Alexander Galloway on Sun, 12 Jan 2003 20:20:47 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Tactical Media & Conflicting Diagrams (draft chapter) |
Nettimers--I'm preparing a book manuscript on computer protocols and how they establish control in the seemingly anarchical Internet. I'm hoping that some of you will be able to read my draft chapter below on tactical media which tries to show how there are many interesting flaws in the protocological system of control. Please point out my mistakes before i send it to my editor! :-) thanks, -ag + + + "The Internet is like the Titanic. It is an instrument which performs extraordinarily well but which contains its own catastrophe."[1] —Paul Virilio Like many interesting social movements that may manifest themselves in a variety of ways, tactical media has an orthodox definition and a more general one. The orthodoxy comes from the new tech-savvy social movements taking place in an around the Western world and associated with media luminaries such as Geert Lovink, Ricardo Dominguez (with the Electronic Disturbance Theater) and Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Tactical media is the term given to political uses of both new and old technologies, such as the organization of virtual sit-ins, campaigns for more democratic access to the Internet, or even the creation of new software products not aimed at the commercial market. "Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture,” write tactical media gurus Geert Lovink and David Garcia. “Tactical media are media of crisis, criticism and opposition."[2] Thus, tactical media means the bottom-up struggle of the networks against the power centers. (And of course the networks against the power centers who have recently reinvented themselves as networks!) But there is also a more general way of thinking about tactical phenomena within the media. That is to say, there are certain tactical effects that often only leave traces of their successes to be discovered later by the ecologists of the media. This might include more than would normally fit under the orthodox definition. Case in point: computer viruses. In a very bland sense they are politically bankrupt and certainly no friend of the tactical media practitioner. But in a more general sense they speak volumes on the nature of network-based conflict. For example computer viruses are incredibly effective at identifying anti-protocological technologies. They infect proprietary systems, and propagate through the homogeneity contained within them. Show me a computer virus and I’ll show you proprietary software with a market monopoly. I will not repeat here the excellent attention given to the subject by CAE, Lovink and others. Instead in this chapter I would like to examine tactical media as those phenomena that are able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires. “Resistances are no longer marginal, but active in the center of a society that opens up in networks,”[3] Hardt & Negri remind us. Likewise, techno-resistance is not outside of protocol, but is at its center. Tactical media propel protocol into a state of hypertrophy, pushing it further, in better and more interesting ways. Computer Viruses While a few articles on viruses and worms appeared in the 1970s and beginning of the ‘80s,[4] Frederick Cohen’s work in the early eighties is cited as the first sustained examination of computer viruses. He approached this topic from a scientific viewpoint, measuring infection rates, classifying different types of viruses, and so on. "The record for the smallest virus is a Unix “sh” command script. In the command interpreter of Unix, you can write a virus that takes only about 8 characters. So, once you are logged into a Unix system, you can type a 8 character command, and before too long, the virus will spread. That’s quite small, but it turns out that with 8 characters, the virus can’t do anything but reproduce. To get a virus that does interesting damage, you need around 25 or 30 characters. If you want a virus that evolves, replicates, and does damage, you need about 4 or 5 lines."[5] Cohen first presented his ideas on computer viruses to a seminar in 1983. His paper “Computer Viruses—Theory and Experiments” was published in 1984, and his Ph.D. dissertation titled “Computer Viruses” (University of Southern California) in 1986. Cohen defines a computer virus as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a, possibly evolved, version of itself.”[6] Other experts agree: “a virus is a self-replicating code segment which must be attached to a host executable.”