NOSI - Naval Open Source Intelligence: InformationWarfare

Information Warfare - Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.

Michael D'Alessandro — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:57:14 GMT

New York Times - The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

Information Warfare - Cyberspace Barrage Preceded Russian Invasion of Georgia

Michael D'Alessandro — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:39:11 GMT

New York Times - Weeks before physical bombs started falling on Georgia, a security researcher in suburban Massachusetts was watching an attack against the country in cyberspace.

Information Warfare - Playing for keeps

Michael D'Alessandro — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:53:36 GMT

Armed Forces Journal - War game designer extraordinaire Mark Herman writes that computers have permeated everyday life, making even the smallest task quicker and more efficient. The problem is that the efficiencies created by computers are costing us our resilience to rebound from technological disturbances. To counter this, the U.S. military needs to lead more war-game cyber security exercises, not only across the services, but also together with the federal civilian government, critical infrastructure industry sectors and allies.

Information Warfare - Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

Michael D'Alessandro — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:25:56 GMT

New York Times - The Pentagon has cultivated "military analysts" in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration’s wartime performance.

Information Warfare - The Dogs of Web War

Michael D'Alessandro — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 09:22:20 GMT

Air Force - US armed forces face "peer" adversaries in only one area - military cyberspace.

Information Warfare - Why Syria's Air Defenses Failed to Detect Israelis

Michael D'Alessandro — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 10:51:58 GMT

Aviation Week - The big mystery of the recent Israeli strike on Syria is how did the non-stealthy F-15s and F-16s get through the Syrian air defense radars without being detected? Some U.S. officials say they have the answer.

Information Warfare - Web War I: How Europe's Most Wired Country Beat the Botnets

Michael D'Alessandro — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 11:47:11 GMT

Wired - An excellent indepth look at the cyberwar waged against Estonia this spring.

Information Warfare - Arab Media and the Battle for Ideas

Michael D'Alessandro — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 09:54:36 GMT

First Monday - David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, authors of Netwar, write:

As the information age deepens, a globe-circling realm of the mind is being created - the “noosphere” that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin identified 80 years ago. This will increasingly affect the nature of grand strategy and diplomacy. Traditional realpolitik, which ultimately relies on hard (principally military) power, will give way to the rise of noöpolitik (or noöspolitik), which relies on soft (principally ideational) power. This paper reiterates the authors’ views as initially stated in 1999, then adds an update for inclusion in a forthcoming handbook on public diplomacy. One key finding is that non-state actors - unfortunately, especially Al Qaeda and its affiliates - are using the Internet and other new media to practice noöpolitik more effectively than are state actors, such as the U.S. government. Whose story wins - the essence of noöpolitik - is at stake in the worldwide war of ideas

Information Warfare - Arab Media and the Battle for Ideas

Michael D'Alessandro — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:36:55 GMT

Marine Corps Gazette - The author encourages commanders to recognize that the Arab media, such as Al Jazeera, are critical battlefields that have to be shaped as a part of information operations. You have to know that battlefield as well as you do a battlefield of terrain in order to succeed.

Information Warfare - Could US repel a cyberattack?

Michael D'Alessandro — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:18:42 GMT

Christian Science Monitor - Evidence is mounting that cyberwarfare tactics are part of the 21st-century arsenals of powers like Russia and China, yet the United States has not made Internet defenses a major priority.

Information Warfare - War Fears Turn to Cyberspace in Estonia

Michael D'Alessandro — Tue, 29 May 2007 10:38:19 GMT

New York Times - Another look at the cyberwar between Estonia and Russia.

Information Warfare - Newly nasty

Michael D'Alessandro — Fri, 25 May 2007 10:53:54 GMT

Economist - Defences against cyberwarfare are still rudimentary. That's scary.

Information Warfare - Cyber War! - An Interview With John Arquilla

Michael D'Alessandro — Fri, 25 May 2007 10:53:18 GMT

PBS Frontline - A fascinating interview from 2003 to read with the man who coined the term cyber war, especially in light of this month's events in Estonia.

I also recommend the fictional account he wrote in 1998 of the first cyber war...very insightful fiction:
Wired - The Great Cyberwar of 2002.

Information Warfare - CyberWar I - What the Attacks on Estonia Have Taught Us About Online Combat

Michael D'Alessandro — Wed, 23 May 2007 11:38:12 GMT

Slate - An early lessons-learned article on the Russian-Estonia cyberwar.

Information Warfare - Estonia Computers Blitzed, Possibly by the Russians

Michael D'Alessandro — Sun, 20 May 2007 11:31:17 GMT

New York Times - Russia wages the first country-on-country cyberwar, against Estonia.

Washington Post - Cyber Assaults on Estonia Typify a New Battle Tactic.

Information Warfare - Cyber-Mobilization: The New Levée en Masse

Michael D'Alessandro — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 10:03:46 GMT

Parameters - The means and ends of mass mobilization are changing, bypassing the traditional state-centered approach that was the hallmark of the French Revolution and leaving advanced Western democracies merely to react to the results. Today’s dynamic social, economic, and political transitions are as important to war as were the changes at the end of the 18th century that Clausewitz observed. Most important is the 21st century’s levée en masse, a mass networked mobilization that emerges from cyber-space with a direct impact on physical reality. Individually accessible, ordinary networked communications such as personal computers, DVDs, videotapes, and cell phones are altering the nature of human social interaction, thus also affecting the shape and outcome of domestic and international conflict.

