US fears web attacks
13 February 2001

Could bearded cyber-punks Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden have the edge over the Pentagon? Washington is worried

Gone are the relative certainties of the Cold War, as the Bush administration confronts the more insidious threats of an electronic age. US fears are centring on potential cyber attacks from what it considers its most dangerous enemies - Cuba and Osama bin Laden.

Hostility with Cuba may not be of an overt military nature any more, but tension across the web is developing. The fear is that Cuba may be preparing a cyber attack on US infrastructure, an offensive led by 74-year-old dictator Fidel Castro.

Admiral Tom Wilson head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency says that Castro's army could start an "information warfare or computer network attack" that could "disrupt our military". Wilson was speaking before the Senate Intelligence Committee during a public hearing on 7 February 2001, which went on to discuss classified material behind closed doors.

Responding to a question concerning Cuba's capability for cyber warfare Wilson said "there's certainly the potential for them to employ those kind of tactics against our modern and superior military". He said Castro's conventional military strength is lacking but there is substantial intelligence capability at his disposal for "asymmetric" attacks – a US official euphemism for terrorism.

"Cuba is not a strong conventional military threat. But their ability to ploy asymmetric tactics against our military superiority would be significant. They have strong intelligence apparatus, good security and the potential to disrupt our military through asymmetric tactics."

The hearing was part of the annual World Threat Assessment Discussion, an opportunity for the Senate Intelligence Committee to set an agenda for the current Congress session and to gather information about the latest security threats.

Chairman of the committee, Republican senator Richard Shelby, said the private discussion would "explore the challenges posed by among others the proliferation of encryption technology, the increasing sophistication of denial and deception techniques, the need to modernise the National Security Agency (NSA) and other shortfalls in intelligence funding."

Turning its attention to dangers posed by terrorists using encryption technology, the committee urged careful monitoring of rogue groups. CIA director George Tenet said individuals such as Osama bin Laden – the man alleged to have been behind the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa - are using the internet to cloak communications within their organisations. "You recruit people on internet sites and you use encryption," Tenet said. "You move your operational planning and judgements over internet sites' use of encryption. You raise money."

Bin Laden inspires particular alarm in the US. National Security Agency chief Mike Hayden says his own organisation is "behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution", which bin Laden is able to exploit. Hayden blamed this gap for the US's failure to prevent the 1998 embassy attacks, which killed 224 people. Four men are on trial for the bombing in the US.

In an interview with American TV news programme "60 minutes II", Hayden said the NSA had not adapted to the post Cold War world. "This is about an agency that's grown up in one world and now finds itself in another world and it's got to change if it hope to succeed in that world," he said.

The NSA has also suffered image problems. Hayden admitted his agency had been shut down for several days in January 2000 due to computer failures. Its also the butt of widespread lampooning. As one of the most secretive of government bodies, a Washington joke has it that the acronym stands for "no such agency".


Source: Kable's Electronic Government International