Fernando Alcoforado*
This article aims to show how science and technology are used in cyber warfare as one of the weapons of modern warfare and what to do to use it solely for the good of humanity. Cyber warfare relies on information technology and, in modern times, also on the advances provided by artificial intelligence. Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science based on scientific research. Cybernetics as a scientific field began during World War II with Norbert Wiener as a forerunner working on computer programming and control mechanisms for anti-aircraft artillery.
Wiener’s aim with cybernetics was to develop research to create an artificial system capable of performing hitherto essentially human functions, such as performing complex calculation patterns, predict the future and trajectory of an aircraft. At this time, Wiener became interested in the principle of feedback and control, which consists of the use of detectors that act as sensory organs and collect information on the performance of functions expected for a given equipment.
Cyber warfare basically consists of the use of digital attacks for espionage or sabotage purposes against a country’s strategic or tactical structures. Espionage aims to steal tactical and strategic information such as troop movement data, the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s war system and any other valuable information on resources needed for war. In sabotage, it can range from a simple action like taking down the servers of a government site to something extremely harmful like launching a nuclear warhead. Sabotage comes down to “doing something” as opposed to espionage, which comes down to “figuring something out”.
In cyber warfare, state-backed hackers, whether members of a country’s military forces or financed by such a country, attack computers and networks of opposing countries that affect resources needed for the war. They do it just like any other computer or system, that is, they study the system deeply, discover its flaws, and use those flaws to control or destroy that system.
Hackers can use confidential information intended for others (espionage) to gain the lead in the battle against their opponent. Hackers can find out the speed of a missile and build another missile or a plane that can overtake it. Hackers can find out where the enemy is moving your troops and plan an ambush. Hackers can find out which scientists are important in the creation of these weapons, or which politician was indispensable in raising funds for such a war system and attack them directly using, for example, drones.
When the country has control of these systems, it is also possible to sabotage people and structures. By discovering how troops are communicating, the country gains access to the network so that it can confuse the enemy and invade their base. It could break into enemy systems / accounts and cheat them by impersonating one of them. Or the country could use this information to control them and blackmail people over something found on your computer or kidnap their families using private information..
Destroying the systems of enemy countries has one obvious result: it destroys what controls that system, and consequently prevents it from functioning. A common example of cyber-warfare is the use of attacks to disable government websites and social networks. This tactic was effectively used by the Russians during the South Ossetian War in 2008, causing chaos and spreading false information to the population before and during the Russian invasion.
Cyber warfare targets any sector important to the enemy’s infrastructure. This means sectors such as the army, national defense and the war industry. However, these targets may also be weapons factories,, mining and other factories that assist in the operation of these factories and the electrical system that supplies power to all of these sectors. In its scariest version, cyber war may target the most important strategic resource of a country that is its population. A hacker could make a terrorist attack to destabilize or demotivate a fighting population. This implies in triggering financial warfare with attacks on the financial sectors, which would cause economic damage or attacks on communication systems to disable the telephone network and the internet.
Cyber war makes no distinction between civilian and military targets. Although a missile causes much greater damage than a virus, a cyber attack can result in civilian casualties and deaths. If there were an attack on the energy system of any country and the system was destroyed by a cyber attack it would not only be the weapons factories that would stop working. Such an attack would also result in traffic accidents, interrupted surgeries, life-support machine failures when large numbers of people could die.
It is very difficult to find the author of a cyber-attack or the governments that fund these attacks. One aspect that makes digital weapons worse than nuclear weapons is finding out who made the attack. It is very easy to hide the origin of such an attack by masking the identification of the author of the attacks. Even if the government finds out from which computer the attack was carried out, it is still difficult to figure out who was the person behind the screen and it is even more difficult to know whether or not he was a government agent.
Clausewitz stated that war is an act of violence to impose the will of a belligerent on his enemy. The Chinese Sun Tzu adds that “the greatest military prowess is to win without fighting”: cunning and manipulation have more advantages than aggression to impose their will on others. Cyber warfare, defined by using means to control countries or companies, radically transforms the three historical components of warfare: espionage, sabotage, and information warfare, along the lines of Sun Tzu.
There is no doubt about the use of cyber capability to gain political, economic and military advantage. According to news, on the one hand, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and on the other, the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom and France have increasingly sophisticated means of obtaining information from governments and businesses to influence the lives of people and destroy your opponents infrastructure and strategic objectives.
The world has entered a permanent phase of war: no battle front and no rules of engagement. Cyber warfare resembles insurrectional warfare, with the difference that it can plan and execute action from a distance, away from the enemy. Using artificial intelligence algorithms will multiply the impact of actions and create new vulnerabilities in the opponent. Identification of their authors will be more difficult, by using robots to allow the spread of false information on social networks or to make available with free access algorithms allowing people to be included in any video and to put in their mouth whatever they want say it. It is possible that cyber espionage, sabotage, or influence operations are already being conducted in a completely autonomous manner, requiring only the green light of someone.
The understanding that 5G technology can be exploited for espionage and sabotage of infrastructure, communications and financial center facilities has become a new concern and is at the root of the ban on Huawei’s purchase of products for public or private 5G networks in the United States. The new cold war between the United States and China has started with trade, but it should move quickly to technology, where China shows to be ahead of Washington in advancing the latest generation 5G.
Everything just reported makes it abundantly clear that science and technology are at the service not only of human emancipation but also of war and the destruction of humanity. In fact science and technology have come to be used for good and evil. The expectation that science and technology would be used exclusively for the advancement of humanity has been painfully interrupted by events that have marked today’s society, chief among them undoubtedly the catastrophes of World War I and World War II. Indeed science has contributed to the barbarism of two world wars with the invention of powerful and destructive weaponry and continues to contribute to the sophistication of modern warfare.
In their work A Dialética do Esclarecimento (The Dialectic of Enlightenment) (Zahar Editora, 1985), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, philosophers linked to the Frankfurt School, claim that “affiliates, distant from individuals, capitalism, science and technology, now merged as one instance, consolidate their supremacy over contemporary society, determining their course with the same impudence and impersonality of an invisible hand ”.
Michael Lowy, Franco-Brazilian sociologist and philosopher and director of social science research at CNRS – French National Center for Scientific Research, states that modern barbarism or “barbarism generated within so-called civilized societies” is characterized by the use of technical means. modernization (industrialization of homicide, mass extermination thanks to cutting-edge scientific technologies), the impersonality of the massacre (entire populations – men and women, children and the elderly – are “eliminated” with as little personal contact as possible between decision makers and the victims), for the bureaucratic, administrative, effective, planned, “rational” (instrumentally) management of barbaric acts and for the use of modernizing legitimating ideology: biological, hygienic, scientific [LOWY, Michael. Barbárie e modernidade no século 20 (Barbarism and modernity in the twenty century). Published in Brazil by the newspaper “Em Tempo” – emtempo@ax.apc.org and originally in French in the journal “Critique Communiste” No. 157, hiver 2000].
To make science and technology use for the good of humanity, we must end the wars that will only occur if there is a Planetary Social Contract that ensures the welfare state in each country of the world and the restructuring of the UN to mediate international conflicts and ensure world peace. With world governance through a restructured and strengthened UN, it will be possible to fight the war and end the bloodshed that has characterized human history throughout history. War monuments must be replaced by peace monuments from the establishment of a democratic world government.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 79, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).
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