[7] Variants in the field of malicious code include worms and Trojan Horses. A worm, like a virus, is a self-replicating program but one that requires no host to propagate. A Trojan Horse is a program which appears to be doing something useful, but also executes some piece of undesirable code hidden to the user. In the literature viruses are almost exclusively characterized as hostile or harmful. They are often referred to completely in the negative, as in “anti-virus software” or virus prevention, or as one author calls it, a “high-tech disease.” They are considered nearly exclusively in the context of detection, interception, identification, and removal. Why is this the case? Viral marketing, emergent behavior, self-replicating systems—these concepts are all the rage at the turn of the millennium. Yet computer viruses gain from none of these positive associations. They are thought of as a plague used by terrorists to wreak havoc on the network. So why did computer viruses become so closely connected with the viral metaphor in biology? Why think of self-replicating programs as a “virus” and not simply a parasitic nuisance, or a proper life form? Even the father of computer virus science, Cohen, thought of them as a form of artificial life[8] and recognized the limitations of the biological analogy. “[C]onsider a biological disease that is 100% infectious, spreads whenever animals communicate, kills all infected animals instantly at a given moment, and has no detectable side effect until that moment,”[9] wrote Cohen, identifying the ultimate inaccuracy of the analogy. How did self-replicating programs become viruses? For example, if viruses had emerged a decade later in the late-1990s, it is likely that they would have a completely difference socio-cultural meaning. They would most certainly be thought of more as a distributed computing system (like SETI@home) or an artificial life experiment (like Tom Ray’s Tierra), or an artwork (like Mark Daggett’s email worm, vcards), or as a nuisance (spam), or as a potential guerilla marketing tool (adware)—not a biological infestation. Computer viruses acquired their current discursive position because of a unique transformation that transpired in the mid-1980s around the perception of technology. In fact several phenomena, including computer hacking, acquired a distinctly negative characterization during this period of history because of the intense struggle waging behind the scenes between proprietary and protocological camps. My hypothesis is this: early on, computer viruses were identified with the AIDS epidemic. It is explicitly referenced in much of the literature on viruses, making AIDS both the primary biological metaphor and primary social anxiety informing the early discourse on computer viruses. In that early mode, the virus itself was the epidemic. Later, the discourse on viruses turns toward weaponization and hence terrorism. Here, the virus author is the epidemic. Today the moral evaluation of viruses is generally eclipsed by the search for their authors, who are prosecuted as criminals and often terrorists. The broad viral epidemic itself is less important that the criminal mind that brings it into existence (or the flaws in proprietary software that allow it to exist in the first place). Thus, by the late 1990s viruses are the visible indices of a search for evil-doers within technology, not the immaterial, anxious fear they evoked a decade earlier under the AIDS crisis. Computer viruses appeared in a moment in history where the integrity and security of bodies, both human and technological, was considered extremely important. Social anxieties surrounding both AIDS and the war on drugs testify to this. The AIDS epidemic in particular is referenced in much of the literature on viruses.[10] This makes sense because of the broad social crisis created by AIDS in the mid to late 1980s (and beyond). “In part,” writes Ralf Burger, “it seems as though a hysteria is spreading among computer users which nearly equals the uncertainty over the AIDS epidemic.”[11] A good example of this discursive pairing of AIDS and computer viruses is seen in the February 1, 1988 issue of Newsweek. Here an article titled “Is Your Computer Infected?,” which reports on computer viruses affecting hospitals and other institutions, is paired side-by-side with a medical article on AIDS. Consider two examples of this evolving threat paradigm. The Jerusalem virus[12] was first uncovered in December 1987 at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Isreal. “It was soon found that the virus was extremely widespread, mainly in Jerusalem, but also in other parts of the country, especially in the Haifa area,”[13] wrote professor Yisrael Radai. Two students, Yuval Rakavy and Omri Mann, wrote a counter-program to seek out and delete the virus. Mystery surrounds the origins of the virus. As Frederick Cohen writes, terrorists are suspected of authoring this virusbecause it was timed to destroy data precisely on the first Friday the 13th it encountered, which landed on May 13, 1988 and coincided with the day commemorating forty years since the existence of a Palestinian state.[14] (A subsequent outbreak also happened on Friday, January 13th 1989 in Britain.) The Edmonton Journal called it the work of a “saboteur.” This same opinion was voiced by The New York Times, who reported that the Jerusalem virus “was apparently intended as a weapon of political protest.”