or butchered connections to any philosophy of Marx.
These are not atrocities of an ideology, however misinterpreted, these are atrocities of people and of a state.
Which country whose ideology was officially Communist is or was least bad for its people?
I'm not a scholar of ex(communist) states but I'm thinking either Cuba or the former Yugoslavia. I am not aware of any attempt to bring communism into practice that could be called a humanitarian success. The other totalitarianism isn't exactly great either but it at least seems less murderous internally.
If I believed all politicians were power hungry amoral bastards then this wouldn't be that strong of evidence against communism but depressingly enough they're mostly sincere[0]. Communism appears to be a wonderful system for social insects. Humans, not so much.
[0] It would be extremely surprising if they didn't show the same over representation of psychopaths as corporate executives but that still leaves 24 out of 25 politicians as moral creatures.
From your link: "Initially, COMECON served as cover for the Soviet taking of materials and equipment from the rest of the Eastern Bloc, but the balance changed when the Soviets became net subsidizers of the rest of the Bloc by the 1970s via an exchange of low cost raw materials in return for shoddily manufactured finished goods.[46]"
So it looks like they used eastern bloc resources to restore Soviet Union devastated after the war. Explainable action under their their (enforced) ideology of socialist countries mutual aid etc
Very explainable, if you replace now common mindset of "well being of people, their liberty to participate in market" with mindset of "world revolution, opposition to capitalist, imperialistic powers". Priority of restoration of SU first, as a power house of world revolution, becomes explainable. There was a Cold War going on, you know. Suppression of democratic reforms too - "if people don't want our brand of hierarchical command communism, then they're mistaken, they're not ready, we know better". Governments always say they know what's better for people. Of course "communism" in some far future is better than living a better life today, in eyes of communist government ideologue.
Considering SU later become net subsidizer of Eastern Bloc, and that these countries were in pretty good shape right after SU dissolution, with all the limitations of "socialist economy", one-sided interpretation of history as exploitation, plunder, and atrocities and nothing more, sounds to me extremely stupid and narrow minded. As stupid as "killing his own people" meme.
I'm disgusted by people who do moral interpretations of history with today's dominating moral standards. "Let's not forget atrocities of Roman Empire, plunder, enslavement, domination, exploitation of neighboring peoples ." Whole world history is one big atrocity.
Also, people who consider Soviet Union, a primitive oriental despotism, as a communist regime, without quotation marks - have no class.
> do moral interpretations of history with today's dominating moral standards
I cannot upvote this enough. I feel sad when people forget that most of the history has been rewritten to suit newer regimes, newer philosophies. And the practice is still very dominant. Howsoever informed we may try to be about past, especially past that we haven't lived through but heard about in books or media or discussions, we are still aware of only part of the story. The part that survived, the part that dominated. And what is worse, we often tend to classify some leaders as well as their supporters who have failed and then replaced by their antitheses, to have this innate evil - while forgetting that they may very well be not 'evil' in their own morality; and hence ignorance not evilness causes their evil actions.
Who exactly is defending what the Soviets did? I'm skeptical that there's a pile of people out there who are gungho about what a great job Stalin & co did.
I think dominating a country militarily and installing puppet governments and banning their religion and forcing their children to learn your native language is bad enough. If nothing else, the Eastern Bloc was being exploited for the purpose of providing a land buffer zone against military invasion. I.e., the risk of being a front line battlefield was being exported.
If you're looking for a shipping manifest for raw materials from an EB country to the USSR at prices below free market rates I imagine you could find that too. But to me that's not the primary point.
Hypocrisy is deliberately lying about your values. This may be that, but it may also just be a compromising of values. An alcoholic saying that alcohol abuse is bad isn't hypocrisy is the alcoholic truly believes it.
It isn't necessarily hypocrisy. It makes sense for them to be leery of acting without first talking about the limits they believe should be applied to cyberwarfare. A single act may be consistent with many different interpretations, and the United States could easily be blamed if one of their allies committed some heinous act and justified it using a doctrine they extrapolated from Stuxnet and other acts condoned or committed by the United States.
