He asked for a critique and he got one

Rob Rosenberger, Vmyths co-founder
Wednesday, 4 December 2002 "SOUTHEAST STORM CUTS power, flights," an MSNBC headline blares. "Warnings posted from Kansas to Carolinas and Virginia," a subheading observes.

Americans shrug it off when blizzards knock out power grids, when hurricanes contaminate water supplies, when earthquakes sever telecommunications, and when terrorists shut down air traffic.

But if India's power goes out because of computer warfare, it'll crush them! If hackers snarl mass transportation, it'll crucify them! If a cyber-attack disables India's phone system, it'll drive them into chaos!

Bear with me, folks. It leads to computer virus hysteria. The story offers details & anecdotes about the effects of bad weather on modern America. Read it and weep:

A storm sweeping eastward out of the Plains left thousands of homes and businesses without power, closed schools and delayed flights Wednesday. Storm warnings and watches were posted from Kansas to the Carolinas and Virginia, the National Weather Service said. Snow was falling along a path from the Texas Panhandle, where several inches covered the ground Wednesday morning, to mountain peaks in southwestern North Carolina. 'Everybody needs to stay home,' said Oklahoma Highway Patrol Lt. Jerry Treadwell. Schools were closed across much of northeast Arkansas, where snow, sleet and freezing rain caused scattered power outages.

Okay, so let's quickly summarize what happened to the southeast. "Thousands of homes and businesses" lost power. Schools closed down. Air traffic got snarled. Sounds pretty typical for the U.S., doesn't it? Whole regions of the country lose power and divert air traffic because of blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, plus the occasional volcanic eruption and the occasional terrorist act. Resilient Americans just shrug it off. ...So anyway, I subscribe to the "IWAR" discussion group for information warfare. The Deccan Herald of Bangalore, India published an information warfare opinion piece written by a Dr. Raj Mehta. He asked IWAR participants (after the fact) for "dialog & critique so I can refine it further. Needless to say that I consider this issue to be of utmost importance." You can read Mehta's opinion piece here. He asked for constructive criticism. All right... First let's recognize the fact Mehta editorialized rather than detailed his concerns about information warfare. One would expect a Ph.D. to offer a lot more to an audience of constructive critics. For example, how can one accept on faith the author's "hypothetical scenarios that are technically quite feasible"? Mehta presents no real-world anecdotes in his editorial to support this alleged feasibility. At most he uses sweeping generalizations of crime — a problem we've dealt with since Eve plucked fruit from the forbidden tree. To put it succinctly: Mehta focuses on a single arbitrary "cause" (information warfare) and he ignores the amazing commonness of the "effects" it would produce. To put it in detail:
MEHTA ASSERTS A criminal element could "quite feasibly" bring railways, airways, telecommunications, and power grids to a halt — at which point "modern India will come to a stand-still, and law and order problems could result across the country."

Mehta focuses on a single arbitrary cause (information warfare) and he ignores the amazing commonness of the effects it would produce.

And yet modern India routinely suffers regional outages of the very infrastructures it so desperately relies on. So, too, does modern America. A large portion of Tennessee recently lost its power grid for three days during a severe winter event, yet the state maintained law & order without coming close to a declaration of martial law. The U.S. power industry actually conspired to deprive the state of California of electricity and they went so far as to cause rolling blackouts. Like Tennessee, California never considered the notion of martial law. Hurricanes destroy sections of the U.S. eastern seaboard nearly every year; they can contaminate 150,000 square kilometers of vital water supplies with dead carcasses and sewage overflows. Yet the eastern seaboard seldom declares martial law. Regional U.S. airways & railways routinely fall victim to severe weather, as it just did in the southeast. Every regional problem ripples through the national mass transportation grid. And yet modern life goes on. Indeed, modern life inexplicably goes on if we take Mehta's assertions at face value. One would expect India suffers weather problems like those in the U.S. Their airways & railways suffer as well from regional paramilitary flareups (e.g. along the Pakistani border) not usually seen in North America. Should we infer Kashmir's unrest stems partly from the unreliability of its mass transportation? Mehta asserts the banking & financial industrial complex could "quite feasibly" suffer enormous losses if "unfriendly elements" cook the books without the industry's knowledge. So what? We've seen fantastic examples of this all throughout the ages. How quickly we forget a name like "Enron"! Nations have long used counterfeiting as a way to destabilize their enemies and/or to pay for covert operations. Both sides counterfeited in the U.S. civil war, for example. Florence, Italy nearly collapsed from financial ruin in the late 15th century after the death of its most prominent politician revealed he raped the city-state's coffers. In the late 20th century, the implosion of the "LTCM" hedge fund literally set the entire global financial world on the brink of collapse due to the nitroglycerine power & instability of the Black-Scholes model. Again, Mehta focuses on a single arbitrary "cause" (database manipulation) and he ignores the amazing commonness of the "effects" it would produce. I'll skip over Mehta's concerns about information warfare in revenue collection. I view it as merely a nation-state's role within the overall banking & financial industrial complex. See above. Mehta asserts a band of terrorists could "quite feasibly" manipulate an immigration database to gain entry to India or any other computer-dependent nation. "The terrorists would be allotted visas and would enter India without any agency being able to detect such an invasion. Can you imagine what havoc this could cause?" he asks rhetorically. And yet, once again, history revels with instances of sponsored actors who enter and exit an enemy's borders with impunity. CIA, KGB, Moussad, et al. create "confetti packs" (movie ticket stubs, bank transaction jackets, wallet photos with handwriting in a local dialect, etc.) so an agent will look like a typical citizen if the police empty his pockets. Terrorist groups — or to use the old term: "agents provocateur" — teach the very same "tradecraft" to their own "sleepers." No computer database can replace these intricacies. It takes only motivation & resources to "quite feasibly" manipulate any given immigration system no matter how primitive or state-of-the-art it may be. Remember when terrorists from Pakistan infiltrated India's parliament chambers? Thirteen people died in the bullet spray. Yet to hear Mehta say it, these infiltrations could be done with ease by computer. Just click a mouse to sneak past immigration officials! Double-click it to sneak guns into parliament!

No offense, but I rank the Ph.D's opinion piece at that of an undergraduate.

Honestly, folks: it'll never be that simple.
I COULD GO on, of course. Let me reiterate: Mehta focuses on a single arbitrary "cause" and he ignores the amazing commonness of the "effects" it would produce. This Ph.D. wants us to critique his opinion piece so he can "refine it further"? I can sum it up in two words: "start over." No offense, but I rank his effort at that of an undergraduate. Let's ask people in the southeast if they believe computer attacks could drive a nation into anarchy & chaos...