A Conversation That Never Happened.

Attribution Error: “Well, Sir, the Ministry of State Security has absolutely nothing to gain by going after Microsoft Exchange. It’s not its style – way too public. The MSS would never draw attention to its activities in so dramatic a fashion. I mean, there is absolutely nothing in it for them to have the world believing Beijing is reading its e-mails. The motto of the MSS has always been: ‘Nobody knows that we went in, and nobody knows what we took out’. I just don’t believe it was them.”

WELLINGTON HARBOUR was always worth looking at. Sipping thoughtfully at his cup of Earl Grey, Adam Freeman took in the comforting vista. He was in need of comfort, he told himself, after what he could only describe as a very odd meeting. Bamboozling the public was one thing, the preservation of national security more or less required a certain amount of economy with the truth. But bamboozling ourselves, he thought, not to mention our Minister, that’s dangerous. Seeing things clearly, he had always assumed, was the Alpha and the Omega of keeping the nation secure.

A gentle knock on his office door, interrupted these uneasy musings. He looked up to see the youthful countenance of Matthew Stubbs. Youthful but full of care, Adam thought to himself. The young IT wizard looked as worried as he felt.

“Come in, Matthew,” he said placing his teacup carefully on its saucer. “What can I do for you?”

“Forgive the interruption, Sir,” the young man replied, “but I was wondering if I could share some thoughts with you in confidence.”

“Depends on the thoughts, Matthew. Depends on the thoughts.”

The young man smiled wanly. “I suppose it does, Sir, yes.”

“Sit down, boy, and let’s find out.”

Matthew seated himself in the nearest of the comfortable leather chairs positioned to one side of his superior’s desk. Adam swung round to face him.

“Well then, let’s have it. What are these thoughts that require my confidence and discretion?”

“All that stuff about the Microsoft Exchange hack being sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of State Security that we fed to the Minister.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I just don’t think it’s true, Sir. I mean, I don’t see how it could possibly be true.”

“Go on.” Inwardly, Adam breathed a huge sigh of relief. He wasn’t the only one who thought this intel was dodgy.

“Well, Sir, the MSS has absolutely nothing to gain by going after Microsoft Exchange. It’s not its style – way too public. The MSS would never draw attention to its activities in so dramatic a fashion. I mean, there is absolutely nothing in it for them to have the world believing Beijing is reading its e-mails. The motto of the MSS has always been: ‘Nobody knows that we went in, and nobody knows what we took out’. I just don’t believe it was them.”

“You’re not buying the ‘Advanced Persistent Threat 40’ linkage, Matthew?”

“APT 40? No, Sir. They’re just a bunch of varsity students, MSS interns probably, looking to earn brownie points with their future bosses. They’d never dream of hacking Microsoft without the express backing of the highest military and party authorities. And, as I said, the highest authorities would never expose the PRC to the sort of global outrage that the disclosure of such an operation would inevitably entail.”

Adam leaned forward, fixing the young man with his best basilisk glare. “So, if it wasn’t the MSS, and it wasn’t APT 40, then who was it?”

“Best guess, Sir? It wasn’t the Chinese at all. My money, as always, would be on the Russians. Oh, I know, I know, it’s possible that the hack could have been the work of a Chinese criminal operation. Thing is, Sir, crime gangs like that don’t really exist in the PRC. Security and surveillance is just too all-enveloping. Which isn’t to say that corruption isn’t rampant throughout Chinese society. But acquiring and selling real estate by illegal means is one thing; endangering the security of the state by going after a software giant like Microsoft, well, that’s something else altogether. Get caught doing something like that, and it’s bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head time – no mucking ‘round.”

Adam, nodded grimly.

“But, Russia’s different.” Matthew continued – warming to his subject. “In Russia, corruption isn’t a bug – it’s a feature. Where the Chinese still believe in the possibility of a perfected world, the Russians have embraced chaos as their friend. Russian nationalists know that with the break-up of the Soviet Union, the geopolitical heft required to claim – let alone maintain – great power status just isn’t there anymore. The people who matter in the Russian Federation know their country is getting weaker, and that there’s not a lot they can do to stop it. So, they have, quite correctly, concluded that the only viable geopolitical strategy available to them is to make their principal rivals even weaker. To tip them into an even tighter spiral of decline.”

“Am I to take from that, Matthew, that you buy into the ‘Trump As Russian Trojan Horse’ argument?”

