Classified Information is defined as data, regard­less of form that includes sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion that its dis­clo­sure is restricted by law or reg­u­la­tion to par­tic­u­lar group of peo­ple. Information is clas­si­fied at one of three lev­els based on the amount of dan­ger that its unau­tho­rized dis­clo­sure could rea­son­ably be expected to cause to national security. 

The high­est basic level of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion is Top Secret. Top Secret infor­ma­tion is defined as infor­ma­tion that if dis­closed would rea­son­ably be expected to cause “excep­tion­ally grave dam­age” to national secu­rity. The next to high­est level of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion is Secret. Secret infor­ma­tion is defined as infor­ma­tion that if dis­closed would cause “seri­ous dam­age” to national secu­rity. The third level of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion is Confidential. Confidential is defined as infor­ma­tion that if dis­closed could cause “dam­age” to national security. 

There are other restric­tions on infor­ma­tion such as NTK — need to know and SSI — sen­si­tive secu­rity infor­ma­tion. In these dan­ger­ous times, a slip or acci­den­tal dis­clo­sure of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion can eas­ily result in loss of life and bil­lions of dol­lars of damage. 

The extra­or­di­nary sen­si­tiv­ity of our intel­li­gence and defense orga­ni­za­tions’ mis­sion requires the extra­or­di­nary pro­tec­tion against pos­si­ble unau­tho­rized dis­clo­sure of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion. Any infor­ma­tion com­ing to your atten­tion con­cern­ing the loss or unau­tho­rized dis­clo­sure of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion should be reported imme­di­ately to proper gov­ern­ment offi­cials. Due to a num­ber of recent secu­rity inci­dents involv­ing the unau­tho­rized dis­clo­sure of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion train­ing pro­grams like “Handling Classified Information” has seen a sig­nif­i­cant increase in demand accord­ing to Spy-Ops. Organizations are tak­ing addi­tional steps to inform employ­ees and con­tract work­ers of their respon­si­bil­i­ties when han­dling sen­si­tive information.

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Last week while work­ing on cyber attacks against media web sites I dis­cov­ered some infor­ma­tion I thought you might ben­e­fit from reading. 

One of the more sig­nif­i­cant con­cerns with cyber war­fare is a tar­geted attack against the news media. There are two dif­fer­ent strate­gies that play here. The first pos­si­bil­ity is a dis­rup­tive strat­egy — where the cyber attack dis­ables the media from report­ing on activ­i­ties and dis­rupt­ing their abil­ity to inform the pub­lic about events that are or have just taken place. The sec­ond strat­egy addresses the use of the media as a source of mis­in­for­ma­tion. Misinformation and dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paigns are eas­ily mounted and you can even find this tac­tic addressed in the well known work “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu. We have assessed the impli­ca­tion of both of these sce­nar­ios using the Scenario Based Intelligence Analysis Tool cre­ated by Spy-Ops. The result of that analy­sis is below. 

Scenario 1 — Media Disruption
An attack against the entire media sec­tor in an attempt to dis­rupt its abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with and inform the pub­lic is rated a 2.3 on our risk scale. 

MEASUREMENT SCORE
Cost = 4.3
Complexity = 4.7
Difficulty = 4.4
Discovery Probability = 3.8
Success Probability = 2.0
Impact = 4.7
Current Defense = 2.5
___________________________________________
Overall Risk = 2.3 

Scenario 2 — Dis or mis Information
An attack against a pri­mary new source with the intent to inject mis-information for pub­lic dis­sem­i­na­tion is rated a 4.1 on our risk scale. 

MEASUREMENT SCORE
Cost = 1.3
Complexity = 1.6
Difficulty = 2.2
Discovery Probability = 2.0
Success Probability = 4.0
Impact = 4.7
Current Defense = 2.5
___________________________________________
Overall Risk = 4.1 

In sup­port of the higher risk and increased like­li­hood of suc­cess in this type of attack is the fol­low­ing account of events that took place on June 17, 2007. The view­ers of a Czech tele­vi­sion chan­nel watch­ing a Web cam pro­gram mon­i­tor­ing weather in var­i­ous Czech moun­tain resorts saw a nuclear explo­sion tak­ing place in the Krkonose or Giant Mountains in the north­ern Czech Republic. CNN Europe reported that mem­bers of a Czech art group were respon­si­ble and got in trou­ble for hack­ing a tele­vi­sion broad­cast and insert­ing the phony video of the nuclear explosion. 

One can only imag­ine the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact on the view­ers that wit­nessed this prank. The TV chan­nel CT2 said that they received fran­tic phone calls from view­ers who thought a nuclear war had started. By the way, just recently the artists were acquit­ted of the charges stem­ming from the fake nuclear blast on TV.

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Congress’ watch­dog agency, the Government Accountability Office, is warn­ing that the Pentagon needs to improve how it plans for and man­ages devel­op­ment of crit­i­cal intel­li­gence and sur­veil­lance systems. 

In a report released April 23, the GAO said the mil­i­tary has strug­gled “to improve inte­gra­tion across DOD and national intel­li­gence agen­cies” ham­pered by the widely dif­fer­ing mis­sions and bureau­cratic cul­tures of the intel­li­gence agencies. 

