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Comment by throwaway10001 | Hacker News Reader

Unless we start spending less than 1% of our GDP or so on Pentagon Inc, I don't mind this. What's the point of having a $12 Billion aircraft carrier if a Chinese hacker can hack it? Or having a $700 Billion a year military if a kid with telnet can hack your power grid? I mean to say that war has been shifted to computer networks and we need to be ready.

I just think it can be done without tracing all the phone calls my aunt makes.

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I think that's part of Schneier's point though. This spending seems to be primarily on cyber "weapons", not cyber "shields". We DO need to spend money on making our networks more secure and redundant. But instead of that, we seem to just be taking more of a MAD-style first strike approach to things. Glass cannons, essentially.

Cold War 2.0

My thoughts exactly while reading the article.

I also wondered if allegations against Huawei were falsified (assuming they were) not because they posed a security threat from the Chinese government, but because they would make it more difficult for U.S. surveillance programs.

Distinctly preferable to Hot War 3.0 if you ask me.

If you're forced to choose between a bullet in the head and one in the foot, you'll choose the foot almost every time. But why are those the only two choices?

Because we don't get to unilaterally choose, is why.

Who is "we" in this case? HN? The US? The UN? Humanity? If we don't get to choose for ourselves (for any definition of "ourselves"), who's making the choice for us, and why are hot war and cyber war the only choices?

The US fascination with war is kind of mind blowing when you first visit. The number of servicemen/women, the number of military related things (ships, planes etc), the papers, the news. Its much less militaristic down here on our tiny island - New Zealand.

"We" is humanity.

The fact that you don't get to make the choice about what others do to you is one of the very big reasons we have the 2nd Amendment at all, as I recall.

But countries can choose what they do to others, and sometimes those choices have blowback. I remain unconvinced that those who decide such things for us are acting in our interests, or that the problems they claim exist can only be solved the way they claim to solve them.

The fact that countries can choose what to do to others also means the other countries can choose what to do to us.

By all means come up with better solutions and better leaders, but don't act like other countries don't get to make their own choice in what they do.

But we're not talking about other countries, are we? The title of the article is "Has the US Started an Internet War?" Why is the only choice between the US starting a cyber war and a hot war?

That's not the only choice, but to defend against a war started against you, you need to have people trained in that before the war starts. In other words, you need to identify the need to form up those forces before a war starts, even if you don't intend to ever start one yourself.

> we seem to just be taking more of a MAD-style first strike approach to things

But that actually worked during the cold war. I mean MAD prevented it turning hot. Sure, it wasn't the most pleasant or elegant solution but it worked.

Big difference is detection. When somebody launches an ICBM at you, you know it, and can react appropriately (which makes them tend not to launch ICBMs at you). When somebody hacks your computer, if they're good at it, there are often no fingerprints, and so the parties involved can continue conducting offensive warfare with no threat of retaliation.

As Schneier says in the article, MAD was applied in the Cold War with only two players of comparable strength. The potential conflict we are now discussing has far more players of widely varying capabilities, so the principles of MAD don't necessarily apply.

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