“To a certain extent, Sir. But, honestly, I don’t think Putin and the FSB are all that interested in complex plans. Their strategy is much more one of manufacturing as many dragon’s teeth as they can, and sowing them wherever they can. That’s why it’s so difficult to separate the Russian state from the Russian criminal fraternity. The Kremlin likes – and needs – a revolving-door of plausibly deniable cut-outs. If a plan works, they’ll claim it as their own. If it fails, then those involved will either be made examples of in a courtroom cage, or buried in a lonely forest clearing.

“So, if you’re ‘Chaos Theory’ is correct, Matthew, then the Russians wouldn’t hesitate to penetrate and disable Microsoft Exchange. The more mayhem the merrier?”

“Exactly, Sir.”

“And the same strategy isn’t available to the Chinese?”

“Not really, Sir. Above all else, the Chinese prize order. Chaos terrifies them. Chaos is what follows when the Mandate of Heaven is withdrawn. Chaos is proof that you’ve failed. And, from what I’ve observed over the past few years, the Communist Party of China doesn’t really ‘do’ failure. Which is why I was so surprised to hear the Director-General attribute the Microsoft hack to the Chinese Government with such certainty – to the Minister, of all people! I mean we don’t really ‘do’ certainty – do we Sir?”

Adam leaned back in his chair and chuckled. He’d picked Matthew Stubbs as a high-flyer from the day he joined the Bureau, and he was congratulating himself heartily for his perspicacity. Had he not been feeling quite so pleased with himself, then perhaps he would not have responded to Matthew’s question so fulsomely.

“No, Matthew, you’re quite right, we don’t ‘do’ certainty – not in matters of national security – not unless we’re told.”

Matthew’s brow furrowed theatrically. “I’m sorry, Sir?”

“Oh come on, Matthew, join the dots?” Truth to tell, Adam was only just joining the dots himself. Even so, he was quite sure he’s solved the puzzle that had been confusing him and his young protégé.”

“ Think, Matthew, think! The news about the ‘Pegasus’ intercepts hits the front pages all over North America and Europe. The whole world is treated to a cautionary tale involving the Israelis, one of their plausibly deniable cut-outs – the mysterious NSO Group – and a piece of spyware that allows all manner of dubious regimes to take over the cellphones of political and/or journalistic irritants and transform them into more-or-less continuous transmitters of high-grade, and potentially fatal, intelligence.”

“Fatal, Sir?”

“Fatal, Matthew. How do you think the Saudi Crown Prince knew exactly where to send his team of assassins to chop up poor old Jamal Khashoggi? Pegasus, Matthew, Pegasus. Not the sort of story that reflects too well upon our Five Eyes friends and their friends – is it? Especially when all of us are using Pegasus – or something as close to it as makes little difference – to keep tabs on our own ‘irritants’. Besides, start people thinking about Western-sponsored hacking, and pretty soon they’ll be remembering Stuxnet and all the fun the Israelis and Americans had wrecking the Iranians’ centrifuges.”

“Ah.”

“Yes, Mathew, ‘Ah.’ Ah, with bells on! So, what is the standard operating procedure when the misdeeds of the West’s intelligence gathering agencies start making headlines?”

“Distraction by way of Projection, Sir. We immediately accuse our enemies of doing exactly what we’ve been doing. Nothing resonates so forcefully with the mainstream news media like an accusation packed with the raw emotional power of psychological projection. Lay a trail using that as bait and the newshounds are off like foxhounds.”

“Matthew, I am supremely confident that you have a very bright future with the Bureau – providing you remember one thing.”

“What’s that, Sir?”

“Conversations like this one never happen.”

“What conversation, Sir?”

This short story was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 23 July 2021.

The Greatest Cyber-Weapon May Be The Truth.

Who's Hacking Who? So, let’s be clear: the very same Western powers who were voicing their alarm at China’s alleged outsourcing of its cyber-attack capabilities to private actors, are the identical Western powers who, for years, have winked at their friends in Jerusalem outsourcing their intelligence gathering to a shadowy Tel Aviv outfit known simply as the NSO Group.

JUST ONCE, wouldn’t it be nice to hear a government give voice to the bleeding-bloody-obvious? To see a Prime Minister, just once, drop the pretense that her “official version” of events, and the truth, are anything other than very distant relations. If nothing else, it would be an extremely interesting experiment. How would the world react?

Such were the thoughts that passed through my head on Tuesday morning when I heard the news about the US-led criticism of the so-called “Chinese Hackers”. Characterised as a shot across China’s bow by the fed-up Western powers – and New Zealand – this ultimatum masquerading as a missive called upon the Chinese Government to rein-in its errant cyber-warriors, or face something considerably worse than a warning being directed at Beijing.