This is not an aca­d­e­mic exer­cise. The report notes that the mil­i­tary plans to spend $28 bil­lion over the next seven years to field a wide array of intel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance sys­tems. That’s just air­borne sys­tems and does not include spy satel­lites, with their tra­di­tion­ally hefty price tags. 

The GAO report cites one exam­ple where the Pentagon “had dif­fi­culty obtain­ing com­plete infor­ma­tion” on top secret “national” assets — usu­ally a veiled ref­er­ence to highly clas­si­fied radar and electro-optical satel­lites — “because of secu­rity clas­si­fi­ca­tions of other agency doc­u­ments.” Also, bud­get wars have ham­pered the effort to improve coor­di­na­tion across the intel­li­gence enter­prise, the GAO report says. In clas­sic under­stated fash­ion, the report says that “dis­agree­ments about equi­table fund­ing from each bud­get have led to pro­gram delays.” 

The Pentagon has drawn up an “ISR Integration Roadmap” but it does not appear to help much, if the report’s lan­guage is parsed care­fully. The roadmap does not “pro­vide a long-term view of what capa­bil­i­ties are required to achieve strate­gic goals or pro­vide detailed infor­ma­tion that would make it use­ful as a basis for decid­ing among alter­na­tive investments.”

(more…)

The Marines have always been good at deliv­er­ing their mes­sage, and this com­mer­cial is another great exam­ple of that:

We now return to our reg­u­lar pro­gram­ming. Semper Fidelis.

(Gouge: BT)

– Ward

In a recent op-ed in The Bulletin Charles Pena sug­gests that the American military’s use of air­power is not help­ing us win the war. Here’s the piece:

Operation Iraqi Freedom has rung in the new year with a bang — lit­er­ally. On Jan. 10, U.S. war­planes dropped 40,000 pounds of bombs on the south­ern out­skirts of Baghdad, one of the largest air strikes of the Iraq war. This attack reflects the increased use of air power as a com­po­nent of Gen. David Petraeus’ coun­terin­sur­gency strat­egy (Gen. Petraeus is the com­man­der of all U.S. forces in Iraq and the pri­mary author of FM 3–24, the Army’s coun­terin­sur­gency man­ual). In 2007, the U.S. con­ducted more than 1,100 air strikes, a more than five­fold increase over the pre­vi­ous year.

The U.S. military’s fas­ci­na­tion with bomb­ing is rooted in our com­pet­i­tive advan­tage in advanced technology.

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Back in 1985, dur­ing my first air­wing detach­ment to Fallon, Nevada, my squadron par­tic­i­pated in an exer­cise called “Constant Peg.” C-Peg was super clas­si­fied and involved American fighter crews fly­ing 1v1 ACM mis­sion against Soviet fight­ers like MiG-23s and MiG-21s. These fight­ers were based at Tonopah. (My pilot and I went up against a MiG-23.)

Now dur­ing the briefs before the exer­cise the guys fly­ing the MiGs were very hyper about us NOT land­ing at Tonopah … ever, ever, ever … even though the exer­cise took place just north of the field. “If you have an emer­gency go back to Fallon,” was the refrain, which struck us as a bit exces­sive, even con­sid­er­ing the fact these enemy air­planes were based there.

The squadron oper­a­tions offi­cer, who went on to be a cor­po­rate test pilot, said some­thing that made sense years later: “They’re not wor­ried about the MiGs. There’s some­thing else going on there.” When we pushed him for details, he said he didn’t know. He just had a hunch that C-Peg was a cover for another program.

Well, we now know that other pro­gram was the F-117 devel­op­men­tal test pro­gram. And after see­ing first­hand the V-22’s DT pro­gram for three years, I can tell you that it’s a mir­a­cle that nobody found out about the Stealth jet dur­ing that time. Incredible sto­ries have emerged about long com­mutes and clue­less fam­i­lies and night ops. They did have a cou­ple of close calls. There were reports of UFOs by local civil­ians that were quashed by Air Force officials.

So, again, have the folks in Texas seen some­thing the Air Force doesn’t want them to see?

Check out these eye­wit­nesses in this news report. They seem con­vinced that they saw some­thing weird:

– Ward

The man Fiasco author Tom Ricks referred to as (I’m para­phras­ing here) the worst tac­ti­cian in mod­ern mil­i­tary his­tory is in the head­lines for receiv­ing a six-digit retainer from a vet­er­ans char­ity that only gives 25 per­cent of its income to the vet­er­ans it was set up to assist.

This from our friend Simon at ABC News:

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the inva­sions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was paid $100,000 to endorse a vet­er­ans char­ity that watch­dog groups say is rip­ping off donors and wounded vet­er­ans by using only a small por­tion of the money raised for vet­er­ans ser­vices, accord­ing to tes­ti­mony in Congress today.

Read the entire ABC News report here.

– Ward

President Bush deliv­ered a blow to California’s whale and dol­phin hug­gers today on behalf of the Navy. Here’s the press release from DoD:

The Navy announced today that two impor­tant steps have been taken under exist­ing law and reg­u­la­tions to allow it to con­duct effec­tive, inte­grated train­ing with sonar off the coast of south­ern California after a fed­eral court ear­lier this month imposed unten­able restric­tions on such training.

