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White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt said that policymakers and others should stop “conflating… cyberwar with cyber-espionage with cybercrime.â€
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According to Mr. Schmidt, securing the information superhighway involves too many factors to be lumped into a single bucket. Resolving online criminality like identity theft should be treated differently than protecting the electric grid from sabotage by foreign powers or online espionage, but war-like rhetoric may threaten the U.S.’s ability to deal with any of these issues effectively, he warned.
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“Words do matter. When we start throwing out these things, like we’re in the midst of a cyber war, or that cyber war is around the corner, there’s a lot of [those things] that don’t actually apply, so we really have to define what it is that we’re talking about.â€
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It was in fact Mr. Schneier who kicked off discussion of the war-like rhetoric, claiming that this is part of a turf war to determine which federal agency would have control over cybersecurity, abetted by “exaggeration and distortion†by a “military industrial complex that does that quite well.â€
“Metaphors matter here,†he added. “All these examples [of online sabotage] aren’t really warfare, but if you call them warfare, a different set of psychological buttons get pushed. To the police, we are citizens to defend. To the military, we are a population to be subdued, or at least to get out of the way and not make trouble.â€
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Mr. Schmidt, the White House cybersecurity coordinator, deplored the “terrible use of the word ‘cyberwar’.â€
Mr. Schneier also asserted that the Department of Defense “won†the turf war over “who’s in charge of national security in cyberspace… the U.S. cyber-command is sort of co-located with the [National Security
AdministrationAgency] and it has the same head.Microsoft’s Mr. Charney noted that the United States “has tried to come up with one over-arching strategy [for securing cyberspace]… but there are really four different ones.†He said that cyber crime, corporate online espionage, online sabotage of national infrastructure, and military espionage online all need to be dealt with separately.
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