It’s a good Topic

US Lashout Impact

The US will lashout with nuclear weapons in response to a military cyber attack

A2: Cyberattack Takeouts

This is true despite their lobbying arguments --- they just cherry pick the worst predictions

Singer 1-14 (Peter,- American political scientist, an international relations scholar and a preeminent specialist on 21st century warfare. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he is Director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: A Q&A with Peter Singer”)

Erik Gartzke has argued that the damage from cyberattacks can be real but it is usually also temporary and does not much affect the balance of power. Cyberattacks are thus more of an irritant than a game changer. What do you make of this argument? Is cyberwar overhyped? Yes, and no. The immensely important but incredibly short history of computers and the Internet has reached a defining point. Just as the upside of the cyber domain is rippling out, with rapid and often unexpected consequences, so too is the downside. The astounding numbers behind “all this cyber stuff” drive home the scale and range of the threats: — 9 new pieces of malware, malicious software designed to cause harm, are discovered each second — 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies have been hacked (and the other 3 percent likely have been too and just don’t know it) — and more than 100 governments have created military organizations to fight battles in the online domain. Alternatively, the problems can be conceptualized through the tough issues that this “cyber stuff” has already produced: scandals like WikiLeaks and NSA monitoring the ramifications of new cyberweapons like Stuxnet or the role that social networking plays in everything from the Arab Spring revolutions to your own concerns over personal privacy But we too often lump things together that are unlike, simply because they involve zeros and ones. Take the idea of “attacks.” The lead U.S. general for the military’s Cyber Command/NSA testified to Congress that “Every day, America’s armed forces face millions of cyberattacks.”[i] To get those numbers, though, he was combining everything from probes and address scans that never entered U.S. networks to attempts to carry out pranks, to politically motivated protests, to government-linked attempts at data theft and even espionage. But none of these attacks was what most of his listeners in Congress thought he meant by an “attack,” the feared “digital Pearl Harbor” or “cyber 9/11” that’s been cited a half-million times in the media and that his boss, the secretary of defense, had been warning them about in a simultaneous series of speeches, testimony, and interviews with the mainstream media. Essentially, what people too often do when discussing “cyberattacks” is bundle together a variety of like and unlike activities, simply because they involve Internet-related technology. The parallel would be treating the actions of a prankster with fireworks, some street protesters with a smoke bomb, a bank robber with a shotgun, James Bond with his pistol, an insurgent with a roadside bomb and a state military with a cruise missile as if they were all the same phenomenon simply because their tools all involved the same chemistry of gunpowder. That said, there are most definitely growing capabilities to cause real and lasting physical damage via cyber means, with Stuxnet being a great illustration. It was like every other game-changing weapon in history in that it caused some kind of kinetic harm (a stone, a drone, a bomb, etc.). But it was also something new in that it was virtual in its means; it was just 0s and 1s. Being software, it was both here, there and nowhere simultaneously, hitting its target, but also residing in thousands of computers elsewhere. In the book, we explore how the next step in (cyber) war is integration, efforts like Israel’s “Operation Orchard,” where both computer network operations and traditional military activities are blended together. It’s the difference between having radios, tanks and airplanes in World War I versus the way they became powerful by being synergized in the blitzkrieg in World War II. Edward Snowden has brought the issue of political oversight to the forefront. I was particularly struck by the parallels you strike in the book with civilian oversight over the nuclear program in the 1940s and 1950s. The Senate Armed Service Committee discovered aggressive military plans for preemptive nuclear attacks against the Soviets, which were luckily shut down before the 1960 Cuban missile crisis. You write: “Today’s leaders might want to ask if there are any cyber equivalents.” What kind of equivalents are you worried about? What questions should be asked of whom? While the cyber arena poses, as President Obama said, “the most serious economic and national security challenges of the 21st century,” it is one that we have proved to be woefully ill-equipped to handle. Indeed, as former CIA director Michael Hayden put it, “Rarely has something been so important and so talked about with less and less clarity and less apparent understanding. . . .” We can see this problem in everything from the public and mass media’s confusion on matters from the NSA to the latest credit card hacks to Congress’s inability to articulate anything worthy in this space, let alone take effective action. Indeed, 2013 marked the 12th year since Congress passed any significant cybersecurity legislation, the last time being 2002, half a decade before anyone had even heard of the iPhone, let alone today’s world of metadata and Google Glass. That chapter you cite in the book looks the fact that important plans and strategies for a