Although still in its early stages, this development will not reverse itself and will increasingly influence the conduct of war. From the global spread of Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks, to the rapid evolution of insurgent tactics in Iraq, to the riots in France, and well beyond, the global, non-territorial nature of the information age is having a transformative effect on the broad evolution of conflict, and we are missing it. We are entering the cyber-mobilization era, but our current course consigns us merely to react to its effects.

Information Warfare - Bloodless theories, bloody wars

Michael D'Alessandro — Sat, 20 May 2006 10:48:54 GMT

Armed Forces Journal - Ralph Peters is skeptical about effects-based operations.

Information Warfare - Australia Embraces Net-Centric Warfighting

Michael D'Alessandro — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 10:41:44 GMT

Aviation Week and Space Technology - Australia's top planners began with the search for an airborne radar that could pick out very small targets at great distances. But that vision has made a quantum leap into the esoteric world of network-centric warfare with development of the Wedgetail aircraft.

Information Warfare - Invasion of the Computer Snatchers

Michael D'Alessandro — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:32:07 GMT

Washington Post - Hackers are hijacking thousands of PCs to spy on users, shake down online businesses, steal identities and send millions of pieces of spam. If you think your computer is safe, think again.

Think of the military implications of this...the article documents the activities of civilian hackers...but there would be obvious military applications of these processes.

Information Warfare - Information Battleground

Michael D'Alessandro — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 11:05:44 GMT

Air Force - The Air Force is locked in a global struggle to attack, defend, collect, and manipulate data.

Information Warfare - Digging Deep

Michael D'Alessandro — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 09:47:43 GMT

Sea Power - The use of data mining reportedly helped unmask a terrorist leader months before 9/11, but there are concerns about coordination and privacy.

Information Warfare - The Web as Weapon

Michael D'Alessandro — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 11:20:45 GMT

Washington Post - Abu Musab Zarqawi intertwines action on the ground in Iraq with an impressive propaganda campaign on the Internet.

Information Warfare - Briton Used Internet As His Bully Pulpit

Michael D'Alessandro — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 11:03:04 GMT

Washington Post - "The war is not just a legal war or a military war, but it's an information war and you've got to fight it through the press and the Web as much as anything else...The most effective military jihad these days is to use the Internet to spread your ideas, and to use the power of words."

Information Warfare - Terrorists Turn to the Web as Base of Operations

Michael D'Alessandro — Sun, 07 Aug 2005 09:05:26 GMT

Washington Post - al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace. With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.

Information Warfare - The Blogs of War

Michael D'Alessandro — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 09:24:38 GMT

Wired - On the 21st-century battlefield, the campfire glow comes from a laptop. It's a real-time window on life behind the lines - and suddenly the Pentagon is on the defensive.

Information Warfare - The Network Way of War

Michael D'Alessandro — Sun, 01 May 2005 11:05:09 GMT

Air Force - Data flowing to and from all Air Force elements will cause a dramatic new form of combat.

Information Warfare - U.S. Military's Elite Hacker Crew

Michael D'Alessandro — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 10:29:07 GMT

Wired - A look at the Pentagon's cyberwar capabilities.

Information Warfare - Battle Lessons

Michael D'Alessandro — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 12:47:30 GMT

New Yorker - Junior officers weren't prepared for Iraq. So they're training each other-online.

Information Warfare - The War Inside the Arab Newsroom

Michael D'Alessandro — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 11:46:05 GMT

New York Times Magazine - A fascinating look behind the scenes of the Al Arabiya news channel, and how it compares and contrasts to Al Jazeera. "Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed is trying to turn Al Arabiya into a new kind of Arab news channel, with fewer hostage tapes and more moderate voices. But that's hard to do when his employees aren't sure they want to change, American troops occasionally arrest his reporters and his anchors get personalized death threats from Iraqi insurgents."

Information Warfare - The New Way of Electron War

Michael D'Alessandro — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 10:38:45 GMT

Air Force - A look at how the Navy and Air Force will share the load of electronic warfare in the future.

Information Warfare - Air Warfare in Transition

Michael D'Alessandro — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 10:22:31 GMT

Air Force - Complex combinations of aircraft, sensors, and data links bring dramatic change in combat employment.

Information Warfare - Images of Fighting in Fallujah Compel at Different Levels

Michael D'Alessandro — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 12:19:44 GMT

Washington Post - An example of information warfare in action - Thomas Ricks shows two different sides of what happened to civilians in Fallujah.

Information Warfare - Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War

Michael D'Alessandro — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 12:56:24 GMT

New York Times - A look at the evolution of the battlefield Internet.

Information Warfare - Thinking About Deception

Michael D'Alessandro — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 12:11:17 GMT

Defense and the National Interest - This brief paper discusses the most often asked questions about military deception: What is it? Why do it? How do you measure its impact, or, how do you calculate its contribution to winning? Can you rely on it?