Photo Fwd: Personal information protection 개인 정보 보호

Hankyoreh, Oct. 15, 2010
Personal information protection

Human rights activists put on a performance to voice objections to the revised bill of the Resident Registration Act, submitted by the government to the National Assembly, to adopt an electronic card system of resident registration in front of the Central Government Complex in Seoul, Oct. 14.

They have disputed the government’s plan to adopt a new system, saying, “personal information included in the electronic card will increase and accordingly, the danger of leaking an individual’s personal information will be much greater.”

The Ministry of Public Administration and Safety has made strong moves to push the adoption of electronic card system. The government scrapped the system in 1998 in response to concerns infringement of human rights pertaining information and wasting budget money. 　

South Koreans must enroll in the resident registration system by which a 13-digit number is issued to all Korean nationals. 　

(Photo by Rhee Jong-chan)

Text Fwd: NATO's 21st Century Priorities: Missile Shield, Cyber Warfare 나토의 21세기 우선권은 미사일 방패와 사이버 전쟁이 될 것임

StopNATO on Oct. 15, 2010

Radio Netherlands
October 14, 2010
NATO to lay out vision for cyber, missile defence


NATO defence and foreign ministers meet Thursday to reshape the alliance into a
modern force against cyber and missile threats, at a time of tough fighting in
Afghanistan and budget cuts at home.

The diplomatic and defence chiefs hold a rare joint meeting at NATO headquarters
in Brussels to deliberate on a draft of the "strategic concept" that will lay
out the alliance's vision for the next decade.

The mission statement will then be endorsed by NATO leaders meeting in Lisbon
next month, replacing a document written in 1999, two years before the September
11 attacks on the United States sparked the war in Afghanistan.

"My firm intent is that the Lisbon summit will put in place an alliance that is
more modern, more efficient and better able to work with our partners around the
globe," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said this week.

The 11-page blueprint, drafted by Rasmussen, has not been made public but it is
expected to touch on 21st century threats including cyber attacks, missiles from
"rogue" states, global terrorism and piracy off the Somali coast.

The ministers will also discuss proposals to reform NATO's command structure and
cut the number of agencies, an idea pushed by Rasmussen to make the 28-nation
alliance "leaner and more efficient."

At the same time, Rasmussen and US officials have urged allies to resist cutting
too deeply into their own national defence budgets despite austerity drives
across debt-laden Europe.

"My worry is that the more our allies cut their capabilities, the more people
will look to the United States to cover whatever gaps that are created, at a
time when we're facing" fiscal pressures, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates told
reporters travelling with him to Brussels late Wednesday.

Rasmussen has emphasised that despite tough economic times, allies should invest
in a missile shield amid concerns about the intentions of Iran and North Korea.

The NATO chief also wants allies to invite Russia to cooperate in the
anti-missile shield in order to ease Russian concerns about the aims of the
system.

Gates said there was "broad agreement" on missile defence plans and that the
cost of linking NATO members into a common network was "relatively modest."

Diplomats, however, say France and other nations want more details about how
much the system would cost and how it would work.

© ANP/AFP
===========================
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Text Fwd: NIS prepares to serve as watchtower for cyber crisis

* Image source/ caption: same as the article below
'A National Police Agency official debriefs police officers on cyber security and the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack affecting South Korea, July 27.'

Hankyoreh
NIS prepares to serve as watchtower for cyber crisis
As NIS takes cyber security helm for military and civilian sectors, citizens raise concerns of possible increase in surveillance
Posted on : Sep.14,2009 12:19 KST

The government confirmed Sunday that the National Intelligence Service (NIS) will serve as a control tower for private, public, and military sectors in the event of a cyber crisis.

According to the government’s comprehensive measure relating to monitoring cyber security, when cyber security levels pass ‘normal’ and reach cautionary levels, the NIS is expected to create a countermeasure organization and take control of the situation, analyze it and issue a warning if necessary. Until now, the private sector’s Korean Communication Commission (KCC), the public sector’s NIS, and the military’s Defense Ministry have shouldered responsibility for cyber security in each sector. The distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on July 7 had raised cyber security levels to ‘caution.’

The government has also decided that the KCC will have a role in managing public relations and eliminating zombie PCs. The Defense Ministry plans to integrate members from different units to form a single unit comprised of 500 military service members to deal with cyber affairs.

