The New Space-Based Technology of Intelligence

The commander of US Strategic Command, General Kevin Chilton, told the BBC that U.S. space-based intelligence is playing an "invaluable" role in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What is amazing is that in this day and age, with the full force of the U.S. military establishment and 21st-century technology at its beck and call, the intelligence services still don't have a clue about bin Laden's actual fate or whereabouts (or so we think). The National Reconnaissance Office uses the U.S. spy-satellite system, the BRITE system or Broadcast Request Imagery Technology Experiment, that generates real-time spy-satellite ground photos with resolutions up to four inches, to help lead to the capture of al Qaeda’s leadership. Satellite imagery is used during daylight and clear skies; radar imagery is used for nighttime and cloudy weather. Critics point out, however, that neither provides the ability to distinguish a face or to tell the difference between a bin Laden led caravan or a group of refugees or tribal villagers.

Gen Chilton said US forces had come to rely very heavily on space-based global positioning systems (GPS), precision navigation and communication, including the ability to communicate over the horizon in a country like Afghanistan without an established communications network in place. He said it was invaluable to U.S. and Nato operations to be able to control drones remotely, and to gather and disseminate the information collected to other locations for analysis so that the information can be put to use on the ground.

In Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001, he told the BBC, the U.S. was able to use GPS-guided munitions to enable the Northern Alliance to break out of a position they had been bottled up in for years and advance on horseback before using precision weapons to defeat the Taliban. He said those same types of technologies applied today in trying to counter Taliban infiltration back into Afghanistan.

"We can't imagine not having our computers operating whether it be in a military operation or a commercial operation in our societies today," he told the BBC. "So those dependencies make you look for vulnerabilities because you can anticipate that an adversary will look for vulnerabilities in potential conflict in future. That's one of our charters for Strategic Command, is to try to identify those vulnerabilities and work to mitigate them."

In 2008, operators under his command had seen "intrusions" into Pentagon computer systems which varied from nuisance - possibly caused by a bored 15-year-old - to something more sophisticated, such as espionage by a foreign country.

"We have to look not only at threats that have materialized in the past," said Homeland Security Chief, Michael Chertoff in a speech at the recent RSA security conference in San Francisco. "We have to consider the threats that may materialize in the future. ... We know that a successful large-scale cyber-attack against our country would have very wide-reaching consequences."

Through the Internet, terrorists and criminals can do the kind of damage they could never do on their own, Chertoff said. As an example, he cited the massive denial-of-service attack launched against Estonian government computers last year. "Imagine what would happen if it were possible for hackers to enter the air travel system," he said.

The Estonian cyber-attacks were clearly prompted by the Estonians' relocation of the Soviet second world war memorial on April 27, '07. Ethnic Russians staged protests against the removal, during which 1,300 people were arrested, 100 people were injured, and one person was killed.

A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.

While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the row that erupted over the Estonians' removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, subjected the small nation to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies.

The crisis unleashed a wave of so-called DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, attacks, where websites are suddenly swamped by tens of thousands of visits, jamming and disabling them by overcrowding the bandwidths for the servers running the sites. The attacks have been pouring in from all over the world, but Estonian officials and computer security experts say that, particularly in the early phase, some attackers were identified by their internet addresses - many of which were Russian, and some of which were from Russian state institutions.

Chertoff likened the government's attempt to improve its cybersecurity to the intensive effort of the Manhattan Project that brought the atomic bomb to fruition. In January, President Bush signed an order that gave DHS and the National Security Agency greater power to oversee government computer security. Details about what the agencies are doing remain classified.

"It takes a network to beat a network," said Chertoff. Chertoff characterized cybersecurity as a very serious challenge, one that is likely to grow more serious over time. A network response, he said, is necessary to deal with network attacks.

Though US-CERT, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which provides information necessary to defend the nation's networks, Chertoff hopes to bring additional resources to bear to defend the country's computers.

Chertoff said it's not possible to monitor access to federal networks in real time, not all federal agencies have 24/7 network monitoring capabilities, and US-CERT's Einstein system is too backward looking in that it identifies threats that have already had an impact.

Chertoff said the government simply doesn't respond fast enough across the board. "The time delay is time that we cannot afford to lose in a world where attacks come literally in microseconds and from all corners of the globe," he said.

In keeping with the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, Chertoff aims to reduce the number of network access points into federal agencies from about 1,000 presently to about 50. He called for beefing up the cyberdefenses of federal agencies and making sure that all of them can respond to threats around the clock.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

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