http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/08/california-farm.html
By Kevin Poulsen
August 29, 2007
Politicos in California's rural Central Valley are lobbying to bring the
Air Force's elite Cyber Command to nearby Beale Air Force Base, where it
will boost the local economy with its environmentally-friendly form of
war.
The 25,000-person Cyber Command is currently headquartered at Barksdale
AFB in Louisiana, but it's looking for a new home. Candidates include
Offutt AFB, near Omaha, Nebraska, and Lackland AFB outside San Antonio,
Texas.
But politicians and community leaders in and around Yuba County,
California say the sunshine state is the logical place to locate the
Future of Warfare ... in part because cyber war is "green." From the
Sacramento Bee [1]:
John Nicoletti, Yuba County supervisor, said Beale's pitch is
especially attractive because the Cyber Command won't create
pollution on the scale of more traditional military operations.
"This is a green industry," Nicoletti said. "We're not talking about
airplanes and solvents."
This is, of course, appalling. A quick check of the cyberwar doomsday
map [2] reveals that Beale AFB is just 140 miles northeast of THREAT
LEVEL headquarters in San Francisco. In other words, California managed
to navigate the entire cold war without hosting a single nuclear missile
silo on its fertile soil, and now Yuba wants to position Cyber Ground
Zero upwind from the second most populous city on the west coast.
Thanks guys. We'll see how "green" you think cyber war is when your
organic farms and windmill fields are slammed with deadly DDoS packets
in a ruthless Chinese first strike -- the impact of which will be as bad
as the worst natural disaster in U.S. history (two years ago this week).
From the same article:
Sami Saydjari, executive director of the nonprofit Cyber Defense
Agency said the Cyber Command is being created to protect U.S.
government and business networks from the type of attack Estonia
suffered earlier this year.
Over three weeks, an onslaught of "denial-of-service" messages --
originating from Russian computers -- crippled electronic networks
used by the Estonian government, banking industry and media.
Saydjari said a successful attack against the United States could
cause devastation on the scale of Hurricane Katrina.
That means over 1,600 dead, thousands more displaced and homeless.
Take it from a "nonprofit" Wisconsin computer security consultancy whose
corporate logo [3] is crafted to look like a U.S. military seal.
[1] http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/347405.html
[2] http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-09/ff_estonia_bots
[3] http://www.cyberdefenseagency.com/
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