Wampum

Ew! Pew Stinks

Someone posted to NANOG a pointer to this week's oeuvre de Pew: "The Future of the Internet", the puff for which reads In a survey, technology experts and scholars evaluate where the network is headed in the next ten years. Being modestly curious I looked at the Pew website where I found six pages of broadly retarded pdf entitiled The State of Blogging who's chief gems were dubious numbers from people, as opposed to say, using the technology (PubSub alone reads 6.4m blogs/day), but my curiosity didn't end there. I looked at the pdf survey which my vain sense of self (daemon on shoulder) insisted I should have gotten. My more sane self (head on shoulders) routinely tosses questionaires.

I read the Qs down to 9a and started laughing. Some of the previous Qs were poorly formed, or forward looking without any reference the past and the respondent's awareness of actual agency and change, but that is just ordinary boosterism. But Q9a got the belly laugh.

Q9a. Prediction on attacks on network infrastructure.

At least one devastating attack will occur in the next 10 years on the networked information infrastruture or the country's power grid.

Somewhere on my extended desk is a critical paper by a zoomie on the power grid as a target. I think only VJ and my suffering partner is aware I might be interested in an analytical paper on strategic targeting of national power systems.

The nutshell: The Army Air Corp started targeting power generation and distribution in the metro NY area in the late '30s, to see what a strategic bombing campaign against national civilian infrastructure could accomplish. Results are mixed, from the empirical experiences in the WW2 period, through GW1 and the Yugoslav war, and the conclusion is ... it is wicked difficult, even with lots of expensive planes and many, many fine bombs, and possibly effective by any of several metrics _only_ when the targeted nation is isolated and the campaign is of unlimited duration, as under all other models (and emperical tests) the results are negative.

Only seven percent challenged the model. Another eleven percent disagreed with the "in ten years" bit of the prediction, but fully sixty freaking six clueless percent of the Pew technocratii respondents agreed with the assertion.

The Pew questionaire in this instance is bad scholarship. It promotes an already well answered question (vulnerability) as if it were not answered, and as a side-effect, promotes the presumption that targeting the power generation and distribution capacity of hostile states isn't a waste of finite military and industrial resources. Boeing and its cognates and Bob Dornan and his cognates may benefit, but that wasn't the apparent policy goal.

As for the other part of the question, routers twinkle. We built the net to conduct warfighting command, control, communications and intelligence functions where pervasive network asset loss due to deployment of nuclear weapons was a design constraint. We route around damage. Lots of damage.

Worldcom, Enron and failed switches at 2nd-rate electrical transmission facilities would be less ... fantastic lines of inquiry.

The utility of strategic bombing of civilians ... er ... infrastructure, such as national power systems, has been sold effectively to "technology experts and scholars", with only 7% of the respondents issuing BS alerts.

Since few of my peers have served time where the local war college library was the only alternative to darts and drink, or surfed on waves of bright young things and their operations research thesii for the future of naval warfare, I posted the four tests for measuring the efficacy of strategic bombing of civilians ... er ... infrastructure:

o directly impact on combat forces, or
o cause a reduction in war material production,

resulting in a reduction of military capacity w.r.t. government goals, or

o diminish civilian moral, or
o raise the costs to the political leadership,

resulting in a reduction of government authority w.r.t. military goals.

If you don't think ignorance is expensive, there are a lot of bums drawing well above minimum wage on the "Presidents Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP), its successor CIAO, the NSSG, and various others entities" (the paid pastimes of the NANOG troller, who's prior scholarship involved Y2K preparedness) preparing lists of "vulnerabilities" less useful than an inventory of rabid foxes in upstate New York, not to mention the entire White Shirt Apparatus, who's CyberFooism chief quit out of disgust, and the nice folks at Lockheed et al, who are happy to keep building what the dysfuntional wing of the Iron Triangle gets onto the R&D and procurement budgets.

It is a _lot_ of money, with a 66% plus mind-share among the 'leets. When you meet one, use a clue-by-four. The moronitude of the regime is monotonically increassing.

Posted by EBW at January 12, 2005 08:54 AM | TrackBack