>there probably needs to be a new branch of the military to recruit, train, and deploy new kinds of hacker-soldiers.
Agree, but I'd suggest it likely that this branch is already well-established and operational, if hidden from the public eye.
Agree, but I'd suggest it likely that this branch is already well-established and operational, if hidden from the public eye.
There's no need for "cyber command" to really be part of the military. There's no need to put hackers through boot camp, or make 'em wear uniforms, or salute... it would bring down the average quality of the hackers and the average quality of the military. Far better to fold it under the roof of the intelligence agencies.
In Israel there is a mandatory draft. Every soldier goes to boot camp and units like 8200 have strict military structures. (Success is hard to measure, but Israel's high tech industry is some indication of the benefits of military discipline.)
The CIA and NSA have... (goes to look it up)... uhh, some large but undisclosed number of employees. They seem to do a perfectly good job of keeping secrets without needing full-on military discipline.
I'm not actually saying that military training would make anyone a worse hacker, though, I'm just saying that the need for military discipline would limit the number of people (especially in that particular demographic) who wanted to sign up. I have no doubt some of the NSA's best hackers are completely unable to do a single chin-up.
To say nothing about the willingness to salute someone who just learned they can copy and paste text.
Military discipline was a necessity to get a company, a battalion, and larger units to work together at all. Strict organization is necessity as chaos is unmanageable with traditional communication means.
Modern organizations have moved on from rigid, hierarchal organizational models to network-centric models. Even military organizations have moved to this direction (discipline and military courtesy is still maintained).
Success is hard to measure, but Israel's high tech industry is some indication of the benefits of military discipline.
High tech industry has been proved to benefit from military funding. Israel spends larger portion of its GDP to (military) R&D than any other nation.
'Follow orders blindly' (which is more or less the thing we're arguing about) was actively discouraged from the leadership.
Is this good? How can I tell.. But since I started out biased (i.e. with a working brain) I did enjoy that part of my service.
is it the many movies where the hero help the gov to hide some alien invasion to prevent panic that causes people to think this is right?
I'm a little-l libertarian and I'll happily join the calls for "more transparency" where appropriate, but "government should have no secrets", especially in the area of self defense, is not a realistic position. It's an abusable-but-necessary evil.
> Because people who wish you harm for various reasons really exist, and nobody's figured out how to tell the entire world every detail about our defensive capabilities without substantially weakening them in the process.
..sounds like security through obscurity to me.
Even if you're transparent about your overall scheme, you need to keep some execution details hidden.
what happens is "we spent x billions on toilet seats (to quote an alien movie) and password go over the air unencrypted, but we are not telling you the frequency"
That sounds like you are echoing something you heard once without understanding the reasoning behind it.
security through obscurity usually doesn't make sense WRT computer security because the attacks the computer systems are often subject to are sustained for long periods and can't be stopped (think of someone downloading your software to attack it).
In a military situation you do have the capability to retaliate and/or reinforce. This changes the situation because it makes time a critical factor. In that case, obscurity makes a lot of sense because it slows down the attacker. When you have the ability to change things yourself anything that slows down the attack is useful.
This applies to computer security too - if you can detect an attack, then anything that stops that attack from being successful for long enough that you can neutralize the attack vector is useful. This doesn't imply "security though obscurity", but it does imply that you have defence-in-depth, and you don't give out information about what those lower level defences are. Then if your outer layer is breached there is at least some chance the attacker will trigger some kind of alert while working out what the next layer of defence is. That isn't "security though obscurity", it is "security and obscurity".
As a fun exercise, count the number of movies and TV shows in which the CIA is shown in a positive light. The FBI often is, the military usually is, the CIA almost never. Heck, the CIA has such a bad name in American movie land that on the odd occasion they want to show a good American spy (e.g. Die Another Day) they'll put 'em in the NSA instead despite the fact that the activities depicted are much more CIA-like than NSA-like.
Or maybe that the country exists because of government tyranny.
Or because the government arrests people just for showing up to the wrong meeting.
Or because they have studied International Relations at Cambridge University and have an understanding of world history. (that one is probably quite rare, but its very effective).