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As is often the case with politicians, you really have to read between the lines to figure out what they are saying. This time it is John Bolton, President Trump’s national security advisor, saying that “we are going to open the aperture (huh?), broadening the area we are prepared to act in”.
In Bolton’s defense, the whole idea is to scare people because they do not know what you might do.
He says that the goal is to tell Russia or China that if you hack us, there will be a price to pay. We will impose costs on you until you get the point that it is not worth your while to use cyber against us.
The important thing to understand is, that while the White House is playing a massive game of chicken, the collateral damage is you and me.
At this point the White House is pretty much shooting with an empty gun. They indicted some people who, most likely, will never see the inside of a U.S. courtroom (called naming and shaming) and increased tariffs (which likely will increase the price of U.S. goods or reduce U.S. family’s standard of living). They can yell and thump their collective chests, but for the most part, Russia and China are ignoring them.
We have been led to believe that the U.S. hacked and shutdown the Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency for a few days, but likely that message was read to mean “Gee, we need to spread out, diversify, be redundant”.
But using those tools do come with risks says Bobby Chesney, a former Justice Department official who directs the Center for International and Security Law at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. He is right.
The goal is one that the Russians and Chinese are expert at and we are not. If you have read The Shadow War (if you have not, I strongly recommend it), what they do is ratchet up the level of confrontation just enough – but not so much that we do anything. Examples are the Chinese military bases in the South China Sea (about which we have done nothing) or Russian meddling in the 2016 and 2018 elections via social media and creating conflicts. If we can master that technique, then that would be good.
If we, even accidentally, exceed that threshold, there will be blow back on us and by us, I mean U.S. businesses and consumers.
Up until now we have been very careful as to how we hack back, but will the Russians, Chinese and others take this as a signal to increase their hacking? What is their plan? Surely they are not just going to sit back and wait for us to do something. Likely they will attempt to hack into U.S.computers and lie in wait. Silently sitting there until they are ready to launch an attack from inside the U.S.
Might we hack back after the fact? Sure. Is our intel good enough to stop an attack in advance? That is more questionable. especially if the attack is coming from Des Moines.
That is where the collateral damage comes in. Are they going to steal intellectual property? Or do damage? Steal personally identifiable information? Rumors are that they have infiltrated part of the power grid. The feds would never admit it because it would cause panic, but there is good reason to believe it is true.
One sort of nuclear option would be to use killer satellites to take out a bunch of our GPS satellites. Right now, according to The Shadow War, that would be pretty easy. We would probably call that an act of war, so they are not likely to do that. Another option suggested in The Shadow War is to cut (accidentally) an important undersea fiber optic cable. The Chinese have been testing their ability to do both of these things. Luckily for us, both of those would be hard to deny. In either case, it would take us months to years to recover, with incumbent collateral damage to U.S. businesses and consumers.
Unfortunately, that puts the onus on us – you and me – to try our best to mitigate that collateral damage. While I hope there is no collateral damage, if there is, I hope it is not you or me.
There is one other thing that we don’t know. When will this escalate? Could be next week. Could be never, but I am not voting for never. Not a good plan.
Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
Source: SFGate.