Meanwhile, concerns remain that the enforced power of the NIS relating to cyber security could mean increased surveillance over the private sector.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]

© 2006 The Hankyoreh Media Company.


* Related article

http://www.spark946.org/bugsboard/index.php?BBS=eng_1&action=viewForm&uid=51&page=1
Citizens against DSC surveillance - 2009.9.7
2009/09/09

Text fwd: COMPASSIONATE EMPIRE - A BIBLICAL LESSON

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2009/06/compassionate-empire.html

Saturday, June 27, 2009
COMPASSIONATE EMPIRE - A BIBLICAL LESSON

Global strike and cyberwarfare - these are two concepts that you'd better get used to hearing as the US military empire moves to expand its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance.

The basic idea of cyberwarfare is that we crawl inside the "offending nation's" computer system and shut down (hack) their ability to see what is happening as we launch "preemptive" attacks on them.

Then using "global strike" weapons like nuclear missiles, the military space plane, and other technologies we hit them hard while they are blind.

All very nice stuff, isn't it? The message is that you'd better do as we tell you and save yourself the grief. That's the compassionate empire in us talking. Very proper like, as they say in the United Kingdom.

This is the stuff new arms races are made of....what self-respecting country is going to stand back and let you develop the ability to push them around and not find a way to respond?

The US says we want to "reset" relations with Russia, we want to see China stop building up its military, we want Korea and Iran to stop building nuclear weapons.

Maybe, as the Bible says, "You hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of your own eye; and then shall you see clearly to cast out the mote out of your brother's eye."

Text Fwd: StratCom and the Domination of (Cyber) Space

* Text informed by Bruce Gagnon on May 15, 2009

By Tim Rinne State Coordinator, Nebraskans for Peace

It seems an unlikely place from which to try to dominate the world…

A remote Air Force base in rural Nebraska, twelve miles south of Omaha. There’s even a cornfield across the road.

But it’s where George Bush was rushed for safekeeping on 9/11. And today, it’s where the White House continues to wage its international ‘War on Terror’ and to pursue its goal of dominating space.

And, as it now turns out… cyber space.

Ten years ago, U.S. Strategic Command was a weapon in search of a foe. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the headquarters for the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal without any real purpose. Things had reached such a dismal state for the Pentagon’s ‘doomsday machine’ that the command’s name was even popping up on some base-closing lists.

But 9/11 changed that. Virtually from the moment President Bush was shuttled to StratCom’s underground command center, its role and mission began to morph.

By the time the first anniversary of the attack rolled around, “U.S. Space Command” had been moved under StratCom’s control. Over the next three years, the command picked up the missions for “Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance,” “Information Operations,” “Full-Spectrum Global Strike” and “Missile Defense” (a misnomer if there ever was one, given it’s offensive capability). In 2005, “Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction” was added to its mission quiver. And finally, in 2007, it was given the hazily defined task of “Cyberspace.”

In the space of five years, the command had gone from just one mission (its half-century-long responsibility of “Nuclear Deterrence”) to a total of eight. It had gone from being nominally defensive to offensive: from being a purported weapon of last resort that hopefully would ‘never be used’—to ‘being used for everything.’ If before, Strategic Command had represented an end-of-the-world nightmare straight out of “Dr. Strangelove,” this ‘New StratCom’ (with now conventional as well as nuclear war-fighting powers) was ‘Dr. Strangelove on steroids.’ Never in the history of the world had there been a military instrument of such power and global reach.

In testimony before Congress in February 2008, the current StratCom Commander (four-star Air Force General and former astronaut Kevin Chilton) went so far as to suggest that the name actually be changed from “Strategic Command” to “Global Command” to better reflect the scope and nature of the command’s new duties.

If what these eight missions have in common, though, is their ‘global’ scope and nature, what knits them together is ‘space.’

Fifteen years ago—during the Clinton Administration—the Pentagon began systematically ‘wiring’ the U.S.’s entire military infrastructure around the use of space technology. Today, space has become medium through which the U.S. now wages war, whether we’re talking satellite-guided drones piloted from a trailer 7,000 miles away or foot soldiers on the frontlines in Afghanistan.