Meanwhile, in the capitals of those Western powers, highly respected newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Guardian were running a horror story about a cyber-weapon called “Pegasus”. Developed by the Israelis, and marketed to a veritable rogues’ gallery of authoritarian nation states, Pegasus allows its purchaser to take over the cellphones of political and/or journalistic irritants and transform them into more-or-less continuous transmitters of high-grade (and potentially fatal) intelligence.

So, let’s be clear: the very same Western powers who were voicing their alarm at China’s alleged outsourcing of its cyber-attack capabilities to private actors, are the identical Western powers who, for years, have winked at their friends in Jerusalem outsourcing their intelligence gathering to a shadowy Tel Aviv outfit known simply as the NSO Group. What’s more, these same powers are expecting us to believe that only “baddies” like the Saudi Arabians and the right-wing populist Hungarians are availing themselves of this state-of-the-art surveillance technology. That the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia (and New Zealand?) would never dream of using Pegasus (or something very like it) to spy on their own “irritants”.

That’s why it would have been so incredibly refreshing to hear Andrew Little, the cabinet minister responsible for the GCSB, call a media conference to announce that the cyber-attack capabilities of the Chinese Government and their arms-length surrogates had now reached the point where effective retaliation against Western penetration of Chinese cyber-space has been demonstrated in the most practical and potentially destructive fashion.

At the very least, such an admission would clear the air of all the smoke which the “Five Eyes” intelligence gathering partnership has been blowing in New Zealanders’ faces for so long. It would also relieve us of the Orwellian obligation to go on believing the unbelievable. Namely, that we and our Five Eyes partners are not constantly engaged in probing and penetrating the cyber-defences of the Chinese, the Russians, and anyone else who pisses off our big mates. That we are not constantly seeking to discover how much they know about what we know; and to, whenever possible, use our own cyber-weapons to degrade, disable and destroy any competitive economic, military and technological edge these “enemy” countries might possess.

With the air thus cleared, we could, perhaps, be spared the sort of rhetoric spouted by one commentator who, on Tuesday morning, compared a recent Chinese hack attack to a “ram raid”. This colourful metaphor casts the United States and its allies in the role of the innocent shopkeeper whose front window is smashed-in, and merchandise stolen, by a car-load of delinquent Orientals. Talk about psychological projection! As if that same innocent shopkeeper, in March 2003, had not, in complete violation of the UN Charter and contrary to International Law, ram-raided his way into a shop called Iraq – and laid it waste.

How much more liberating it would be – for the whole world – if Jacinda Ardern delivered a speech to the United Nations in which she pledged to do all within her power to persuade the great powers of the world that cyber-warfare, like nuclear warfare, can only end in the mutual and assured destruction of the contending powers. That computer viruses, no less than biological viruses, have the potential to bring our intricately interconnected and acutely vulnerable world to its knees.

Imagine her pledging before the UN General Assembly that, henceforth, New Zealand would maintain an exclusively defensive cyber posture, and, paraphrasing Lincoln, declare: “With malice toward none, with kindness to all, let us strive to do everything we can to achieve a just and lasting cyber-peace between nations.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 July 2021.

By Other Means.

Without Power: The Venezuelan Government is under no illusions concerning those responsible for the energy blackout currently afflicting its citizens. President Nicolas Maduro has declared his country to be the victim of a cyber-attack initiated and overseen by the US Government.

IF WAR is “the continuation of politics by other means” (Carl von Clausewitz) then cyber-war is the continuation of war by other means.

When the US Government warned the rest of the world that, when it comes to securing regime change in Venezuela, “nothing is off the table”, most observers assumed it was talking about some form of military intervention. (An impression encouraged by a video-clip of National Security Advisor John Bolton’s hand-scrawled aide memoire “5,000 troops”.)

Thousands of Gringo soldiers planting their combat boots on the sovereign territory of Venezuela was not, however, a prospect which many Latin American leaders relished explaining to their own people. Better by far to have the Venezuelan generals abandon President Nicolas Maduro in favour of the CIA’s hand-picked “Interim President”, Juan Guaido.

Unfortunately for Uncle Sam and his lickspittle lieutenants, the Venezuelan armed forces refused to follow the script Washington had written for them. Guaido was able to call out the Chavista’s sworn enemies among the Venezuelan elites and their middle-class enablers but, as the events of the past 20 years have proved, these guarimberos are insufficiently numerous to be decisive. The Venezuelan police, backed by the army and the popular militia, can contain their protests without resorting to deadly force.

