WASHINGTON-About a year after the Clinton administration created a special panel in 1996 to assess potential threats to telecom networks and other critical infrastructure, the Pentagon conducted a top secret exercise-code named “Eligible Receiver”-that found national security vulnerability far greater than what the U.S. government previously had acknowledged.
In his new book, The Next World War, author James Adams reports senior U.S. officials were stunned at the degree to which Eligible Receiver exposed wireless and wireline networks, power grids, banking and financial operations and other vital support systems to sabotage.
“Eligible Receiver was a real shock to us all,” a Pentagon official told Adams. “It should have been a wake-up call, but as so few people know the details, I’m not sure who has heard the alarm and what they’re doing about it.”
Adams, a defense journalist who recently resigned as CEO of United Press International to launch a defense consulting firm, said Eligible Receiver proved beyond doubt that an `electronic Pearl Harbor’ was possible.
“It was so easy to do. That’s the frightening thing,” Adams told RCR in a recent telephone interview.
The rise of information warfare, which Adams said began in earnest with the 1991 Persian Gulf War, has implications for government spectrum use in the next century.
Vital communications links, according to Adams’ book, have led some in the U.S. military to “believe that future wars will be fought and won by those who control the electronic spectrum and who can deploy smaller forces packing bigger punches with fewer punches.”
Indeed, the book said operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, among other things, required 7,000 radio frequencies, 1,000 miles of land links, 12 combat communications squadrons and 29 million calls.
Carriers and manufacturers want a huge new swatch of spectrum for third-generation mobile phones, but the Pentagon’s heavy reliance on high-tech in the post-Cold War era could make it difficult to get the agency to surrender any more frequencies to the private sector.
With Eligible Receiver now having leaked out after being kept under wraps by the joint chiefs of staff, the Pentagon appears anxious to draw attention to cyber-attack threats ostensibly in hopes of securing more support from Congress and the private sector.
“Yes, there was an exercise. We need to be increasingly concerned that all segments of society and all key infrastructure are dependent on information and information systems and increasingly vulnerable to attacks on it,” said Susan Hansen, a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Hansen said the Pentagon knows from being hacked itself that “our systems are recognizable targets.”
The harsh and sobering reality of U.S. vulnerability to cyber attacks came out loud and clear in the October 1997 report to President Clinton from Retired Air Force Gen. Robert Marsh, chairman of the Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection.
Since the report’s publication and President Clinton’s critical infrastructure executive order in May, new units have been created in DOD, the FBI, the Justice Department and the Commerce Department to oversee and guard against attacks on the national information infrastructure.
John Hamre, deputy Defense secretary, is the Pentagon’s point man on critical infrastructure protection, while Michael Vatis runs the FBI’s new National Infrastructure Protection Center at its headquarters here.
Richard Clarke, meanwhile, has been tapped national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counter terrorism.
Until now, little attention has been paid to such threats. Indeed, the advice the Network Reliability and Interoperability Council-headed by AT&T Corp. Chairman C. Michael Armstrong-gives to the Federal Communication Commission is limited to technical fixes and prevention against outages.
The private sector is partnering with federal agencies in the fight against cyber attacks, but already there are signs that friction over costs and privacy-the same hot button issues that dominate digital wiretap and encryption debates-will challenge the mission.
In addition, according to Adams, government infighting has accompanied the development of critical infrastructure protection policy.