powerful new technology are being made, but the broader civilian political system and populace has largely remained apart from the discussion. And if there is a historical parallel to the Cold War, it’s in how civilian leaders nowadays, as in the past, might be caught off guard by some of the operational plans to actually make use of these new weapons, like the LeMay plan or the goofy U.S. Air Force discussion in 1957 of nuking the moon, just to show the Soviets that we could do interesting things in space, too. This gap is not just a U.S. issue but also is notable in states like China, where civilian control of the military is shall we say … far more complex. I think this also applies not just to the military operational side but also has played out in the surveillance side. Congress may have approved much of the actions of the NSA, but it was clear they didn’t understand them or their ramifications, and that some ran with that. Similarly, it was reported that after General Alexander briefed Obama on NSA activities in the wake of Snowden, the president supposedly got frustrated and asked for it to be repeated to him, “but this time in English.” What do you make of the Snowden “whistleblower or traitor” debate? The challenge of the Snowden revelations is that it involves a massive amount of data, showing activities that roughly falls into three categories: 1) Smart, strategic, useful espionage vs. American enemies, 2) Questionable activities that involved US citizens thru backdoors, fudging of policy/law, foreign agency collaboration 3) Un-strategic (stupid) actions that targeted close American allies, as well as the underlying network security and business prospects of American technology companies (who, according to Forrester Research, may lose as much as a $180 billion worth of revenue from this). So the problem in the discourse and debate on everything from how U.S. political leaders defended the programs to whether he is a traitor or a whistleblower is that people focus on one category but not the others. Government leaders talk about how such programs are critical to preventing another 9/11, but that doesn’t assuage the Germans on why we spied on Angela Merkel. Or, in turn, you see human rights activists talk about how this was huge for U.S. public debate about the new meanings of the 4th Amendment in the cyber age, which is true, but that doesn’t resonate to revelations of a program to spy on Chinese military research or Pakistani terror activities. The irony is that NSA should almost be glad that he disclosed all three categories, [since] if it was just the latter two, the present mess would be even uglier but more focused. You take a nuanced position on the degree to which cybersecurity issues demand involvement by governments (they do) and can be controlled by governments (they cannot, at least not fully). A point you make that I had not fully appreciated before reading the book is that the distribution of labor productivity in this area is highly skewed: A few extremely skilled programmers can achieve more than many programmers with average skills. Governments have advantages in that they can employ many but they may not be able to compete for the very best. What are the consequences of this? Will governments become more dependent on the private sector for sensitive security tasks? Yes, this is a space where quality matters. As the Silicon Valley firms can attest, the best programmers aren’t just elite but can give you gains an order of magnitude greater than the average. But it doesn’t mean that scale doesn’t matter. The so-called 人肉搜索, which roughly translates as “Human flesh search engine” in China, has been very effective for its purpose of chilling public debate and online news that might not be regime friendly. For states, they have to understand that they are, as Joe Nye put it, still the “top dogs on the Internet,” but that there are now many, many smaller dogs that can bite. Like the Internet itself, cybersecurity involves everything from states large and small to non-state organizations that range from Google to the Syrian Electronic Army to collectives of people who link up to share cat videos or conduct Anonymous campaigns to you and I. We all have both concerns, interests and powers. To your question of hiring, it’s a good way of connecting to how at the end of the day both the problems and answers of cybersecurity are not about the software or hardware, but the wetware, the people behind the systems. Part of this is expanding our awareness, but it also goes to issues of workforce. For instance, we’re finding only about 10 percent of the cybersecurity specialists that we need in the U.S. right now. Of the ones they’re finding, hiring managers describe that they’re only happy with the quality of about 40 percent. That’s not a good situation, but it goes beyond the IT department. Whether you’re working in the IT department or you’re working in operations, legal, marketing or finance, wherever, you’re increasingly going to be dealing with cybersecurity questions, whether it’s managing people who work on them to your intellectual property, to your services, to your contract negotiations. This also means, though, that in that issue of both the human side and the government hiring the outside expertise, there are other drives we need to recognize, whether it be goals to build out your bureaucracy, your budget or your business. Again, there are real threats, but also the worry of a so-called “cyber-industrial complex.” In 2001, four companies were lobbying Congress on cybersecurity issues. Now it’s over 1,500. The Washington Post even gave an article on the phenomenon the title “Good News for Lobbyists: Cyber Dollars.”

