Decoding the new information war
- By Heiko Khoo
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E-mail China.org.cn, June 18, 2013
In 1961 U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist."
We now live in the era of the military-information complex. The parameters between the military-surveillance state and the world's largest Internet corporations are non-existent. From the standpoint of the U.S. state they serve a dual purpose. They are strategic national corporations and part of the everyday societal system of circulation and they are a means of monitoring and controlling people at home and abroad. The art of the NSA is to use this infinite source of human interaction to mine whatever data it wants and identify courses of action which enhance "national power." This, by chance, includes enhancing the power of its Internet allies!
Specialists in U.S. cyber war theory constantly harp on about the China cyber threat. They warn of China's growing capability to fight battles on the information front. For example, Colonel Jayson Spade's thesis, "China Cyber Power and America's National Security" draws an ominous picture of China's plots to access U.S. data, or to implant back-door bugs to access information from U.S. companies. He cites from China's National Defense 2008, which identifies China's primary objectives as "defusing crises," and "deterring conflicts and war." Our brilliant Colonel Spade sees these objectives as hostile to U.S. interests!
He warns that Chinese state entities try to get what they can out of joint ventures. They acquire knowledge from trade and investment, and set up cyber militias as the basis of Peoples' War in the Information Age. Paradoxically, it is now perfectly reasonable to conclude that China's restrictions on access to such websites as Facebook, Google and Yahoo have prevented, or at least hindered, U.S. espionage against China on a colossal scale. Yet hacking was precisely what China hawks in the U.S. kept squawking on about for years!
Global alternatives to capitalist visions of the Internet are required. We need a vision in which personal data is personal property, innovation and invention are collective property and the Internet will serve as the basis of the communications infrastructure of communism, which Marx described as the free association of producers and consumers.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://china.org.cn/opinion/heikokhoo.htm
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