[15] Yet Radai claims that in subsequent, off-the-record correspondence, the Times reporter admitted that he was “too quick to assume too much about this virus, it’s author, and its intent.”[16] In the end it is of little consequence whether or not the virus was written by the PLO. What matters is that this unique viral threat was menacing enough to influence the judgment of the media (and also Cohen) to believe, and perpetuate the belief, that viruses have a unique relationship to terrorists. Words like “nightmare,” “destroy,” “terrorist,” and “havoc” pervade the Times report. Second, consider the “AIDS Information Introductory Diskette Version 2.0” Disk. On December 11, 1989, the PC Cyborg Corporation mailed approximately 10,000[17] computer diskettes to two direct mail lists compiled from the subscribers to PC Business World and names from the World Health Organization’s 1988 conference on AIDS held in Stockholm.[18] The disk carried the title “AIDS Information Introductory Diskette Version 2.0,” and presents an informational questionnaire to the user and offers an assessment of the user’s risk levels for AIDS based on their reported behavior. The disk also acted as a Trojan Horse containing a virus. The virus damages file names on the computer and fills the disk to capacity. The motives of the virus author are uncertain in this case, although it is thought to be a rather ineffective form of extortion as users of the disk were required to mail payment of $189 (for a limited license) or $378 (for a lifetime license) to a post office box in Panama. The virus author was eventually discovered to be an American named Joseph Popp who was extradited to Britain in February 1991 to face charges but was eventually dismissed as being psychiatrically unfit to stand trial.[19] He was later found guilty in absentia by an Italian court. Other AIDS-related incidents include the early Apple II virus “Cyberaids,” the AIDS virus from 1989 which displays “Your computer now has AIDS” in large letters, followed a year later by the AIDS II virus which performs a similar infraction. So here are two threat paradigms, terrorism and AIDS, which characterize the changing discursive position of computer viruses from the 1980s to ‘90s. While the AIDS paradigm dominated in the late ‘80s, by the late ‘90s computer viruses would become weaponized and more closely resemble the terrorism paradigm. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s had a very specific discursive diagram. With AIDS, the victims became known, but the epidemic itself was unknown. There emerged a broad, immaterial social anxiety. The biological became dangerous and dirty. All sex acts became potentially deviant acts and therefore suspect. But with terrorism there exists a difference discursive diagram. With terror the victims are rarely known. Instead knowledge is focused on the threat itself—the strike happened here, at this time, with this weapon, by this group, and so on. If AIDS is an invisible horror, then terror is an irrational horror. It confesses political demands one minute, then erases them another (while the disease has no political demands). The State attacks terror with all available manpower, while it systematically ignores AIDS. Each shows a different exploitable flaw in protocological management and control. While the shift in threat paradigms happened in the late 1980s for computer viruses, the transformation was long in coming. Consider the following three dates. In the 1960s in places like Bell Labs,[20] Xerox PARC and MIT scientists were known to play a game called Core War. In this game two self-replicating programs were released into a system. The programs battled over system resources and eventually one side came out on top. Whoever could write the best program would win. These engineers were not virus writers, nor were they terrorists or criminals. Just the opposite, they prized creativity, technical innovation and exploration. Core War was a fun way to generate such intellectual activity. The practice existed for several years unnoticed. “In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises,” said Ken Thompson, co-developer of the UNIX operating system, in 1983. “One of the favorites was to write the shortest self-reproducing program.”[21] The engineer A. K. Dewdney recounts an early story at, we assume, Xerox PARC about a self-duplicating program called Creeper which infested the computer system and had to be brought under control by another program designed to neutralize it, Reaper.[22] Dewdney brought to life this battle scenario using his own gaming language called Redcode. Jump ahead to 1988. At 5:01:59pm[23] on November 2 Robert Morris, a 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell University and son of a prominent computer security engineer at the National Computer Security Center (a division of the NSA), released an email worm into the ARPANET. This self-replicating program entered approximately 60,000[24] computers in the course of a few hours, infecting between 2,500 and 6,000 of them. While it is notoriously difficult to calculate such figures, some speculations put the damage caused by Morris’s worm at over $10,000,000. On July 26, 1989 he was indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. After pleading innocent, in the spring of 1990 he was convicted and sentenced to three years probation, fined $10,000 and told to perform 400 hours of community service. Cornell expelled him, calling it “a juvenile act,”[25] while Morris’s own dad labeled it simply “the work of a bored graduate student.”