In accor­dance with the pro­vi­sions of the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), and at the rec­om­men­da­tion of the Secretary of Commerce, the President con­cluded that con­tin­u­ing these vital exer­cises with­out the restric­tions imposed by the dis­trict court is in the para­mount inter­ests of the United States. He signed an exemp­tion from the require­ments of the CZMA for the Navy’s con­tin­ued use of mid-frequency active (MFA) sonar in a series of exer­cises sched­uled to take place off the coast of California through January 2009. The Navy already applies twenty-nine mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures approved by fed­eral envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tors when using active sonar, and these will remain in place.

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Here’s a lit­tle intrigue to wrap your head around while you’re wait­ing for the turkey to cook. Dave Fulghum at Ares Weblog reports the following:

There are new details of Israeli’s attack on Syria that sug­gests the U.S. had knowl­edge of the event and per­haps some back-channel involve­ment. The Pentagon was mon­i­tor­ing the elec­tronic emis­sions com­ing from Syria dur­ing Israel’s Sept. 6 attack and, while there was no active Pentagon engage­ment in the oper­a­tion to destroy a nuclear reac­tor, there was advice pro­vided, say mil­i­tary and aero­space indus­try offi­cials.

Read the rest at Military.com.

(Photo: Syrian tar­get before and after. Courtesy Washington Post.)

And all of us here at Defense Tech wish you a Happy Thanksgiving.

I ran across an inter­est­ing study pub­lished by the RAND Corporation that took a look at how the United States could best lever­age its cur­rent com­mu­ni­ca­tions and intel­li­gence net­works to wage an effec­tive infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions cam­paign in a coun­terin­sur­gency.

The study, aptly titled Byting Back: Regaining Information Superiority Against 21st Century Insurgents, takes a novel, web 2.0 approach to the prob­lem of gain­ing infor­ma­tion to fight an insur­gency. RAND rightly states that the infor­ma­tion require­ments for con­ven­tional war the basis upon which most of the Pentagons intel­li­gence appa­ra­tus is based are very dif­fer­ent from those of a counterinsurgency.

If win­ning war requires under­stand­ing the ter­rain, win­ning coun­terin­sur­gency requires under­stand­ing the human ter­rain: the pop­u­la­tion, from its top-level polit­i­cal struc­ture to the indi­vid­ual cit­i­zen. A thor­ough and cur­rent under­stand­ing of indi­vid­u­als and their com­mu­nity can help rally sup­port of the gov­ern­ment by allow­ing the gov­ern­ment to meet the needs of the local pop­u­la­tion. Because insur­gents do not iden­tify them­selves as such on sight, knowl­edge at the indi­vid­ual level is often what it takes to make such nec­es­sary dis­tinc­tions.

The study sug­gests uti­liz­ing local wikis com­piled by the pop­u­la­tion, secu­rity ser­vices and gov­ern­ment offi­cials; lever­ag­ing cell phone net­works to push infor­ma­tion and to poten­tially track insur­gents; incor­po­rat­ing the use of video and voice recorders on indi­vid­ual weapons to com­pile infor­ma­tion and lessons learned and the insti­tu­tion of a detailed gov­ern­ment cen­sus of the population.

The RAND ana­lysts call this an inte­grated coun­terin­sur­gency oper­at­ing net­work, or ICON.

Interestingly, the authors devel­oped a met­ric of 160 infor­ma­tion require­ments in a coun­terin­sur­gency. From their analy­sis, the RAND authors found that only 13 of those bits of infor­ma­tion required covert sources, while 90 could be obtained by troops on patrol and 57 come from the pop­u­la­tion itself. How do you think the mil­i­tary views this bal­ance now? I betcha its weighted heav­ily toward the covert oper­a­tive side of things.

What the RAND study also reveals is that the ICON ben­e­fits from openness.

By con­trast, secu­rity tended to be the least strin­gent desider­a­tum. Only 2 require­ments were of the sort that could not be shared with indige­nous forces, while 28 could be shared with any­one.

Though RAND admits the tech­nolo­gies to build such an intel net­work are well within reach, link­ing them together could pose sig­nif­i­cant challenges.

In addi­tion to design­ing and engi­neer­ing work, DoD and lead­ing IT firms will have to work together as they never have before to crack such prob­lems as pro­vid­ing selec­tive secu­rity in an open search-collaborative envi­ron­ment. With proper incen­tives, mar­ket forces will pro­vide most of the drive needed. But an abun­dance of cre­ativ­ity and com­mon pur­pose will also be needed.

It seems to me, though, that all the tools are out there to do this. We dont need ungainly weapons cam­eras devel­oped by some bil­lion dol­lar defense con­trac­tor, for exam­ple, when most cell phones come with one embed­ded in their wafer-thin mechan­ics. The key is to form a sort of intel­li­gence com­mu­nity that inter­weaves these dif­fer­ent streams into one eas­ily acces­si­ble database…a coun­terin­sur­gency Myspace, maybe?

– Christian