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21 Jul 2008 11:48 am

The Internet As Battlefield

By Jessie Roberts

Blogs are a problem, not a solution, an anonymous Army IT professional tells Danger Room. The source paints an unsettling portrait of lax military intelligence:

Give a senior service official a BlackBerry and I can guarantee he will transmit sensitive and sometimes classified information on it without thinking. He will use the Bluetooth headset and the built-in phone to talk about sensitive topics without a care in the world as to who is listening. I have lost count of how many times we have had to collect all of the BlackBerries we issue and purge them due to sensitive or classified information being sent on them. The BlackBerry is one of the greatest weapons system in the terrorists' inventory, and we supply the bullets!

I spent over 20 years in the Air Force working on the "cyberbattlefield," as the Air Force calls it -- and yes, the Air Force has it completely correct: the Internet is a battlefield that needs to be dominated, not the tool set of some guy in a cave . ...Until the rest of the Department of Defense sees the Internet as a battlefield that it should dominate, we will continue to give our enemies all the information and tools they need and give them an advantage that can defeat our best weapons and tactics.

Shouldn't the idea that computers and phones aren't all that private be intuitive by now? It's hard to imagine that the institution that developed the internet wouldn't understand or value it as a tool of war.

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