[26] While the media cited Morris’s worm as “the largest assault ever on the nation’s computers,”[27] the program was largely considered a sort of massive blunder, a chain reaction that spiraled out of control through negligence. As Bruce Sterling reports: “Morris said that his ingenious ‘worm’ program was meant to explore the Internet harmlessly, but due to bad programming, the worm replicated out of control.”[28] This was a problem better solved by the geeks, not the FBI, thought many at the time. “I was scared,” admitted Morris, “it seemed like the worm was going out of control.”[29] Morris’s peers in the scientific community considered his prosecution unnecessary. As reported in UNIX Today!, only a quarter of those polled thought Morris should go to prison, and, as the magazine testified, “most of those who said ‘Yes’ to the prison question added something like, ‘only a minimum security prison—you know, like the Watergate people vacationed at.’”[30] Thus while not unnoticed, Morris’s worm was characterized as a mistake not an overt, criminal act. Likewise his punishment was relatively lenient for someone convicted of such a massive infraction. Ten years later in 1999, after what was characterized as the largest Internet man hunt ever, a New Jersey resident named David Smith was prosecuted for creating Melissa, a macro virus that spreads using the Microsoft Outlook and Word programs. It reportedly infected over 100,000 computers worldwide and caused $80 million in damage (as assessed by the number of hours computer administrators took to clean up the virus). While Melissa was generally admitted to have been more of a nuisance than a real threat, Smith was treated as a hard criminal not a blundering geek. He pleaded guilty to 10 years and a $150,000 fine. With Smith, then, self-replicating programs flipped 180 degrees. The virus is now indicative of criminal wrongdoing. It has moved through it’s biological phase, characterized by the associations with AIDS, and effectively been weaponized. Moreover criminal blame is identified with the virus author himself who is thought of not simply as a criminal but as a cyber-terrorist. A self-replicating program is no longer the hallmark of technical exploration, as it was in the early days, nor is it (nor was it ever) a canary in the coal mine warning of technical flaws in proprietary software, nor is it even viral; it is a weapon of mass destruction. From curious geek to cyber terrorist. [...] Conflicting Diagrams "Netwar is about the Zapatistas more than the Fidelistas, Hamas more than the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the American Christian Patriot movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, and the Asian Triads more than the Costa Nostra."[61] —John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt Throughout the years new diagrams (also called graphs or organizational designs) have appeared as solutions or threats to existing ones. Bureaucracy is a diagram. Hierarchy is one too, so is peer-to-peer. Designs come and go, useful asset managers at one historical moment, then disappearing, or perhaps fading only to reemerge later as useful again. The Cold War was synonymous with a specific military diagram—bilateral symmetry, mutual assured destruction (MAD), massiveness, might, containment, deterrence, negotiation; the war against drugs has a different diagram—multiplicity, specificity, law and criminality, personal fear, public awareness. This book is largely about one specific diagram, or organizational design, called distribution, and its approximate relationship in a larger historical transformation involving digital computers and ultimately the control mechanism called protocol.[62] In this diagramatic narrative it is possible to pick sides and describe one diagram as the protagonist and another as the antagonist. Thus the rhizome is thought to be the solution to the tree,[63] the wildcat strike the solution to the boss's control, Toyotism[64] the solution to institutional bureaucracy, and so on. Alternately, terrorism is thought to be the only real threat to state power, the homeless punk-rocker a threat to sedentary domesticity, the guerrilla a threat to the war machine, the temporary autonomous zone a threat to hegemonic culture, and so on. This type of conflict is in fact a conflict between different social structures, for the terrorist threatens not only through fear and violence, but specifically through the use of a cellular organizational structure, a distributed network of secretive combatants, rather