WASHINGTON — The Pentagon plans to create a new military command for cyberspace, administration officials said Thursday, stepping up preparations by the armed forces to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare.
Uh-oh.
“We are not comfortable discussing the question of offensive cyber-operations, but we consider cyberspace a war-fighting domain,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “We need to be able to operate within that domain just like on any battlefield, which includes protecting our freedom of movement and preserving our capability to perform in that environment.”
All right, listen up! We’ve got our marching orders. We’re under attack from some kids in Pacoima and we’re going to take them out. Someone ready the Operation Cyber Freedom worm-bomb thingy.
Those little twerps won’t know what hit them! They call themselves Hackers! Hah! We’ll show those mother…uh, sorry, forgot WWL Radio was here doing a story on Cyber Terror and why a new new Pearl Harbor may be necessary to restore order and the rule of law in a territory which is akin to a virtual Wild Wild West shootout at the OK Corral. I didn’t say that out loud and you didn’t hear it from me, but there’s no room for outlaws in a global economy.
Let me tell you something about battlefield strategy, if you can handle it without spitting up a little in your mouth and the importance of protecting one’s freedom of movement within the battle-space. In other words if it’s in your way, you knock it down. And if you want it you go get it. Two kids from Pacoima? Blow-up their computers and send them to reform school prison until they learn the Internet is for shopping and email and not screwing around with proprietary databases. And no that is not on the record hotshot, but there is no difference between the Internet and TV – both are made to sell stuff: Period, end-of-story. If it’s necessary to shut down the Internet in order to protect it from a Cyber911 perpetrated by alien cyber-terrorists and foreign governments, not to mention the occasional electromagnetic coronal mass ejection from the sun, then by gumbo that’s what we’ll do. The military created the Internet; it’s our ball; it’s ours to pick up and take off the field of play unless you play by the rules we say. And that don’t mean it’s a game. This is life and death. Privacy and anonymity are not possible in a cross-dimensional battlespace. All suspects must voluntarily submit to surveillance to demonstrate innocence. To mistrust the government is to make you a conspiracy theorist which makes you insane. We may lie to protect our guilt, but we always have consumers’ best interests at heart. So you don’t have to believe us but you must always trust us or it’s treason.
Now, just because we have a zero-tolerance strategy against privacy doesn’t mean we’re going to be watching your every move. It’s like Lincoln said, “You can watch some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time but you can’t watch all the people all the time.” Which means, come on, we’re only going to watch you after the fact. Post-crime. Not pre-crime. We’ll use your electronic trail to hunt you down when you’re being chased and not a moment before. And when we do catch you, it doesn’t mean we’re going to get all Guantanamo over your ass. America follows the Geneva Conventions except when we don’t which is classified which it should be because otherwise it endangers the troops and private contractors and the whole manufacturing consent project which gets harder and harder the more voices are heard.
We’re not going to torture our enemy anymore to get them to stop making breaches in the hull of our national cyber-security infrastructure, which if you want to know what that means in plain American, it means the security of transactions. In order to maintain the security of state secrets, you’ve got to give up yours. Is that asking too much? Like the UFO geek from England. We don’t want to torture him. That’s not why we want him so bad we’ll stop at nothing to get our hands on him. We don’t want to punish or retribute him. We want to wipe his memory clean through drugs and electroshock, lock him up forever and that is all we’re asking. Space Command is not something we like to talk about or remember even on the holidays. Once you understand everywhere is a battlefield then everything clears up pronto. Where do you think Cheney’s secret bunker was? And you did not hear that from me. So forget about all that, except to say, and this is the final word on the subject, but who do you think is going to clean up all that orbiting debris; all the space junk, huh? And who is going to protect you from killer satellites, huh? Not to mention the alien menace, uh, I mean asteroids, comets, rocks as big as stadiums which you can only see about 5 five minutes before impact. There are all kinds of heroes you’ll never hear about or even imagine they exist. And, like the Space Command, Cyber Command is a land of unsung heroes.
We protect your credit-card information and your financial statements and we follow your every move to insure your safety from enemies known and unknown from within and without, real and virtual, terrestrial and…but you didn’t hear that from me.
Our only mission at Cyber Command is to ensure battlefield supremacy in a war between privacy and security. Privacy means you’ve got something to hide and security means we have a right to know what it is. It’s not rocket science.
The kids in Pacoima are just as dangerous as…well, that would be classified now wouldn’t it potato-head?
Anyway, do you know how many billion barrels of bubbly crude it takes to power the internet each and every day? No one does! Does that sound like sound management practice to you? The Internet is a national security risk. It’s a drain on our energy supply; it exponentiates our carbon footprint and exacerbates our prime directive – Omniscience. Too many open secrets. Too many sock-puppet blabber mouths and chronic contrarians. Not to mention organized crime syndicates, political action committees and FBI Agents posing as pre-teens out for a good time. The internet is not a right but a privilege and you’ve got to give up your anonymity to prove you’re worthy of privacy – it’s that simple. Call it Orwellian if you want; I call it an Imperative.
Now, let’s go scare the hell out of those punks in Pacoima.
