David J. Williams

Two interesting headlines today:

-Kyrgyzstan under cyberattack:  Details are sketchy, but Russian hackers appear to have knocked Kyrgyzstan entirely off the Internet, engaging in the same DDoS attacks that they deployed in Estonia and Georgia. As of last night, the American air base in Kyrgyzstan was no longer receiving emails, which is presumably the point, given that the U.S. and Russia are jockeying for position/negotiating in Central Asia as the U.S. tries to secure supply lines into Afghanistan that don’t involve Pakistan.  Regardless of the extent of the attack, geography dictates that Russia has the upper hand here, and this is their way of reminding the U.S. of that fact.

-Iran launches satellite:  As Danger Room is quick to point out, the details need to be taken with a grain of salt, as Iran scores high on the Bullshit Meter vis-a-vis anything involving missile capabilities.  Nonetheless, the satellite is being tracked even as I write this, meaning that Iran’s weapons are on the verge of global reach. The targeting problem will be a lot trickier, but in the meantime:  score one for the Persians.  Xerxes would be proud.

With the invasion of Georgia, Russia has signaled that reports of her demise are greatly exaggerated, and more than a little premature. Thanks in part to the U.S. being mired in an endless Middle Eastern war, Russia is in a position to define a sphere of influence, and operate within it with impunity. Many are focusing on the legalisms involved: in particularly, how the secession of Kosovo from Serbia opened up the door for Russia to play the same game in South Ossetia/Georgia. But the truth of the matter is that U.S. moves in eastern Europe (in particular the prospect of U.S. missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic) meant that Russia has been backed into a corner. Now we see her response.

And we’re also getting a glimpse of the new face of warfare. Even as the tanks started to roll, it became evident that Georgia was under massive cyberattack; now the New York Times has reported that this online incursion (or rehearsals for it) commenced last month. The NYT calls this the “first time that a known cyberattack has coincided with a shooting war”, which I find strange, as there’s more than a little evidence that the U.S. did the same thing in its assault on Iraq in 2003 (and if they didn’t, then they were fools not to).  At any rate, it won’t be the last.

But the exact contours of this new type of war will take some while to play out.  As with space warfare, the topography of cyberwarfare remains relatively undefined.  A fascinating article in Wired pointed out how some countries are cyberlocked:  just as a landlocked country has no access to the sea, cyberlocked countries rely to too great an extent on nearby countries for their access to the net.  (In this case, Georgia is dependent to an alarming degree on Russia infrastructure.)  The road from here to THE MIRRORED HEAVENS (in which the World Wide Net actually sunders along geopolitical lines) remains a long one, but I think we’re starting to see the first signs of it.

And meanwhile Georgia had better pray the cease-fire holds.  Vladimir Putin may not use computers, but he’s pretty good at employing people who do.