The Christian Science Monitor interviews Mike McConnell, former director of National Intelligence, the authority over all US intelligence agencies, and of the NSA, which has recently teamed up with Google to probe cyber attacks:
Nathan Gardels: Defense analysts say that 90 percent of the probes and scans of American defense systems as well as commercial computer networks come from China. Is China the chief culprit?
Mike McConnell: I don’t know if it is 90 percent. Probably the best in the world in the cyberrealm are the United States, the Russians, the British, the Israelis, and the French. The next tier is the Chinese, but they are determined to be the best.
We are an open society. A virtual sieve for cyberpenetration…
The Chinese are exploiting our systems for information advantage – looking for the characteristics of a weapons system by a defense contractor or academic research on plasma physics, for example – not in order to destroy data and do damage. But, for now, I believe they are deterred from destroying data both by the need to export to the US and by the need to keep stable currency and stable global markets.
But what happens if we have a war? A capability for information exploitation could quickly be used for information attack to destroy systems on which the US depends. Every nation with advanced technology is exploring options to establish policy and rules for how to use this new capability to wage war.
