WikiLeaks: ‘Americans are Getting Cyberscrewed’

“Americans are getting cyberscrewed” with no comprehensive plan to prevent it, according to James Carafano, deputy director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

“This is a 24/7/365-until-you-die kind of competition, and the people that are going to thrive and survive … are people that are top-notch cyber-competitors,” Carafano said Nov. 17 at a panel discussion of the threat to U.S. security posed by WikiLeaks, which last month released almost 392,000 classified Iraq war reports.

Carafano was joined by Heritage senior research fellows Lisa Curtis (Asian studies) and James Phillips (Middle Eastern affairs). Helle C. Dale, senior fellow for public diplomacy, moderated.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s goal, Curtis said, is to undermine support for the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan (the subject of WikiLeaks’ previous document dump). But because both wars entail an allied coalition, the leaks endanger our allies’ security as well, including informants on the ground in the theater.

“So the global ramifications of WikiLeaks is something that we need to talk about,” Curtis said.

The leaks put information on our intelligence gathering and battlefield tactics into the hands of the enemy, and erode the trust our allies must have in us in order to share important–but sensitive–intelligence, she said.

“They will now question whether the U.S. is capable of protecting the information that they share,” she said.

Both Curtis and Phillips cautioned against attempting to draw a complete picture of the war efforts from the documents that have been leaked. They are only part of the picture, and context is essential.

“It’s a very blurred picture and to me it looks more like a Rorschach test,” Phillips said.

Phillips said the documents actually reveal some “inconvenient truths” for those who oppose the wars. For example, he said, the reports show the extent of Iran’s involvement in Iraq. The Quds Force, a division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as the Revolutionary Guards more broadly, provide weapons to our enemies. Those weapons include armor piercing ingredients for IEDs and special suicide bomb vests.

Because of the Iranian fingerprints on attacks that have killed Iraqi Shiites in addition to coalition forces, Iran has mostly downplayed the leaks, Phillips said. “The Iranians are very uncomfortable with any conspiracy theories that they’re not actually involved in [promoting],” he said.

Phillips also pointed to the chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq that are mentioned in the leaks. He said those as well as long-range missiles provide more than enough justification for the invasion of Iraq.

“This evidence of chemical munitions provides convincing proof–if any further proof is needed–that refutes the revisionist narrative of the Bush administration fighting an ‘illegal’ war in Iraq,” he said. “The selective morality and self-righteous arrogance of the WikiLeaks crew is breathtaking. But if anything positive comes out of it, I hope that that would be a renewed appreciation for what led to this war.”

Carafano was blunt about the fact that the leaks are a symptom of a more pressing problem, which is the fact that the military’s previous technological advantage has simply been outrun. In the Cold War, he said, the technology that gave the U.S. the advantage was developed by the military.

“That age is over,” he said. “The most cutting edge technology is being developed by the private sector.”

And when the military wants to tap into that software, they are often warned off by the National Security Agency because of the way that new technology–such as smartphone apps–can spring new leaks.

So on the one hand, he said, the military is making the argument that the technology is a threat, “and on the other hand they’re saying: We’re falling further and further behind–my high school kid has better technology than I can give soldiers who are being shot at. This isn’t fair.”

This is also reason to oppose cuts in the military budget, he said, that are often proposed to close the deficit.

“And here you have a military that’s struggling to keep up today and prevent things like WikiLeaks and you’re going to take away 20 or 30 percent of their budget,” he said. “The people that say that–they are every bit as reprehensible as and objectionable, and could care less about your safety and security as those people in WikiLeaks. And the difference is, they’re American citizens.”

But our strategy is still deeply flawed, no matter the funding, he said. The military is not training its recruits to deal with the dangers and challenges posed by new technology, they are not safeguarding the information from within well enough, and most of all they are not giving due focus and attention to cybersecurity and their own technological ingenuity.

“We could face anything along that spectrum: Another loss of material like this, or something that could be next to an electronic Pearl Harbor,” Carafano said. “And I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you how to stop it–and that is to have a government that can compete in cyberspace at least as good as my teenager. And we have a government that’s not there yet.”