And U.S. Strategic Command—as the mission agent for space—has become the linchpin for virtually every military action the U.S. now undertakes.

As the chair of the Colorado Springs-based “Space Foundation” bluntly expressed it at the “Strategic Space and Defense 2006” conference in Omaha, “StratCom is a laboratory for the future of warfare.”

Right this instant, StratCom is flying those Predator and Reaper drones over Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s in charge of the missile ‘defense’ installations proposed for Poland and the Czech Republic. Through its “Component Command” of the National Security Agency (NSA), StratCom is eavesdropping on our phone calls, monitoring our emails and textings and tracking our financial activities. It’s shooting down errant satellites, lobbying for new generations of nuclear weapons and actively planning the next war—whether against so-called ‘rogue states’ like Iran and North Korea or a geo-political rival like China. With a simple ‘go-ahead’ from the White House, StratCom is now authorized to attack any place on the face of the earth in one hour—using either conventional or nuclear weapons—on the mere suspicion of a threat to the U.S. national interests…

Sixty minutes from now, StratCom could have started the next war, and the first Congress would hear about it would be on CNN.

Unlikely as it sounds, the military command center for America’s global empire is buried out on the Nebraska prairie six stories down. It’s from here that the U.S. flexes its global muscle and seeks to enforce its will. And it’s why we say that StratCom is the most dangerous place on the face of the earth.

But there’s an Achilles heel in this imperial design, for which StratCom acts as the hub.

Strategically, the U.S. has pursued a policy of space dominance because space is the ultimate ‘high ground.’ Whoever controls space can control the earth beneath.

As StratCom is quickly discovering, however—in today’s world—to ‘control space’ you also have to be able to control ‘cyberspace.’ If you can’t protect your space assets and communication network from cyber attack, you can’t control space.

And to hear Commander Chilton tell it, at present, the U.S. can’t.

The most powerful war machine ever assembled is vulnerable—not from incoming ICBMs, some looming chemical-biological attack or a terrorist insurgency—but from hackers. Nowadays, enemies and rivals don’t need to match the U.S.’s $740 billion annual military budget to be a viable threat. They just need a good computer.

And the specter of an attack that could hack into military battlefield systems or blind aerospace defense networks is now haunting StratCom and Pentagon officials’ sleep.

In an interview with reporters on May 8, 2009, Chilton disclosed that the Pentagon’s unclassified networks are probed thousands of times a day, as hackers try to steal information on military programs or planning. And the number of intrusions is on the rise. “I worry,” he said, “when I see important information is taken from our networks.”

The Pentagon itself disclosed in April that it had spent more than $100 million in just the last six months responding to and repairing damage from cyber attacks and other computer network problems.

But the military information ‘grid’ is just half of the problem.

The civilian information grid is equally at risk.

Former Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, warned last year that “the ability to threaten the U.S. money supply is the equivalent of today’s nuclear weapon.” A successful attack on a single large U.S. bank, he said, would have an “order-of-magnitude greater impact on the global economy” than the attacks of 9/11. Earlier this spring, the National Intelligence Director (NID) reported that it had evidence that the electrical grid itself had been compromised. “Do I worry about those grids, and about air traffic control systems, water supply systems and so on? You bet I do,” said Joel Brenner, who oversees counter-intelligence operation for the NID office.

In response, StratCom has come out swinging.

Commander Chilton asserted in his interview that the U.S. would consider using military force against an enemy who attacks and disrupts the nation’s critical networks. “A good defense also depends on a good offense” he told a reporter with the AP. “‘I don’t think you take anything off the table when you provide options’ to the defense secretary or president, in the wake of an attack, whether the weapon is a missile or a computer program.”

At this point though, StratCom’s “Cyber Command” is more virtual than real. Although the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, has been proposed as the new command’s new home (and its director, Air Force General and StratCom Component Commander Keith Alexander, as the new head of operations), Secretary of Defense Robert Gates hasn’t yet given his approval and no timeline has been set.

That will change. Soon.

With the Pentagon having put all its network eggs in the basket of space, no expense will be spared to seek to gain dominance in cyberspace (just as none was spared to dominate space).

Count on StratCom, accordingly, becoming bigger, more powerful and even quicker on the trigger.

And expect the command center for the U.S. military empire to be in Nebraska for a long time to come.
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Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
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