I've started seeing TV ads for the United States Marine Corps again lately.
USMC ads are always pretty tough: Some young knight pulls a sword, Excalibur-style, from a rock and slays a dragon with one stroke — then finds himself transformed by a blast of lightning into a Marine, standing at attention in full dress blues. They must be pretty effective at recruiting tough guys; I just wonder how they're going to pull in the nerds.
What's that, you ask? Why would we want nerds in the Marine Corps?
Shame on you. Today's military, and tomorrow's wars, are fast becoming a whole new ballgame — one tailor-made for a new type of soldier. If you don't believe me, go ask President Clinton.
In his address to the 1998 graduating class at the Naval Academy in Annapolis it was technology — and not tactics — on the President's mind. "Technology is not always a force for good," hesaid, referring to recent nuclear weapons tests in India.
The technology that occupied him for much of the rest of his speech was far more commonplace than nuclear warheads, however. Clinton's concern was the computer, and the arrival of the age of the global computer network. It was here, he felt — in cyberspace — that we would find our next battlefields.
The stakes are high in the modern, wired world. Just last May, the General Accounting Office published two reports on the security of key government computer facilities.
One spoke of vulnerabilities in the State Department's public computer system that would make it easy prey to malicious hackers. The other described similar weaknesses in the computers the Federal Aviation Administration uses to prevent midair collisions. With a little know-how and a minimum of inside information, security flaws such as these could be used in the commission of a whole new kind of terrorism — no bombs required.
Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tennessee) agrees. "We, as a nation, cannot wait for the Pearl Harbor of the Information Age," he told reporters.
But where will we find the men and women capable of defending our nation against this new kind of attack? John Wayne may have made a fine spokesman for the Green Berets, but his slow drawl doesn't exactly speak of the kind of technical acumen needed to secure a critical government computer network. For the first time, our nation's defense forces may be in the position of looking for a few good nerds.
Or so it seemed on May 19 of this year, when Thompson and the Senate Government Affairs Committee met with a most unlikely group of advisers on national security, in the form of seven young men from an organization calling itself L0pht Heavy Industries (pronounced "loft").
A self-described "hacker think tank," for several years the L0pht members had routinely devoted their time to finding ways to circumvent the security of the computer systems they encountered, some quite sensitive. Their testimony to the committee would come as a wake-up call to the guardians of the national infrastructure.
According to one L0pht hacker, identified only as "Mudge," any one of their group would be capable of singlehandedly disrupting Internet service to the entire country. Furthermore, they could achieve this objective in less than 30 minutes — while the effects could last as long as two days.
The hackers went on to describe a number of other ways in which an enemy could attack the United States across the computer networks. Since such a wide array of essential services is now controlled or coordinated by computers, they explained, a skilled and well-informed attacker could find numerous avenues to exploit.
Almost any public facility — from telephone networks, to power plants, to hospitals — could find itself victim of a crippling assault by terrorists or enemy nations who employ hackers for their objectives.
Could we, as a nation, really be so vulnerable as the testimony of the L0pht hackers seems to indicate? It's tempting to dismiss their statements as mere hacker bravado. Still, recent events — such as the misaligned satellite that disrupted pager communications nationwide — seem to substantiate their claims. The most complex system is only as strong as its weakest link, and it's at these weak links that we can expect our enemies to strike.
Don't think the Federal Government doesn't realize it, either. In 1996, Clinton created a Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, with the express purpose of identifying and responding to these new types of threats.
The FBI also operates two special divisions dedicated to the problem: the National Computer Crime Squad, and the "InfraGard" infrastructure protection unit. Ultimately, the administration's goal is to reach a partnership between government and private industry to create a truly effective defense.
All that remains is to find and recruit the talented individuals who will become our nation's new line of defense. And since the United States still leads the world in computer technology, this shouldn't be too difficult.
Still, imagery of dragon-slaying swords and knighthood are probably not the best marketing tactics for attracting bookish young cybersoldiers-in-the-making. To enlist the nerds into the service of their country, a different angle is called for — something to do with Gillian Anderson, perhaps?
Conveniently, Mountain Dew cans are already colored green.
