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Decoding the new information war

By Heiko Khoo: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, June 18, 2013

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[By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

The U.S. security and military apparatus is a system rooted in the restless struggle to quench American capitalism's thirst for resources and markets. It subordinates other nations by means of "trick or treat" – in the form of trade, fear and force – to secure profits for its leading companies. The ultimate objective of this machinery of security and warfare is not the containment or oppression of other nations or peoples, but the oppression of the majority inside the United States. The unity of the United States of America is a carefully crafted myth designed to conceal the exploitation of the workers who produce the profits of giant capitalist corporations. America's richest 400 people own more wealth than half of all Americans combined, which amounts to 150 million. The country belongs to those 400 and their hangers-on. They are the United States.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. intelligence agencies carved out new operational spheres for themselves based on technical solutions which came to be known as Information Warfare. With the ubiquitous extension of computers and the Internet, the name changed to Command, Control, Communications, Computing and Intelligence, or C4i. More recently, cyber war and network-centric warfare have become the in-vogue terms in the U.S. intelligence community.

War requires the defeat of antiwar. It was hoped that the automation of information gathering technologies would reduce human costs and exposure in espionage activities. Unmanned drones and remote targeting to guide missile strikes were designed to result in fewer U.S. casualties, which would also reduce the danger of an anti-war backlash hampering military operations or leading to demoralization. Thus, the specter of America's defeat in Vietnam would be exorcised.

The dazzling display of laser-guided airstrikes in the 1991 Gulf War, the first computer war, signaled a vast shift towards information warfare. The "War on Terror" provided powerful justification for this new type of engagement and produced an atmosphere of paranoia, which secured a huge boost for the budget of the military-security complex and eradicated the "peace dividend" which the end of the Cold War was supposed to herald. The rising influence of the cyber war lobby corresponded to ongoing revolutions in storage, processing and communications capacity and the fantasies of their innovators were fed with vast resources.

Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) taps into the resources of the world's most widely used Internet companies, supposedly to monitor "foreign threats," using a program they code-named PRISM. But U.S. citizens become "legitimate targets" as soon as they communicate with foreigners. When Snowden revealed this in Hong Kong, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Google's Larry Page both issued carefully worded legalistic denials. Both claimed never to have "heard" of PRISM before, and said they don't provide the NSA with "direct" access to their servers. It is natural that the NSA would not have told either of them that the program is called PRISM and not having "direct access" is irrelevant to the substance of the issue.

Privacy and Big Brother issues are serious problems for Google and Facebook, both of whom cultivated their "cool face of capitalism" image. They appear to provide services that help mankind – on the communist principle "to each according to their needs" – by giving everyone free access to information, social networks and email. This conceals the fact that they acquire individuals' personal information without consent and feel free to share this with the military-security state! The truth is that the data held by these companies should belong to the provider of the data, i.e. the user. These companies should pay us for our data and only use it with our explicit consent.

The ubiquitous and universal spying by Internet giants and the U.S. security services recalls British philosopher Jeremy Bentham's concept of the perfect prison, Panopticon. There, from a central point, a single guard could observe all prisoners in their cells, and by such supervision, reform and remold behavior at minimum cost. But what are Bentham's dreams of an ideal prison compared to the elegance of Facebook, Google and Microsoft's dancing with the U.S. state security apparatus? They unite the whole world with their universal surveillance engines.

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