As an analogous example, parents, knowing that many people think in crude categories such as "drugs" and "illegal," would not simply pot in front of their children without explanation. They would not want to discover later that their kids were doing meth or shoplifting and hear, "What are you angry about? You smoked illegal drugs right in front of me. How is this different?" The parents would likely find themselves accused of hypocrisy, by their kids and by others who honestly or disingenuously failed to understand the distinctions the parents drew between smoking pot and doing meth, or smoking pot and shoplifting.
I don't know if the United States has an official stance on the acceptable use of cyberwarfare, but the fact that they chose to leak their involvement in Stuxnet rather than openly admit it and justify it suggests that they have no official policy to cite (though it may also be that they don't want to officially acknowledge responsibility for Stuxnet's collateral damage.) If there is no official articulation of policy, we really are setting unpredictable precedents that are likely to implicate us in future disasters.
Also I am not at all sure that terrorists are going to care whether the US says they have used weapons like this. I would suggest that "we are worried about cybersecurity" is a much larger green light than "we are using cyberweapons."
I am not aware of the last time a terrorist attacked us with an F-15 or a B-2.....
The much larger issue though is that by releasing Stuxnet, the government had to release tools that terrorists could use into the wild. These can then be reverse compiled, hacked, and turned against us. That's bad news. It would be like leaving behind a large number of Predators or something in terrorist hands.
Actually it is worse than that. With actual airplanes, you have maintenance issues and costs, and the fact is that you have limited quantity and little ability to produce more. With Stuxnet, these limits are not there.
At one point special warfare was also considered taboo, now it is the U.S.'s bread and butter. Unfortunately while our nation recognized the need to develop our black ops capabilities early on, we are a bit late to the party when it comes to cyber-warfare.
When it comes to international conflict, right and wrong are often subjective. Of course someone who is hostile towards the west is going to feel justified about his actions. If he didn't feel justified, he wouldn't maintain those beliefs. Unfortunately for him, feeling justified doesn't make you correct. While many countries dislike some of the United States' actions (often rightfully), almost the entire world hates everything about violent extremists.
If the President thinks that a cyber-attack will prevent a war, (that would be far more costly to both sides than the ones we are already in) it would be immoral for him not to take action. I don't like many of the things that Obama does, (or any politician) but he strikes me as a person who really does want to do the right thing and prevent the needless loss of life.
> Unfortunately while our nation recognized the need to develop our black ops capabilities early on, we are a bit late to the party when it comes to cyber-warfare.
If there's one good example that our military underestimated the importance of cyber-security until recently, it is that the U.S. Army Cyber Command was just established in 2009. Before this happened, there was definitely work being done by the Army in this field, but it wasn't the large-scale, coordinated effort that such an important threat demands.
In the years leading up to the creation of the Cyber Command, there were many field grade officers who expressed the need for such a unit. These officers suggested that the military needed some sort of presence in cyberspace, mostly to ensure the safety of U.S. networks and partly to enable us to effectively respond to cyber-attacks around the world.
This article has a lot of good information about CYBERCOM.
I hope you realize that NSA, perhaps the biggest and most capable information security organizations in the world has always been under the Pentagon. It's absurd to suggest the US attention to data security started with the establishment of "Cyber Command".
My personal view is that it's a dangerous experiment in ineptitude allow the Pentagon to "defend in cyberspace" US networks. Most of the people who are tossing around such terms don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about.
It's one thing to say we're going to let the Pentagon use its procurement bucks to have defense contractors weaponize exploits in case the day arrives. But it's highly debatable whether allowing the military to get involved in US domestic networks is even legal.
Their ability to defend even their own networks for less than 10x the cost of the private sector is still an open question, much less whether or not they can defend anything having a wide diversity of traffic such as today's business and consumer internet.
I didn't say that the creation of CYBERCOM marked the beginning of U.S. involvement in cyberspace. It was created just a few years ago, because our government's leadership felt that we needed to do far more than we have been. The NSA is very good at what they do, but unless they expand dramatically, other organizations are going to have to be formed.
That's fine. I'd just like to disagree with the idea that the US was late to this party. If anything the US has been one of a few countries leading the world into this "cyber arms" race, albeit mostly covertly until recent years.
Taboo? Do you have a reference for that? I was always under the impression that the initial resistance to SO was from traditional generals in the pentagon who came up through the infantry and armored ranks...