than a centralized organizational structure employed by the police and other state institutions. Terrorism is a sign that we are in a transitional moment in history. (Could there ever be anything else?) It signals that historical actors are not in a relationship of equilibrium, but instead are grossly mismatched. It is often observed that, due largely to the original comments of networking pioneer Paul Baran, the Internet was invented to avoid certain vulnerabilities of nuclear attack. In Baran’s original vision, the organizational design of the Internet involved a high degree of redundancy, such that destruction of a part of the network would not threaten the viability of the network as a whole. After World War II, strategists called for moving industrial targets outside of urban cores in a direct response to fears of nuclear attack. Peter Galison calls this dispersion the “constant vigilance against the re-creation of new centers.”[65] These are the same centers that Baran derided as an “Achilles Heel”[66] and what he longed to purge from the telecommunications network. “City by city, country by country, the bomb helped drive dispersion,”[67] Galison continues, highlighting the power of the A-bomb to drive the push towards distribution in urban planning. Whereas the destruction of a fleet of Abrams tanks would certainly impinge upon Army battlefield maneuvers, the destruction of a rack of Cisco routers would do little to slow down broader network communications. Internet traffic would simply find a new route, thus circumventing the downed machines.[68] (In this way, destruction must be performed absolutely, or not at all. “The only way to stop Gnutella,” comments WiredPlanet CEO Thomas Hale on the popular file sharing protocol, “is to turn off the Internet.”[69] And this is shown above in our examination of protocol’s high penalties levied against deviation. One is completely compatible with a protocol, or not at all.) Thus the Internet can survive attacks not because it is stronger than the opposition, but precisely because it is weaker. The Internet has a different diagram than nuclear attack; it is in a different shape. And that new shape happens to be immune to the older. All the words used to describe the World Trade Center after the attacks of September 11, 2001 revealed its design vulnerabilities vis-à-vis terrorists: it was a tower, a center, an icon, a pillar, a hub. Conversely, terrorists are always described with a different vocabulary: they are cellular, networked, modular, and nimble. Groups like Al-Qaeda specifically promote a modular, distributed structure based on small autonomous groups. They write that new recruits “should not know one another,” and that training sessions should be limited to “7 - 10 individuals.” They describe their security strategies as “creative” and “flexible.”[70] This is indicative of two conflicting diagrams. The first diagram is based on the strategic massing of power and control, while the second diagram is based on the distribution of power into small, autonomous enclaves. "The architecture of the World Trade Center owed more to the centralized layout of Versailles than the dispersed architecture of the Internet," wrote Jon Ippolito after the attacks. "New York's resilience derives from the interconnections it fosters among its vibrant and heterogeneous inhabitants. It is in decentralized structures that promote such communal networks, rather than in reinforced steel, that we will find the architecture of survival."[71] In the past the war against terrorism resembled the war in Viet Nam, or the war against drugs—conflicts between a central power and an elusive network. It did not resemble the Gulf War, or World War II, or other conflicts between states. "As an environment for military conflict," the New York Times reported, "Afghanistan is virtually impervious[72] to American power." (In addition to the stymied US attempt to route Al-Qaeda post-September 11th is the failed Soviet occupation in the years following the 1978 coup, a perfect example of grossly mismatched organizational designs.) Today being “impervious” to American power is no small feat. The category shift that defines the difference between state power and guerilla force shows that through a new diagram,guerillas, terrorists and the like can gain a foothold against their opposition. But as Ippolito points out this should be our category shift too, for anti-terror survival strategies will arise not from a renewed massing of power on the American side, but precisely from a distributed (or to use his less precise term, decentralized) diagram. Heterogeneity, distribution, communalism are all features of this new diagramatic solution. In short, the current global crisis is one between centralized, hierarchical powers and distributed, horizontal networks. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, two researchers at the RAND Corporation who have written extensively on the hierarchy-network conflict, offer a few propositions for thinking about future policy: · Hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks. [...] · It takes networks to fight networks. [...] · Whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages.