Software Controls Bite Syria

Over the weekend the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/world/middleeast/battle-heats-up-over-exports-of-surveillance-technology.html?_r=0] published a story about an export violation of software sold to law enforcement to monitor potential criminals and terrorists.  As I mentioned in my last book, The New Cyberwar, some countries are using this software to monitor their own citizens.  There are a lot of places where it is used, none of which are supposed to have it.  This case is a good example of how they get it.

Strangely enough, our own U.S. industries are trying to head off the kind of controls that the government wants to impose.   Damian Paletta has an interesting story in the Wall Street Journal ( U.S. Firms Fight Global Cyberweapons Deal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-firms-fight-global-cyberweapon-deal-1444952599 )  about U.S. industry try to challenge the export controls to be placed on software which has potential cyberwar applications.  The Journal article says it this way:

"  Many of these companies say these rules—which would force them to apply for a series of licenses to export technology that could be used for cyberwarfare—would harm their business while doing little to stop oppressive regimes or others from using intrusion software that surreptitiously monitors communication.

I have some trouble with this kind of argument, especially coming from the likes of Cisco Systems Inc., Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing Co., and Raytheon Co.  What it boils down to is the uses made of some of their software, not the software usefulness to law enforcement or allied countries and their businesses.  If some of their tools are used to test networks for vulnerabilities, we would be hard pressed to object to them selling it.  Everyone should buy some software that checks for vulnerabilities and it might as well be from us.  That is not what we are talking about here.  


The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has published some interesting reports on cyberwar activities of other countries, and this report is no exception.  see Information Controls during Military Operations
http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=93490dabfd80bcbe6e4f28a8c&id=1bbc3c01f1&e=0205fbe9cc

The claim is that as the war in Yemen heated up, cyberwar became a part of those activities as much as the conventional forces of Saudi Arabia and Iran who are really fighting this war.

Iran attacked the Saudi's own national oil company in the same way North Korea attacked South Korea and Sony.  This kind of technical arms proliferation is not something we should tolerate.  Iran and North Korea are getting away with it every day.

"We find that information controls implemented by Yemen’s national ISP, YemenNet, a state-owned and operated national ISP that has served the entire country since 2001, and which is now controlled by the Houthi rebels, have changed substantially since the Houthi takeover of the capital and, by extension, control over the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.  Content filtering now includes a wide variety of political content, and blocking of the entire .il (Israel) domain. We also determine that all political filtering that targets local and regional news and media content is undertaken in a non-transparent way, with fake network error pages delivered back to users instead of block pages."

You can bet the Houthi's have been getting a lot of help from Iran, since the Houthi are not well known in cyberwar circles.  Iran has been using some of these techniques in their own country and helping others like Syria do the same.  We can only hope that their branching out comes back to haunt them one day.