Pentagon's Online Habits Render US Weapons Info Highly Vulnerable
The Pentagon's longstanding practice of connecting networks, equipment, and weapons to the open Internet has unintentionally created major vulnerabilities throughout the Defense Department.
The strategy was supposed to facilitate the collection of performance data to help design new weapons and monitor equipment remotely, among other benefits. Instead, it has jeopardized Pentagon networks and much of what the defense industry has developed over several decades.
Phi Beta Iota: Winn Schwartau, Robert Steele, many others — including four Air War College teams looking at financial, power, natural gas, and one other major system — sounded the alarm of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems being connected to the Internet, and did so in the early 1990's. NO ONE WANTED TO LISTEN. The lack of intelligence and integrity on this matter within the US Government, going back to 1988, has been reprehensible. Even today, as token efforts are made to entertain reforms, the entrenched bureaucracies and the entrenched lobbyists refuse to be serious about the basics. Add to this the total vulnerability of US satellites to Chinese lasers, and you have a US military that could be rendered deaf, dumb, and blind on the battlefield — to include the loss of all geopositioning data feeding those cute little military Garmins (we don't do hard copy combat charts anymore).
See Especially:
Robert Garigue & Robert Steele: From Old IO to New IO
See Also:
Cyber-Security @ Phi Beta Iota
Information War @ Phi Beta Iota
Robert Garigue @ Phi Beta Iota
Winn Schwartau @ Phi Beta Iota