Clearly, a change of strategy was required.

And, in the finest traditions of CIA, Pentagon and State Department contingency-planning, an alternative strategy was ready to hand. According a nine-year-old memo circulated by CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) back in 2010 – and subsequently released by Wikileaks:

A key to Chavez’s [Hugo Chavez was the leader of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution and Maduro’s predecessor in the presidential palace – C.T.] current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector. There is the grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010. Water levels at the Guris dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption sufficiently to compensate for the deteriorating industry. This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system. This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.

Taking down Venezuela’s electricity grid was thus identified as a potentially decisive intervention.

CANVAS, by the way, was born out of the so-called “colour revolutions” that subverted the governments of, among other states, Serbia, Georgia and the Ukraine. It specialises in mobilising young people – usually middle-class students – who are sent onto the streets in what appears to be a campaign of spontaneous, non-violent resistance to autocracy. Behind the screen of these ongoing democratic protests, however, CANVAS unleashes much less acceptable political forces, trained and equipped by the CIA to bring down regimes deemed hostile to US interests. That CANVAS turned up in Venezuela surprised nobody familiar with its sinister record of political destabilisation.

As John McEvoy, writing for the left-wing UK website, The Canary, noted in his 12 March posting, “the Venezuelan opposition tried to include ‘damage to facilities of the National Electric System’ within an amnesty bill in 2016.” Tellingly, the bill demanded amnesty for the perpetrators of any and all protest activities directed at Venezuela’s socialist government since the abortive right-wing coup of 2002. The list was a long one and revealed the lengths to which the right was prepared to go to overthrow Chavez’s democratically elected administration.

With Venezuela’s “National Electric System” now well-and-truly damaged, the question is one of agency. The US Government and its multitude of mouthpieces have been quick to blame the nationwide outages on the maladministration of Maduro’s government. This is what happens, they insist, when socialists take over. Nothing works. Nowhere in these reports, however, is there reference to the US embargo on the export of the spare parts needed to keep Venezuela’s hydro-electric generators and transmission infrastructure operating. No mention, either, of the embargo on the coal exports Venezuela needs to fuel the national electric system’s back-up power stations.

Also lacking in the mainstream reports is the catastrophic effect of a prolonged electricity outage on the Venezuelan capital’s water supply. Caracas is situated nearly a kilometre above sea-level, which means that its fresh water supply must be pumped up to the capital’s inhabitants from below. Take out the electricity and you take out the pumps. People can make do without electricity for a few days, but they cannot survive without water.

In the words of the leaked CANVAS memo: “This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez [or Maduro] can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system.”

The Venezuelan Government is under no illusions concerning those responsible for the current crisis. Maduro has declared his country to be the victim of a cyber-attack initiated and overseen by the US Government. To those who roll their eyes and complain about tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists, supporters of the Venezuelan Government need only offer one word: Stuxnet.

Stuxnet was the highly-sophisticated computer “worm” developed by the USA and Israel and introduced to the IT infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear programme. It proved to be a devastating cyber-weapon, playing a major part in driving the Iranians to the negotiating table and removing the threat of an Iranian bomb.

Compromising the Venezuelan hydro-electric generation system would likely have proved a great deal easier. With the generals refusing to revolt and Guaido’s guarimberos unable to defeat the forces of law and order, it was time to resort to “other means”.

Really? Yes, really. Those who doubt the United States’ willingness to prepare for and launch such an attack should consider the words of Paul Buchanan, an American academic who has spent much of his life working in and around the US national security apparatus. Writing on his blog Kiwipolitico on 28 February, Buchanan had this to say about the likely preparations for regime change in Venezuela:

As the crisis accentuates and the impasse continues, US military planners will pore over maps and powerpoints, then hammer down the details of the means, methods and tactics to be used, as well as Plan B and C scenarios. Assets will be discretely transferred to staging areas and liaison with host militaries and resistance groups will be established. Strategic targets such as oil derricks and refineries will be given special attention.

As well, it would seem, as Venezuela’s national electricity generation and transmission infrastructure.

Some people will no doubt say: “Well at least this is a bloodless intervention.”

Bloodless? Tell that to the patients who died in Caracas’ hospitals as the emergency generators gave out and the equipment upon which their lives depended ceased to function.

War, be it conventional war, or cyber-war, is hell – and always will be.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 14 March 2019.