[73] These comments are incredibly helpful for thinking about tactical media and the roll of today’s political actor. It gives subcultures reason to rethink their strategies vis-à-vis the mainstream. It forces us to rethink the techniques of the terrorist. It also raises many questions, including what happens when “the powers that be” actually evolve into networked power (which is already the case in many sectors). In recent decades the primary conflict between organizational designs has been between hierarchies and networks, an asymmetrical war. However, in the future we are likely to experience a general shift downward into a new bilateral organizational conflict—networks fighting networks. “Bureaucracy lies at the root of our military weakness,” wrote advocates of military reform in the mid eighties. “The bureaucratic model is inherently contradictory to the nature of war, and no military that is a bureaucracy can produce military excellence.”[74] While the change to a new unbureaucratic military is on the drawing board, the future network-centric military—an unsettling notion to say the least—is still a ways away. Nevertheless networks of control have invaded our life in other ways though, in the form of the ubiquitous surveillance, biological informatization and other techniques discussed in the earlier chapter on power. The dilemma, then, is that while hierarchy and centralization are almost certainly politically tainted due to their historical association with fascism and other abuses, networks are both bad and good. Drug cartels, terror groups, black hat hacker crews and other denizens of the underworld all take advantage of networked organizational designs because they offer effective mobility and disguise. But more and more we witness the advent of networked organizational design in corporate management techniques, manufacturing supply chains, advertisement campaigns and other novelties of the ruling class, as well as all the familiar grass-roots activist groups who have long used network structures to their advantage. In a sense, networks have been vilified simply because the terrorists, pirates and anarchists made them notorious, not because of any negative quality of the organizational diagram itself. In fact, positive libratory movements have been capitalizing on network design protocols for decades if not centuries. The section on the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus is one of literature’s most poignant adorations of the network diagram. It was the goal of this chapter to illuminate a few of these networked designs and how they manifest themselves as tactical effects within the media’s various network-based struggles. As the section on viruses (or the previous chapter on hackers) showed, these struggles can be lost. Or as in the case of the end-to-end design strategy of the Internet’s core protocols, or cyberfeminism, or the free software movement, they can be won (won in specific places at specific times). These tactical effects are allegorical indices that point out the flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control. The goal is not to destroy technology in some neo-Luddite delusion, but to push it into a state of hypertrophy, further than it is meant to go. Then, in its injured, sore and unguarded condition, technology may be sculpted anew into something better, something in closer agreement with the real wants and desires of its users. This is the goal of tactical media. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [1] Paul Virilio, "Infowar," in Druckrey (ed.), Ars Electronica, p. 334. One assumes that the italicized "Titanic" may refer to James Cameron’s 1997 film as well as the fated passenger ship, thereby offering an interesting double meaning that suggests, as others have aptly argued, that films, understood as texts like any other, contain their own undoing. [2] David Garcia and Geert Lovink, “The ABC of Tactical Media,” Nettime, May 16, 1997. [3] Hardt & Negri, Empire, p. 25. [4] Ralf Burger cites two articles, “ACM Use of Virus Functions to Provide a Virtual APL Interpreter Under User Control” (1974), and John Shoch and Jon Huppas’s “The Worm Programs—Early Experience with a Distributed Computation” (1982) which was first circulated in 1980 in abstract form as “Notes on the ‘Worm’ programs” (IEN 159, May 1980). See Ralf Burger, Computer Viruses (Grand Rapids: Abacus, 1988), p. 19. [5] Frederick Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), p. 38. [6] Ibid., p. 2. [7] W. Timothy Polk, et al., Anti-Virus Tools and Techniques for Computer Systems (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Data Corporation, 1995), p, 4. [8] Indeed pioneering viral scientist Fred Cohen is the most notable exception to this rule. He recognized the existence of “benevolent viruses” that perform maintenance, facilitate networked applications, or