STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Building the Private Warfare State
By Staff News & Analysis - May 01, 2012

Top FBI cyber-cop joins spy thwarting startup … Veteran FBI cyber security expert Shawn Henry on Wednesday said he is fighting the enemy on a new front by joining a startup out to protect firms from online spies. After 24 years of working for the FBI, Henry has switched to the private sector as the head of a CrowdStrike division specializing in cyber attack incident responses and identifying adversaries. "I've been saying that the private sector could be filling the Internet security void that the government hasn't been filling," Henry told AFP. "Now I can do something," he continued. "CrowdStrike was going to do everything I said we should be doing." Former McAfee chief technical officer George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, who has researched major cyber espionage operations, had operated CrowdStrike in "stealth mode" until early this year. The startup got $26 million in backing from global private equity firm Warburg Pincus. – Inquirer Technology

Dominant Social Theme: As the cyberwar heats up, the private sector needs protection …

Free-Market Analysis: What we call the Internet Reformation has given us a good perspective on how the West's military-intel-industrial complex foments conflicts and then monetizes them.

We've watched the efflorescence of the "long war" in Africa and the Middle East – supposedly spawned by "terrorists" who attacked the World Trade Towers.

Most recently, Osama bin Laden, supposedly the lead terrorist in the Western war on terror, is said to have been killed in his compound. Along with much of the rest of the alternative media, we have questioned this scenario, though whatever really did happen is still being obscured by the US's official position that to release any definitive evidence about the "killing" will harm national security.

We tend to believe that it is the military-industrial complex itself that is helping foment these wars and has a fixation on their longevity and even on their expansion. But now the formal wars are diminishing a bit as a result of budgetary restraints.

But this does not mean the mechanism itself will whither. We've already tracked the putative rise of mercenary activities in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now we would believe that the private sector itself is starting to be put on a war footing. This article, excerpted above, begins to explain just what's going on and how it occurs. Here's some more:

Relentless waves of cyber attacks that appeared to be the work of states inspired the researchers come up with a different way of taking on the threat. "Most companies are focused on detecting malware, and there are millions of pieces of that, with new ones coming all the time," Kurtz told AFP in a recent interview.

"It really is akin to focusing on the bullets in the gun as opposed to the shooter… We think most companies have an adversary problem, not a malware problem." CrowdStrike is building tools to figure out who is behind attacks, how they move after invading systems and what they are out to steal or accomplish, according to the researchers.

"You can't know how best to fight a war without knowing who the enemy is, and it is the same thing in cyber space," Alperovitch said, describing China and Russia as the most prominent threats. CrowdStrike plans to have a security product to market in the second half of this year.

Does it have to be this way? Conflict, in fact, is utilized by the powers-that-be to create militarized command-and-control societies. If the private sector is increasingly pulled into so-called cyber wars, then this militarization shall increase apace.

We are not so sure that China and Russia shall engage in full-out cyber war against the US and Europe and the private sector – but we are certain that such a state of affairs will be presented as reality.

We are increasingly of the opinion that such threats, while perhaps real, are also increasingly manufactured. We increasingly even have doubts about the Cold War itself.

After Thoughts

The power elite likes to control "both sides" of whatever conflict is taking place. But there is no reason why such potentially manufactured conflicts should be restricted to the public sector. The private sector may be developed as a battleground as well.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
loading
Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap