7 years before Facebook was turned on, 4 years before 9/11 and the Patriot Act, before Snowden and and deepfakes and a worldwide lockdown, John Carlin wrote about the next phase of conflict we were entering, as a species, and it was eerily prescient.
He quotes a Chinese army newspaper about their own preparations in '97, which reads like a Russian election-meddling playbook:
Information warfare includes electronic warfare, tactical deception, strategic deterrence, propaganda warfare, psychological warfare, network warfare, and structural sabotage.
He describes a digitized world we've come to know as home:
I-war trashes time-honored distinctions between law enforcement and intelligence, between Americans and foreigners, between the kinds of surveillance permitted at home and what starts at the water's edge.
He points out beginnings of what led to Snowden:
One proposal quietly making the rounds on Capitol Hill is to let the NSA engage in domestic monitoring, partly on the theory that digital technology makes distinctions between "domestic" and "foreign" artificial. Where's the water's edge in cyberspace?
The thinking behind the EARN IT act:
...despite broad-based encryption's obvious merit as part of an I-war defense, the NSA and the FBI oppose it out of hand, on the grounds - not entirely unreasonable - that it makes their mission of listening in on potential enemies more problematic.
The national divide:
...it is a fair bet that paranoid demagoguery will not be absent. It's happened before: look at the 1950s. The best will lack all conviction, the worst will be full of passionate intensity, and the political fabric will start to fray.
And ends it with this:
All of which, of course, could sound a lot like what our Chinese friends call "soft destruction." As William Church says, "The most damaging form of I-war is political war or psychological war." And pretty much anything can be part of it: power outages, network breakdowns, clever disinformation campaigns - anything "to get the populace to feel that the country is going to hell."
Those whom the I-war gods would destroy, they first make mad.
Anyone else feel they've gone mad?
Submitted April 21, 2020 at 02:02AM by Sue-Vide https://ift.tt/2yqVXrA
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