simply live in “peaceful coexistence” with us: “I personally believe that reproducing programs are living beings in the information environment.” See Frederick Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), pp. 159-160, 15-21, and Frederick Cohen, It’s Alive! (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994). The author Ralf Burger is also not completely pessimistic, instructing us that when “used properly, [viruses] may bring about a new generation of self-modifying computer operating systems. ... Those who wish to examine and experiment with computer viruses on an experimental level will quickly discover what fantastic programming possibilities they offer.” See Ralf Burger, Computer Viruses (Grand Rapids: Abacus, 1988), p. 2. [9] Fred Cohen, “Implications of Computer Viruses and Current Methods of Defense,” in Peter Denning, Ed., Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms, and Viruses (New York: ACM, 1990), p. 383. [10] See Philip Fites, et al., The Computer Virus Crisis (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), pp. 28, 54, 105-117, 161-2; Ralf Burger, Computer Viruses (Grand Rapids: Abacus, 1988), p. 1; Charles Cresson Wood, “The Human Immune System as an Information Systems Security Reference Model” in Lance Hoffman, ed., Rogue Programs (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990), pp. 56-57. In addition, the AIDS Info Disk, a Trojan Horse, is covered in almost every book on the history of computer viruses. [11] Burger, Computer Viruses, p. 1. [12] Also called the “Israeli” or “PLO” virus. [13] Yisrael Radai, “The Israeli PC Virus,” Computers and Security 8:2, 1989, p. 112. [14] Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses, p. 45. [15] “Computer Systems Under Seige, Here and Abroad,” The New York Times, January 31, 1988, section 3, p. 8. [16] Cited in Radai, “The Israeli PC Virus,” p. 113. [17] Frederick Cohen reports the total number between 20,000 and 30,000 diskettes. See Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses, p. 50. Jan Hruska puts the number at 20,000. See Jan Hruska, Computer Viruses and Anti-Virus Warfare (New York: Ellis Horwood, 1992), p. 20. [18] Philip Fites, et al., The Computer Virus Crisis, p. 46. [19] Hruska, Computer Viruses and Anti-Virus Warfare, p. 22. [20] A. K. Dewdney identifies a game called Darwin invented by M. Douglas McIlroy, head of the Computing Techniques Research Department at Bell Labs, and a program called Worm created by John Shoch (and Jon Hupp) of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. See A. K. Dewdney, “Computer Recreations,” Scientific American, March, 1984, p. 22. For more on Shoch and Hupp see “The Worm Programs,” Communications of the ACM, March 1982. Many attribute the worm concept to the science fiction novel Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. [21] Ken Thompson, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” in Denning, Ed., Computers Under Attack, p. 98. [22] Dewdney, “Computer Recreations,” p. 14. [23] Jon A. Rochlis and Mark W. Eichin, “With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT’s Perspective,” in Peter Denning, Ed., Computers Under Attack, p. 202. The precise time comes from analyzing the computer logs at Cornell University. Others suspect that the attack originated from a remote login at a MIT computer. [24] Frederick Cohen, A Short Course on Computer Viruses (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), p. 49. The figure of 60,000 is also used by Eugene Spafford who attributes it to the October 1988 IETF estimate for the total number of computers online at that time. See Eugene Spafford, “The Internet Worm Incident,” in Hoffman, ed., Rogue Programs, p. 203. Peter Denning’s numbers are different. He writes that “[o]ver an eight-hour period it invaded between 2,500 and 3,000 VAX and Sun computers.” See Peter Denning, ed., Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms, and Viruses (New York: ACM, 1990), p. 191. This worm is generally called the RTM Worm after the initials of its author, or simply the Internet Worm. [25] From a Cornell University report cited in Ted Eisenberg, et al., “The Cornell Commission: On Morris and the Worm,” in Peter Denning, ed., Computers Under Attack, p. 253. [26] Cited in The New York Times, November 5, 1988, p. A1. [27] The New York Times, November 4, 1988, p. A1. [28] Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown (New York: Bantam, 1992), pp. 88-9. [29] Cited in The New York Times, January 19, 1990, p. A19. [30] “Morris’s Peers Return Verdicts: A Sampling of Opinion Concerning The Fate of the Internet Worm,” in Hoffman, ed., Rogue Programs, p. 104. [...] [61] John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001), p. 6. A similar litany from 1996 reads: “netwar is about Hamas more than the PLO, Mexico’s Zapatistas more than Cuba’s Fidelistas, the Christian Identity Movement more than the Ku Klux Klan, the Asian Triads more than the Sicilian Mafia, and Chicago’s Gangsta Disciples more than the Al Capone Gang” (see