>From The Free Republic http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3970ef1d2375.htm }}>Begin FreeRepublic.com "A Conservative News Forum" [ Last | Latest Posts | Latest Articles | Self Search | Add Bookmark | Post | Abuse | Help! ] Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works. The Pentagon's Info Wars Foreign Affairs News Keywords: ANTIWAR.COM, HACKING, SURVEILLANCE, PENTAGON, INTERNET WARFARE, ACERT, FIRST AMENDMENT Source: CounterPunch Published: July 1-15, 2000 (vol 7, no. 12) Author: Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair Posted on 07/15/2000 16:09:17 PDT by sjy Pentagon�s Info War Jim Redden reports that the US government is laying the groundwork to knock inconvenient voices off line during the next international military confrontation. You can�t blame the folks over at Antiwar.com for feeling paranoid these days. The libertarian-oriented, anti-military website hosted its second annual conference on March 24 and 25. Held at the Villa Hotel in San Mateo, , the theme of the conference was �Beyond Left & Right: The New Face of the Antiwar Movement�. Among the speakers was Alexander Cockburn who gave an account of the event to CounterPunchers shortly thereafter. A short time later, Antiwar.com founder Eric Garris was startled to learn that his site had been added to a list of �militia-related� websites maintained by Mark Pitcavage, research director for the federally-funded State/Local Anti- Terrorism Training (SLATT) program. CounterPunch reported on Pitcavage�s curious operation in its May 1-15 issue. Then in late May, the software for counting the number of visitors to Antiwar.com crashed two days in a row. The reason? An unusually high number of hits from a single visitor. When columnist Justin Raimondo tracked down the curious party, he discovered it was a Pentagon-funded unit of cyber-soldiers known as the Army Computer Emergency Response Team. The counter crashed after recording 2,000 hits from ACERT on the first day alone. Every file on the website was visited at least once. CounterPunch contacted ACERT headquarters and reached public affairs assistant Shirley K. Startzman who confirmed the military had prowled Antiwar.com. She said ACERT uses commercially available web search tools to �continuously research for websites on the Internet that may have information relating to potential cyber threats.� Startzman claimed that this work is �defensive in nature�, intended to �protect Army computer systems from hackers or denial of service attacks�. As Startzman put it, �The Antiwar website was one of many on the publicly accessible Internet the tool identified as having information potentially related to cyber defense. The high numbers of hits reflect this automated search tool.� Later she added that �the commercially available tool we used in this particular case is called Themescape. Its website is www.cartia.com.� Garris and Raimondo aren�t buying this explanation. Despite Startzman�s insistence that ACERT is �defensive in nature�, it is part of a much larger military system. Cyber-warfare is a relatively new idea. It first surfaced as a public issue in 1988 when the Morris Worm computer virus disabled approximately 10 per cent of all computers connected to the Internet. Fearful of the vulnerability of the government�s vast computer networks to such attacks, the Pentagon turned to the Software Engineering Institute, a federally- funded research center based at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By the end of the year, SEI was officially designated as the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (CERT/CC), providing research and assistance to the government and anyone else wanting to prevent viruses and other attacks from crippling their computers. The Pentagon soon decided to concentrate its emerging cyber-warfare operations under the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), which was created in 1977 to coordinate all of the military�s intelligence-gathering operations. INSCOM moved to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in the summer of 1989. Then the Pentagon began to plan its own Internet attacks. The idea was first fleshed out in a 1996 paper published by the National Defense University Press called �Information Terrorism: Can You Trust Your Toaster?� It was written by Matthew G. Devost of the Information Systems and Technology Group, and Brian K. Houghton and Neal A. Pollard, of the Science Applications International Corporation�s Strategic Assessment Center. The authors created a scenario, a war story set in the Internet, pitting �information terrorists� against heroic cyber-warriors in the service of Uncle Sam. By an amazing coincidence, the bad guys in the fictional story maintain a website which sounds a lot like a government version of what Antiwar.com was doing at the time: �The Web page was dramatic and rife with propaganda and claims against American, NATO, and Croatian imperialism and atrocities in the Balkan region, and included questionable allegations of illegal arms transfers between NATO governments and Bosnian Muslims and Croats.� To counter this sinister abuse of the First Amendment the authors said the U.S. military should create a �specialized and integrated counter information terrorism group�, which they called DIRT (Digital Integrated Response Team). As the authors excitedly put it, �These highly trained information warriors would be the national security equivalent of Carnegie-Mellon University�s Computer Emergency Response Team, but with an offensive capability�. After studying this scenario, the Pentagon duly created ACERT the following year. An article on the ribbon-cutting ceremony titled �Protecting Electronic Borders� appeared in the March-April 1997 issue of the Journal of INSCOM. �Information dominance took a giant leap into the future March 17, when the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command ceremoniously opened the Army Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Fort Belvoir, Va. Its mission is to re-write the books on how the Army handles the newest threat in the field manuals - computer hackers.� The INSCOM Journal reported that �A hacker demonstration was conducted as part of the ribbon-cutting ceremony. An ACERT/CC computer security expert conducted the demonstration, saying that you have to �think like a hacker and try to break into a system��. That�s what Garris and Raimondo think ACERT is preparing to do -- to hack into Antiwar.com and disable it, along with other sites that excite the displeasure of the National Security apparat. End<{{ A<>E<>R Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the State among its hapless subjects. 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