The ever-excellent Roderick Jones at Counterterrorism Blog (who also blogs at MetaSecurity) posits a future in which virtual assassination could be deployed as an effective a tool as that of the 19th century anarchists:

… a cyberspace assassination would seek to achieve the following aims: prevent the candidate from actually being in cyberspace ( the equivalent of virtual-murder), instill fear amongst their supporters that the same may happen to them and as a side-effect force the political campaigns to spend money on their cyber security or force the Secret Service to protect cyber-personas (the protection of cyber-identities is clearly something that all protective security agencies are going to need to consider). The tools to do this arguably already exist - hackers or botnets for hire could be diverted to these ends. This of course is fast-forwarding to a future more virtualized point where society is more reliant on cyber-spaces but similar tools could be applied today.

As with all things virtual, the scenario can be flipped. The use of precision cyber-attacks (or virtual assassinations) against America’s enemies should be considered today as a tactic to disrupt cyber-terrorists.

Read the article here.

I doubt that claiming the Third Amendment against non-consensual harbouring of military botnet code would work but it’s a nice idea.

Amendment 3 - Quartering of Soldiers. Ratified 12/15/1791:

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

(h/t harflimon at Brainsturbator)

And I thought General Ripper was dead. This is bonkers …

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack.

Carpet bombing as a deterrent? Infowar with a 3GW mentality? That’s USAF Col. Charles W. Williamson III in Armed Forces Journal.

Updated: Kevin Poulsen at Threat Level is equally unimpressed:

Basically, Col. Williamson has noticed that there are bad guys in the swimming pool, and his solution is to piss in their general direction. That’s the kind of behavior that rightly gets you kicked out of the pool and sent home for the summer.

Updated: Jon Stokes at Ars Technica has rather more time for the idea, albeit with reservations, and adds the following:

So while the article presents the military botnet idea mainly as a proposal for something that the Air Force should consider, one gets the feeling on reading it that this is more of a “speak now, or forever hold your peace” type moment for anyone in the public who objects to the idea…

“The biggest challenge will be political,” writes Williamson. “How does the US explain to its best friends that we had to shut down their computers? The best remedy for this is prevention. The US and its allies need to engage in a robust joint endeavor to improve net defense and intelligence to minimize this risk.”

Well, absolutely. Fighting DDoS with DDoS sounds a bit Old Testament to me. Let’s hope Williamson and his colleagues at AFCYBER can come up with schemes more sophisticated than require further analogies of the carpet-bombing variety. We really don’t need Napalm Pilots, for example.