You are correct. There was a lot of resistance from generals who were well versed in conventional warfare. Many of them thought that guerrilla warfare was either cowardly or somehow below us.
Richard Marcenko, the founder of the now defunct SEAL Team 6 (got transformed into the Developmental Warfare Group) discusses the attitudes he encountered throughout his navy career in some of his earlier novels. (he does write fiction now, but some of his earlier works were based on his life.) I know that he's an extremely controversial figure and that his writing ability is questionable, but he was both a SEAL and an officer at a time when the military was just starting to realize how significant a role that guerrilla warfare would play in future conflicts.
A lot of it varies from service to service. The Marine Corps was the last to develop special ops teams, under the doctrine that all Marines were capable of special operations. The smallest integrated Marine units, the MEU's, are all certified as "special operations capable", and are indeed capable of covert, small-unit action. One of the missions they're often tasked with is TRAP, "Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel". It was a Marine TRAP team that rescued downed F-16 pilot Scott O'Grady during the Bosnian war, for instance.
Ironically, it was the Marines who actually had some of the earlier predecessors to black ops, in the form of the Raider Battalions in the Second World War. One of the Raider Battalions was commanded by FDR's son, which protected the Raiders from political interference, at least until FDR died.
It's not exactly publicized, but my dad told me that the first Raider Battalion, at least, was even organized as a Maoist guerrilla unit; Samuel B. Griffith, its second commander, had previously served in China and spent a great deal of time with Mao. Among other things, the unit was run democratically.t My dad was acquainted with Griffith for a time, and I don't know how much of this is public information, or even accurate, but it's what he told me.
The reason that the Marines are considered to have developed a spec ops teams last is largely due to the military having a different definition of special operations than the average person.
To an average person like me (and I was a Soldier) when I think of special forces, I consider pretty much anyone who went to one of the military's most elite schools. The SEALS, Force Recon, and the actual U.S. Army Special Forces all seem to have a similar level of ability. Each of these groups has taken the absolute best soldiers that could be found and trained them to an extreme degree.
When the government thinks of special forces, they think of organizations that fall under the Special Operations Command. When the U.S. wanted Force Recon to fall under SOCOM, the commandant said "no." This is part of the reason that the Marine Corps didn't officially have special forces until recently.
The problem with SOCOM, and why Force Recon didn't fit in, is that Force Recon was always meant to perform a specific mission within the context of a Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF), not be used as a black-ops team on a detached mission. Which is incidentally why the Marines still have them, even though the Marines have teams assigned to SOCOM now.
Given your knowledge of Marcinko's reputation I'm surprised you used him as your reference material. When Marcinko formed ST6 he selected the first members from an already existing specwar community. The same thing can be said for Beckwith and the creation of SFOD-D which predated ST6.
I was using him as a reference because he experienced first hand the discrimination that the special operations community faced from many high ranking officers and even politicians.
I wasn't trying to say that the SEALS were the first SF unit, I guess I wasn't very clear. Most of the SF type units were around in some form well before the Vietnam War. Even the SEALS were around in the 40's, they just weren't called SEALS yet.
In a 2009 interview, Obama said, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." That is pretty mild support for American Exceptionalism, as defined by the GOP.
On the contrary, hypocrisy is all about believing that "when I do it it's not wrong". Decrying something when you are ashamed that you secretly do it yourself is not hypocrisy, because it doesn't involve a double standard.
On the contrary--they often go to great lengths to justify it. The German invasions of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands were deemed protective occupations, in order to prevent the Allies from invading them. The Gulf War was justified by a UN resolution. You can find some attempt, however feeble, to justify any recent military action.
That's the point. Each and every military action creates an attempt to justify it. It usually fails at both justifying it and explaining the actual reasons behind it.
I don't think irony and hypocrisy need to enter into it; really there is just a concern of escalation, or even a sort of "arms race" (although it would differ from a real arms race in many key respects).
It's what Chomsky calls "asserting the opposite," a psychological method to counter opposition. Essentially if "you assert opposite, it eliminates mountains of evidence" toward your own actions.
Ok, fine, it's hypocritical. There are worse things in the world than hypocrisy. I smoke cigarettes, yet I would advise others not to. I may be a hypocrit, but I'm not wrong. The two are not mutually exclusive.
"Irony" is the wrong word. It's "hypocrisy".