Accidents 2NC

Securing government networks is key to prevent accidental launch

Johnson ‘09 (Bobbie Johnson, citing a study by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament, “Terrorists could use internet to launch nuclear attack: report,” The Guardian (UK), 7-24-2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jul/24/internet-cyber-attack-terrorists)

Terrorists groups could soon use the internet to help set off a devastating nuclear attack, according to new research. The claims come in a study commissioned by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), which suggests that under the right circumstances, terrorists could break into computer systems and launch an attack on a nuclear state – triggering a catastrophic chain of events that would have a global impact. Without better protection of computer and information systems, the paper suggests, governments around the world are leaving open the possibility that a well-coordinated cyberwar could quickly elevate to nuclear levels. In fact, says the study, "this may be an easier alternative for terrorist groups than building or acquiring a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb themselves". Though the paper admits that the media and entertainment industries often confuse and exaggerate the risk of cyberterrorism, it also outlines a number of potential threats and situations in which dedicated hackers could use information warfare techniques to make a nuclear attack more likely. While the possibility of a radical group gaining access to actual launch systems is remote, the study suggests that hackers could focus on feeding in false information further down the chain – or spreading fake information to officials in a carefully orchestrated strike. "Despite claims that nuclear launch orders can only come from the highest authorities, numerous examples point towards an ability to sidestep the chain of command and insert orders at lower levels," said Jason Fritz, the author of the paper. "Cyber-terrorists could also provoke a nuclear launch by spoofing early warning and identification systems or by degrading communications networks." Since these systems are not as well-protected as those used to launch an attack, they may prove more vulnerable to attackers who wish to tempt another nation into a nuclear response.

Extinction

Morgan ‘09 (Dennis Ray Morgan, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea, “World on fire: two scenarios of the destruction of human civilization and possible extinction of the human race,” Futures, 41(10), December 2009, ScienceDirect)

In a remarkable website on nuclear war, Carol Moore asks the question “Is Nuclear War Inevitable??” [10].4 In Section 1, Moore points out what most terrorists obviously already know about the nuclear tensions between powerful countries. No doubt, they’ve figured out that the best way to escalate these tensions into nuclear war is to set off a nuclear exchange. As Moore points out, all that militant terrorists would have to do is get their hands on one small nuclear bomb and explode it on either Moscow or Israel. Because of the Russian “dead hand” system, “where regional nuclear commanders would be given full powers should Moscow be destroyed,” it is likely that any attack would be blamed on the United States” [10]. Israeli leaders and Zionist supporters have, likewise, stated for years that if Israel were to suffer a nuclear attack, whether from terrorists or a nation state, it would retaliate with the suicidal “Samson option” against all major Muslim cities in the Middle East. Furthermore, the Israeli Samson option would also include attacks on Russia and even “anti-Semitic” European cities [10]. In that case, of course, Russia would retaliate, and the U.S. would then retaliate against Russia. China would probably be involved as well, as thousands, if not tens of thousands, of nuclear warheads, many of them much more powerful than those used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would rain upon most of the major cities in the Northern Hemisphere. Afterwards, for years to come, massive radioactive clouds would drift throughout the Earth in the nuclear fallout, bringing death or else radiation disease that would be genetically transmitted to future generations in a nuclear winter that could last as long as a 100 years, taking a savage toll upon the environment and fragile ecosphere as well. And what many people fail to realize is what a precarious, hair-trigger basis the nuclear web rests on. Any accident, mistaken communication, false signal or “lone wolf’ act of sabotage or treason could, in a matter of a few minutes, unleash the use of nuclear weapons, and once a weapon is used, then the likelihood of a rapid escalation of nuclear attacks is quite high while the likelihood of a limited nuclear war is actually less probable since each country would act under the “use them or lose them” strategy and psychology; restraint by one power would be interpreted as a weakness by the other, which could be exploited as a window of opportunity to “win” the war. In other words, once Pandora's Box is opened, it will spread quickly, as it will be the signal for permission for anyone to use them. Moore compares swift nuclear escalation to a room full of people embarrassed to cough. Once one does, however, “everyone else feels free to do so. The bottom line is that as long as large nation states use internal and external war to keep their disparate factions glued together and to satisfy elites’ needs for power and plunder, these nations will attempt to obtain, keep, and inevitably use nuclear weapons. And as long as large nations oppress groups who seek self-determination, some of those groups will look for any means to fight their oppressors” In other words, as long as war and aggression are backed up by the implicit threat of nuclear arms, it is only a matter of time before the escalation of violent conflict leads to the actual use of nuclear weapons, and once even just one is used, it is very likely that many, if not all, will be used, leading to horrific scenarios of global death and the destruction of much of human civilization while condemning a mutant human remnant, if there is such a remnant, to a life of unimaginable misery and suffering in a nuclear winter.

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