LITERATURE
A Review of David Sanger’s “The Perfect Weapon.
War, Sabotage & Fear in the Cyber Age”
by Dennis Slater, MD
Something is bugging me. My aversion to the telephone began in
elementary school. I would sit directly in front of my first-grade
teacher, the young and beautiful Mrs. Sheffield, and stare up her
dress. I had no clue as to why I was compelled to do this, but I knew
it was naughty. Accordingly, I dreaded the prospect of a telephone
call to my parents, exposing my miscreant behavior. I feared the
phone. As a teenager, I sensed an addiction among my family and
friends to the telephone. Whenever it rang, someone sprang to
answer it. To assert control, I would suppress my curiosity and
simply not answer it. Needless to say, I view the iPhone as the
epitome of compulsion. “No sidebar conversations during business
meetings” is the rule, but everyone is furtively eyeing their iPhones.
Chalk up the first-grade fear to survival instinct, the teenage bit to
adolescent rebellion, and now my adult behavior to general luddite
proclivities, something is still bugging me.
In “The Perfect Weapon. War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber
Age”, David E. Sanger, the New York Times National Security
Correspondent, has written a primer for the public at large on the
constructive and destructive forces related to modern information
technology. During the reading I blissfully recalled Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, a San Francisco beatnik poet in the 1950s, who
imagined a world in which “computers watch over us with loving
grace”. Microsoft, Google and Facebook innocently believed that
free and unfettered access to information would democratize the
world. In reality, computer access to information has a distinctly
darker side.
Cyber warfare represents manipulating digitalized information
to disrupt military and civilian life. Sanger portrays the cast of
characters in the epic struggle for secret information – some good,
some bad, some ugly.
The Good Guys – the National Security Agency (NSA) and the
Israelis created the “Stuxnet” worm which toggled Iran’s uranium
enriching centrifuges, and stalled their nuclear ambitions. The NSA
“Left of Launch Program” scuttled North Korea’s Musudan missile
launches in 2016.
The Bad Guys – Vladimir Putin, the Russian GRU and their “Cozy
Bears” and “Fancy Bears” hackers sabotaged US social media
with misinformation to undermine democratic norms. The Russians’
“NotPetya” cyberattack on the Ukrainian electric grid in 2017
paralyzed the country. The North Koreans’ “WannaCry” cyberattack
on Microsoft software in 2016 disrupted hospitals and other civilian
services globally.
The Ugly Guys – Edward Snowden, a contractor working at a
National Security Agency (NSA) outpost in Hawaii, captured a
trove of top secret documents with a $100 “web crawler”, and
disseminated the information worldwide. This constituted the
most egregious breach of national security in U.S. history, exposing
spies and spy programs, weapon systems and military strategies.
Snowden, hero or traitor, is a self-professed patriot. He claimed to
be protecting US citizens from an obtrusive government. He now
resides in Moscow under the protection of the Kremlin.
Cyber war is best understood as a crucial first step in modern
warfare with the objective of dismantling military communications
and civilian infrastructure. Legions of scientists, engineers and
professional hackers are employed by the NSA (US), CUHQ (Britain),
GRU (Russia), Iran and North Korea spy agencies to outwit their
perceived enemies. Sanger makes a concerted effort to show the
dangers of unfettered cyber warfare and the need for international
players to establish rules of engagement. This is analogous to
atomic weapons and Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) which
formed the foundation of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT)
in the Reagan-Gorbachev era.
There is an even more pernicious issue associated with modern
information technology and cyber warfare, just touched upon
by Sanger – the invasion of privacy and the threat to civil liberty.
The recent exposure of the Russian misinformation campaign
to influence the 2016 election, indisputable by anyone except
the American president and his devotees, is a graphic example
of cyberwarfare subverting democracy. Which brings me back
to what’s bugging me – EPIC at the workplace. It is not just the
unwieldly input, the loss of time and efficiency, the inherent
inaccuracies with click and go order sets, and the collection and
potential sale of data without consent. It is the annoying sense that
you are being constantly watched.
And we physicians have been suckered into entering our
professional data free of charge!
Put David Sanger’s book on your summer reading list alongside
George Orwell’s “1984” and you too will get a good glimpse of the
cyber underworld and be forever ill at ease. Have a good day! n
FALL 2018 35