ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120068
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM BOWMAN AND SCOTT SHANE THE BALTIMORE SUN
IT is Jan. 17, 2001, the 10th anniversary of the U.S. bombing campaign against Baghdad, Iraq.
Suddenly, an hour after the opening bell, the computers at the New York Stock Exchange flicker off. A jumbo jet landing at Chicago's O'Hare airport crashes when a bogus tower message tells it to land on a crowded runway. On board the USS Eisenhower in the Persian Gulf, angry sailors demand to know why their bank accounts back home have been emptied.
For the first time in the history of warfare, the American mainland has been invaded - but not by troops. A hostile nation has attacked with the silent and invisible weapons of cyberspace.
The Pentagon strategists who once pondered the effects of a Soviet nuclear strike now are studying such a scenario: How real is the threat? Where does it come from? As it builds America's defense against the new threat from ``information warfare,'' the Pentagon has turned to its electronic brain trust: the National Security Agency.
Still reorganizing after the demise of its Cold War mission, and showing the keen survival instincts of any government bureaucracy, NSA has been eager to oblige. At a gathering of intelligence officers in June, the agency's director, John M. ``Mike'' McConnell, sounded the alarm.
``We're more vulnerable than any nation on Earth,'' he said. ``The things that are vulnerable are U.S. banks, global finance, the stock market, the Federal Reserve, air traffic control, all those things.''
NSA's efforts to seize the lead on information warfare is only one of its moves since the end of the Cold War to preserve its paramount role in intelligence. Even as it has slashed coverage of the former Soviet Union and cut personnel by 10 percent in three years, NSA has shifted resources to make itself useful to U.S. policy-makers. The agency has:
Scrambled to retrain hundreds of Russian linguists to keep pace with shifting crises in other countries.
Moved swiftly to expand coverage of negotiations by foreign trade officials, bribery attempts by foreign businesses competing with U.S. companies and money transfers by international banks.
Ended its long reluctance to become involved in the war on drugs by working closely with the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI on dismantling South American cocaine cartels.
Increased its role in tracking terrorists and their financial backers, especially since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.
Used its supercomputing ability to sift millions of transactions for evidence of rogue nations purchasing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons components.
Nothing better illustrates NSA's dramatic break with its Cold War past than the agency's move into information warfare.
In an era of shrinking budgets, the threat of terrorist hackers wielding software weapons with such names as ``worms,'' ``Trojan horses'' and ``logic bombs'' may be sufficiently alarming to conjure money from a deficit-minded Congress.
By building a computerized society, the United States has left itself wide open to electronic attack. From bank machine networks and the telephone system to electric power companies and steel manufacturers, the U.S. economy is supported by a web of computers.
McConnell acknowledges it's difficult to persuade the public and Congress to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a threat that sounds like science fiction.
Yet the first shots already have been fired in this 21st-century war.
In August, a computer hacker in St. Petersburg, Russia, stole $400,000 from Citibank. Earlier this year, a British teen-ager used his personal computer to break into sensitive U.S. Air Force files on North Korean nuclear inspections.
In 1993, critical Defense Department computer systems were penetrated by outsiders 134 times. Last year the number was 256. This year it may approach 500, according to Pentagon officials, who believe that hundreds more intrusions go undetected.
NSA computer experts are working to foil increasingly clever attack programs that invade a computer, capture secret passwords as they are typed in, and store them in a hidden file for the hacker to retrieve later. Other malicious programs assault a system by trying hundreds of possible passwords a second.
One of the most worrisome characteristics of information attacks is that they can be done cheaply. Spending far less than the cost of one missile, a hostile nation or terrorist group could mount a crippling information attack against sensitive U.S. targets.
``I think you could drop the financial system in this country pretty fast by hiring a [Kevin] Mitnick or two,'' says Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., a member of the Intelligence Committee and a computer buff, referring to the hacker charged with using his skills to sabotage computers all over America and steal thousands of credit-card numbers before his arrest in February.
Experts say one of the most menacing traits of information warfare is its anonymity. When the computers go down at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, operators have no way of knowing whether it's a teen-ager fooling around or the first shot in a attack from a foreign power.
``It's the intelligence problem of the next decade and a half,'' says George Kraus, a security consultant and former naval intelligence officer.
One fear is that computer scientists from the former communist states could offer their services to the highest bidder. In 1992, a group of former Soviet KGB agents tried to extort $1 million from a U.S. computer company by threatening to unleash a computer virus into their system.
