Washington’s cyber war - at home and abroad
After reports that the US designed the greatest cyber viruses in
history with Flame and Stuxnet, Washington faces a predicament in
justifying the duality in its cyber policy and defending its anti-piracy
rhetoric.
While the US has repeatedly condemned cyber-attacks and hacking when
aimed at itself, Washington’s involvement in the coordinated US-Israeli
cyber attack on the Natanz nuclear facility raises a troubling problem
for the government.
“We’re setting a precedent for other nations,” Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told RT. “And
that’s where the real problem lies, because we’ve been criticizing
China for allegedly attacking United States companies and the US
government, while at the same time we’ve been engaging in the same
conduct with other countries.”
Given the US policy of cyber-espionage, some analysts are concerned that this aggressiveness may provoke a reciprocal response.
“When
you attack, for instance, Iran’s nuclear program, you provide the
Iranians with your weapon, your worm, which they can then
reverse-engineer, take apart, figure out how it works, turn it around,
and send it your way,” said John Feffer, a co-director at Foreign Policy in Focus.
But
while Washington has supposedly clandestinely been using the Flame
virus to steal files, photographs, keystrokes, and video from Middle
Eastern computers, it has been trumpeting internet security at home and
abroad.
The US is working hard to extradite Kim Dotcom on piracy
charges. Federal prosecution wants Kim Dotcom for allegedly inflicting
$500 million damage in lost revenue to copyright holders, and the FBI
has shut down his website Megaupload for the illegal distribution of
copyrighted material via filesharing.
The US has also
vigorously pursued Wikileaks’ Julian Assange while starting court
martial proceedings against Bradley Manning, the US officer responsible
for sharing material. Washington claimed that the leaks represented a
threat to national security and the safety of its soldiers abroad.
However,
not only has Washington been complaining about its own security
breaches while engineering the Flame virus to essentially do the same,
but the CISPA bill threatens to infringe upon the civil liberties of the
American public.
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection
Act (CISPA) is a bill which would allow for the US government and
certain technology and manufacturing companies to share internet
information in order to prevent cyber-terrorism.
But organizations
such as ACLU and Strategy for Free Press are fully aware of the risks
of allowing the US government to snoop on its own citizens in the
interests of national security, and have criticized the bills.
“One
of the things that we’re concerned about at Free Press is that we’re
fanning all of these fears about cyber-security that will cause us to
over-react, to actually pass cyber-security legislation that cuts into
our free speech rights as individuals, that compromises free speech on
the internet in ways that would ultimately be harmful to everyone,” Tim Karr, Senior director of Strategy for Free Press told RT in an interview.
“We
saw that CISPA recently went through the house… so they obviously feel
that the climate is right to pass this kind of legislation. Again I
think we have to be really careful because nobody really knows how
significant the threat is. The fear is that Congress will overstep in
ways that cut into our basic civil liberties.”
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