BBC: US Plans to "fight the net" Revealed

If the Pentagon has its way, and it seems that it always does, wiretapping will pale in comparison to the military's plans for the Internet. And of course if the US is contemplating how it could bring down the worldwide Internet - which would bring business, communications, and life as we know it to a standstill -- other governments and insurgents undoubtedly have similar plans. Maybe the proliferation of nuclear weapons isn't our biggest problem. Maybe it's a matter of who controls communications, how, and when.

BBC News Pentagon correspondent Adam Brookes reports that a newly declassified document, Information Operations Roadmap" - signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - details plans for the US Military's plans for "information operations" that range from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

The military sees olpportunities to influence public opinion through new media, create "computer network attack" weapons and use wireless technologies as ways to allow the US military to fight an electronic war.

The military seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system. "Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will 'fight the net' as it would an enemy weapons system," it reads.

The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap.

"The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet," Brookes writes, and it's clear that "Information Operations Roadmap" is taken very seriously inside the Pentagon since it is signed by Rumsfeld.

The roadmap was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act. Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003.

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Posted by: Andrea Weckerle at January 30, 2006 2:28 PM

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