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Globalization, General Analysis: Role of NGOs
Wired For Warfare
Rebels and dissenters are using the power of the Net
to harass and attack their more powerful foesBy Tim McGirk
Time Magazine
Vol. 154, No. 15
Special Report The Communications Revolution/ Languages of Technology
October 11, 1999
In the Chiapas jungles of southern Mexico during the mid-1990s, Zapatista guerrillas--fighting for the rights of Mayan peasants--evolved a new method of conflict: "cyberwar." A mode of battle that involves the Internet and other forms of telecommunication, cyberwar, or Netwar, is employed with increasing frequency by rebels, terrorists and governments around the world. A Netwar can be pure propaganda, recognition that modern conflicts are won as much by capturing headlines as by capturing territory. But a Netwar can have more dangerous applications when computer viruses or electronic jamming are used to disable an enemy's defenses, as both Serb and NATO hackers proved in Kosovo by unleashing barrages of propaganda and attempting to bring down each others' telecommunications systems.
When they rebelled in 1994, the poorly armed Zapatistas were no match for the Mexican army in Chiapas. But their spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, is an agile media manipulator. A renegade college professor who hides his face in a ski mask, Marcos titled his Ph.D. dissertation The Power of the Word. In the battle for public sympathy, he knows his laptop is a more effective weapon than an AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle. Using a network of universities, churches and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada--all linked through the Internet--Marcos mobilized international pressure to make the government cease its assaults against the Zapatistas. When the Mexican army declared in December 1994 that it had surrounded the 12,000 rebels, Marcos dispatched news that the Zapatistas had slipped out of the trap and conquered dozens of villages. It wasn't true, but according to cyberwar specialists the Zapatistas' disinformation campaign caused enough confusion to help touch off a run on the peso, plunging Mexico into recession.
The Zapatistas' tactics also attracted the attention of military strategists. The U.S. Army, for one, sponsored a 1998 study on the group's tactics by the Rand think-tank. "Marcos is not a computer geek," says John Arquilla, a defense information expert at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and co-author of the Rand report The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico. "He's more committed to the idea of info revolution."
That revolution is spreading. These days missiles are not only tipped with warheads but with video cameras; television and radio deliver war news as it happens; and alleged eyewitness accounts of battles and massacres appear on the Internet, quickly finding their way into other media. What matters in today's combat, says Arquilla, "is whose story wins." Not surprising, then, that 12 of the 30 terrorist organizations identified by the U.S. State Department have their own websites. Armies are also entering this digital arena. Sweden's leading military college recently graduated several infowar specialists, and the American military academy West Point is expected to add cybercombat to its curriculum.
In Netwar, governments are often at a disadvantage against rebel groups or terrorists. Since they are hierarchies, governments are digital sitting ducks, easy prey for electronic attacks. Groups like the Zapatistas and Burmese dissidents fighting the military regime in Rangoon, on the other hand, use swarms of loosely organized "hacktivists" to strike at governmental computer networks. The hackers strike, then swiftly disperse into cyberspace. The rebels' electronic battle station is seldom inside the country they are targeting, and tracing it back through the Net can be like trying to find the door in a hall of mirrors. The Zapatistas' first websites, for example, were based in the U.S., while Colombia's Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) guerrillas are in Europe, and Serb Net propagandists relied on sympathizers in Eastern Europe during the Kosovo crisis.
One of the most novel weapons in the Zapatistas' digital arsenal is the Electronic Disturbance Theater, which operates out of New York City. These Net activists specialize in virtual sit-ins. Using a JavaScript tool called FloodNet, the group organizes thousands of online protesters to invade a Mexican government website with up to 600,000 hits a minute, normally bringing it to a grinding halt. "We're not into blowing people up or hacking sites," says one of the Theater's founders, Ricardo Dominguez. "We just want to create a small force field that will disturb the pace of power." He predicts that soon peasant farmers in Chiapas will be able to protect themselves from assaults by security forces with "wireless video uploads" that can secretly record incidents of police or army brutality and transmit live on the Internet. According to Dominguez, this would enable viewers to circulate the faces and badge numbers of assailants to human rights groups.
The art of Netwar is rapidly advancing. Cyberwar is "in its early stages," says the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School's Arquilla, "but it's the harbinger of a new kind of warfare." According to Dorothy Denning, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, the Kosovo conflict was "the first war fought on the Internet."
Air strikes targeted television and radio stations controlled by the Serbs, but NATO deliberately spared the four Internet servers in Yugoslavia from its bombardments. The aim was to let Yugoslavs tap into news on the conflict free from Serb censorship. But this ploy backfired. The Yugoslav government seized control of the servers and used them to pour out pro-Serb propaganda. Their aim, nearly successful, was to weaken the resolve of NATO countries.
No challenge to NATO's domination of the skies, the Serbs held their own in the Internet trenches. Serb hackers also used the servers and satellite links left intact by NATO to break into government and industry computers belonging to members of the alliance, disrupting services and defacing websites. NATO hackers did the same to Serb sites. Serb computer experts also lobbed "e-mail bombs" at U.S. government facilities, clogging the systems.
Digital sabotage is rife in Asia, too. In the week after the results of East Timor's referendum on independence were announced, the Department of Foreign Affairs received hundreds of e-mail "letter bombs" designed to disable government computers. "Without a firewall, [the e-mail] would have contaminated the system," says a source within the department. In Taiwan and China, supporters and opponents of Taiwan's bid for statehood regularly hack into and deface each other's websites.
Some Netwar experts concede the limitations of this kind of combat. Jamming governmental websites may be a nuisance to the Mexicans, for example, but it is unlikely to scare the administration into surrendering to the Zapatistas. Nevertheless, argues Georgetown's Denning, "An electronic petition with a million signatures may influence policy more than an attack that disrupts emergency services."
Others, like Zapatista activist Dominguez, view cyberwar as a more civilized alternative to blood-and-guts fighting. "I'd much rather see extremists take down an Internet server than go around killing people," he says. For the Zapatistas, fighting a Netwar may have saved them from extermination, winning the rebels widespread international support. Marcos often compares himself to the cartoon character Speedy Gonzalez. Like this quick-witted mouse, Marcos used the Internet to run rings around his bigger foes. His comrades in other countries may well follow his lead.
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