Fear, Politics and Budgets

I’m sure the Cyber ShockWave exercise has been very useful to all concerned. So thinks former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart, who acted out his role as presidential adviser during the simulation yesterday. From the Washington Post:

[Lockhart] said it was immaterial whether the attack was an act of war; it had “the effect” of an act of war, he said. Lockhart said that people would be scared by the simulation but that “that’s a good thing.” Only then, he said, would Congress act.

Nobody should be surprised. That’s the bit I was referring to previously when I wrote “lobbyists can capitalise by prodding jittery politicians into thinking a bit more seriously about federal budgets.”

What’s really interesting is not that the exercise participants concluded that the US is ill-equipped to deal with a major suite of cyber attacks (and a couple of bombings for good measure) but the way the dialogue from the exercise works its way into the reporting of the simulation.

From AFP:

Launched from servers in Russia, it first crippled cellphone networks, then landlines, then the Internet and eventually the electricity grid in the entire eastern United States, exacerbated by a pair of bombings at power stations. New York, Philadelphia and Washington were plunged into darkness, airline traffic was disrupted and the financial markets ground to a halt.

“This is a massive blow to the solar plexus of the economy,” said “Treasury Secretary” Stephen Friedman, former director of the National Economic Council.

Joe Lockhart, former president Bill Clinton’s press secretary, served as a counselor to the president, bringing a political perspective to the debate. “We’ve got to bring the Hill leadership down to the White House,” he said of the need to keep members of the US Congress informed.

National Security Adviser Chertoff peppered the cabinet with questions. “If we were to shut a server down in Russia, would the Russians view that as an attack?” he asked. “If the attacker is either a state actor or a terrorist group what are our options for responding or retaliating?”

From Federal Computer Week:

“I think the president has to, despite all of his instincts to reassure people, not undersell this,” Joe Lockhart, former chief spokesman for President Bill Clinton who played the role of counselor to the president. “He’s got to define this as a major crisis … we will kill ourselves politically if we undersell this.”

“There’s no question this has a disastrous impact on the economy,” said Stephen Friedman, former director of the National Economic Council under President George W. Bush who played the role of treasury secretary. “You have financial markets shut down at this point, ordinary transactions are dramatically depleted, there’s no question that this has a major impact on consumer confidence.”

From The Washington Post:

… the attorney general declared: “We don’t have the authority in this nation as a government to quarantine people’s cellphones.”

The White House cyber coordinator was “shocked” and asserted: “If we don’t have the authority, the attorney general ought to find it.”

From News24:

“If this is an attack on the United States the president, as commander-in-chief, has the authority to use the full powers at his disposal,” said former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, playing the role of the US attorney general.

“We’re in good shape from a command and control standpoint,” said “Secretary of Defence” Charles Wald, a retired general and the former deputy commander of US European Command. “We can take action offensively if we know where to go,” Wald said. “Problematically, we don’t know where that is.”

To be honest, I don’t know if the last paragraph was from during the game or after, such is the mixing of the real with the simulated.

Big deal, I hear you say, these sorts of exercises happen all the time. Yup, true, including all manner of cyber-oriented ones. They all incorporate rolling media as standard. But how many have an invited media audience? Fewer, I imagine. How many are part-funded by CNN? Oh, I suspect that reduces the number significantly. And how many therefore are aired on network television shortly thereafter? Not many.

CNN are supposedly going to broadcast their story this weekend. I wonder if they’ll take the War of the Worlds approach, and scare people witless? I very much doubt it, although I bet there will be portentous, doom-laden music, footage of glowering skies, and aerial views of city grids, lights blinking off block by block. All the stock motifs for a ‘nation in peril’ scenario. Given the assumed inability of the general public to parse fact from fiction, the whole programme will be accompanied by a ticker-tape reading, ‘THIS IS A SIMULATION. DO NOT CALL 911. DO NOT PANIC!’, or something like that, just in case some dullard fails to ask the simple question: if this is war, how come we’re allowed to see what’s going on in the White House?

Or I could just have made everything up, and the broadcast will be a sober, informative and intellectually-challenging documentary on a valid component of national security planning. Here’s hoping.