Some private-sector computer specialists say the worst attacks on a nation's computers can be among the most subtle.
``Don't think in terms of obvious destruction,'' says Michel E. Kabay, director of education for the National Computer Security Association and a Montreal computer consultant. ``The most harmful viruses are not the ones that stop your computer.''
A virus that randomly changes numbers on a spreadsheet over time could wreak havoc in the economy, Kabay says.
The Pentagon is working electronic weapons into its strategic planning, while NSA recently established an Information Warfare Support Center to serve the armed forces.
In July, NSA technicians joined top U.S. military commanders to weave information warfare into battle plans. For the first time since it began war games in 1887, the Naval War College introduced computer attacks into its annual two-week exercise in Newport, R.I.
In ``Global '95,'' hundreds of military planners, diplomats and even members of Congress played roles in a scenario involving simultaneous attacks by North Korea on South Korea, and Iraq on Saudi Arabia. Using computers, the enemies attacked transportation and health systems inside the United States.
``We always thought ... the U.S. was a sanctuary,'' says Capt. Martin Sherrard, a Navy information warfare expert who participated in Global '95. ``That's not true anymore.''
While once the prime targets of NSA eavesdropping were Soviet submarines and Russian generals, now the agency has moved deeply into more varied and trickier territory: global trade, Islamic terrorism, narcotics interdiction, nuclear proliferation. A secret post-Cold War review of intelligence increased the list of targets by 60 percent, a former Central Intelligence Agency official says.
Surplus Russian linguists who once could recognize individual Soviet fighter pilots by their voices have had to retrain in higher-priority tongues: Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, Japanese. Hardware costing billions has been junked or retargeted, with massive listening posts along Soviet borders dismantled and satellites shifted to other regions.
That kind of target changing is NSA's greatest post-Cold War adjustment.
The State Department demands intercepts from a shifting list of world hot spots - Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Chechnya, Bosnia. With each crisis, NSA has had to scramble to find linguists skilled in obscure tongues.
``If I were the head of NSA today, I'd be over in Kyrgyzstan buying up a couple of Kyrgys or whatever they're called,'' says former Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner. ``You go out like Noah and you get two of everything and bring them over here.''
The FBI and CIA have pushed for more eavesdropping on terrorists, and NSA has kept its ear close to Peshawar, Pakistan, in an effort to find the shadowy financiers of the World Trade Center blast.
But while Soviet generals talked for years on the same schedule and the same channels, terrorists move constantly and use multiple aliases. This sometimes frustrates the intelligence agency's standard tactic, programming computers to scan phone traffic for selected phone numbers and names.
NSA computers searched the airwaves for the notorious terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal for two decades before picking up information last year that led to his arrest in Sudan, according to congressional sources.
Drug dealers can prove just as elusive. Until recently, the agency was wary about getting involved in counternarcotics, fearing that sensitive methods could be exposed in court or that drug rings would include Americans, whom NSA cannot legally target.
But one veteran DEA official says the flow of information has dramatically increased since the Soviet collapse and is now ``a godsend.''
All of NSA's tips come with strings attached, however: Prosecutors must be willing to drop a case, no matter how important, rather than permit NSA eavesdropping to be revealed in court
Of all NSA's post-Soviet missions, the most controversial is economic spying, which often targets the perfectly legal activities of traditional U.S. allies.
Australia, New Zealand and Canada - which along with Britain and the United States have for five decades shared their signals intelligence - recently built their own intercept sites to pick up commercial satellites, according to one intelligence expert.
With so much competitive economic information flowing over commercial satellites, the old allies have become rivals and no longer want to share business intelligence, this expert says.
President Clinton has responded in kind. Declaring a sound economy the key to national security, he has pressed the spies for data on America's trade competitors and evidence of unfair trade practices.
For now, NSA apparently is not passing foreign companies' commercial secrets to their American competitors. In an era of Tennessee-built Hondas and Chinese-made AT&T phones, the eavesdroppers are understandably uncertain about whom to spy for and whom to spy on. But a few voices say NSA should do more to help U.S. industry.
``If we were willing to spy for the military security of our country during the Cold War, I see no reason morally, ethically, logically that you won't spy to protect the economic security of the country in the non-Cold War,'' says Turner, the former CIA chief.
``There are practical problems with it and I acknowledge all of them. I only say, don't turn your back on it on some silly moral principle.''
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