John Arquilla & David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar [Santa Monica: RAND, 1996], p. 5). Arquilla & Ronfeldt coined the term netwar which they define as “an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms of organization and related doctrines, strategies, and technologies attuned to the information age” (see Arquilla & Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars, p. 6). [62] This is not a monolithic control mechanism, of course. “The Internet is a large machine,” writes Andreas Broeckmann. “This machine has its own, heterogeneous topology, it is fractured and repetitive, incomplete, expanding and contracting” (“Networked Agencies,” http://www.v2.nl/~andreas/texts/1998/networkedagency-en.html). [63] This is Deleuze & Guatari’s realization in A Thousand Plateaus. [64] For an interesting description of Toyotism, see Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 157-160. [65] Peter Galison, “War against the Center,” Grey Room 4, Summer 2001, p. 20. [66] Baran writes: “The weakest spot in assuring a second strike capability was in the lack of reliable communications. At the time we didn’t know how to build a communication system that could survive even collateral damage by enemy weapons. RAND determined through computer simulations that the AT&T Long Lines telephone system, that carried essentially all the Nation’s military communications, would be cut apart by relatively minor physical damage. While essentially all of the links and the nodes of the telephone system would survive, a few critical points of this very highly centralized analog telephone system would be destroyed by collateral damage alone by missiles directed at air bases and collapse like a house of card.” See Paul Baran, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1999 by David Hochfelder, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. [67] Galison, “War against the Center,” p. 25. [68] New Yorker writer Peter Boyer reports that DARPA is in fact rethinking this opposition by designing a distributed tank, “a tank whose principle components, such as guns and sensors, are mounted on separate vehicles that would be controlled remotely by a soldier in yet another command vehicle,” (see “A Different War,” The New Yorker, July 1, 2002, p. 61). This is what the military calls Future Combat Systems (FCS), an initiative developed by DARPA for the US Army. It is described as “flexible” and “network-centric.” I am grateful to Jason Spingarn-Koff for bring FCS to my attention. [69] Cited in Gene Kan “Gnutella” in Andy Oram, Ed. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies (Sebastopol: O’Reilly, 2001), p. 99. [70] See The al-Qaeda Documents: Vol. 1 (Alexandria, VA: Tempest, 2002), pp. 50, 62. [71] Jon Ippolito, "Don't Blame the Internet," Washington Post, September 29, 2001, p. A27. [72] Wanting instead American invulnerability to Soviet nuclear power, in 1964 Paul Baran writes that “we can still design systems in which system destruction requires the enemy to pay the price of destroying n of n [communication] stations. If n is made sufficiently large, it can be shown that highly survivable system structures can be built—even in the thermonuclear era.” See Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1964), p. 16. Baran’s point here is that destruction of a network is an all or nothing game. One must destroy all nodes, not simply take out a few key hubs. But the opposite is not true. A network needs only to destroy a single hub within a hierarchical power to score a dramatic triumph. Thus, Baran’s advice to the American military was to become network-like. And once it did the nuclear threat was no longer a catastrophic threat to communications and mobility (but remains, of course, a catastrophic threat to human life, material resources, and so on). [73] Arquilla & Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars, p. 15, emphasis removed from original. Contrast this line of thinking with that of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the nineteen sixties, whom Senator Gary Hart described as advocating “more centralized management in the Pentagon.” See Gary Hart & William Lind, America Can Win (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986), p. 14. Or contrast it in the current milieu with the Powell Doctrine, named after four-star general and Secretary of State Colin Powell, which states that any American military action should have the following: clearly stated objectives; an exit strategy; the ability to use overwhelming force; and that vital strategic interests must be at stake. This type of thinking is more in line with a modernist, Clausewitzian theory of military strategy, that force will be overcome by greater force, that conflict should be a goal-oriented act rather than one of continuance, that conflict is waged by state actors, and so on. [74] Gary Hart & William Lind, America Can Win (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1986), pp. 240, 249. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net