Used the tactic in past conflict. He spoke at the think tank new america in washington dc. This is one hour and a half. Now let me introduce fred. Perhaps his most important distinction i would say is that he worked previously as an american fellow but he has done one or two other things in his illustrious career. He is the National Security columnist and author of four books the most recent book which i think is here to tell us and has at least gone over with this new book that some one might not necessarily imagine. Fred is a Pulitzer Prize journalist back in his days at the boston globe and i am very pleased to be able to host him here today. On the format, shortly we will allow fred to give him a minute to describe the book and tell us about it what is in it and then i will take the opportunity to have a conversation, dig into a little more and explore some of the themes and what we might conclude that. Then i will open it up to the floor to give you the opportunity to ask fred some questions. Then we will wrap up at 1 45 and that should give us plenty of time for an interesting conversation. Without further a do, fred. [applause] so i will speak for a few minutes here. The subtitle of this book is the secret history of cyber war and i was working on it and i have a subtitle already worked out as i did know the title would be but how long is the history is this. As people think did it start with the discovery of the building in shanghai but no, in fact he goes back all the way to the dawn of the internet itself. In 1967 when the ark and that was about to go up, precursor to the internet, that was a network where all the contractors in the Defense Department would toss out with one another in their computer programs and there was a man name will philip where and head of the Computer Department and he was on the Scientific Advisory board and he broke of paper that has been declassified since then and he said here is the thing and heres the problem was to create a Computer Network, once you have access from multiple unsecured locations you are going to create inherent vulnerabilities. You will not be able to keep a secret anymore. When i was doing my research i talked with this man named steve was the Deputy Director of our cut and i asked him if he read the paper and i said what did you think of it and he said i took it to the guys on the team and i got the story confirmed about and they read it and they said jesus, and dont settle us with the security requirement but look at how hard it was to do this. Its like asking the right brothers and their first plane had to fly 20 miles carried 50 passengers. Let us do this one step at a time and besides the russians will be able to do this for decades. Well, decades, two or three decades but by that time whole systems and networks had gone up with no provision for security whatsoever. I see this as the big apple in the digital garden of eden. The situation created and warned about and created from the very beginning. Now, all of this was unnoticed until june of 1983 when Ronald Reagan watched the movie [inaudible] at camp david. One of the guys who wrote it, not the one who is coming here tomorrow but the other his parents were in hollywood and producers and the new Ronald Reagan so he got in the film and he watched it in the following wednesday hes back in the white house and there was a big meeting to discuss the Missile Launch that you might remember and at one point everyone there is National Security advisors, some people on the hill and he puts down his index cards and says anybody seen this movie called [inaudible] and no one had seen it but he launches into this very lengthy plot description and people are looking around like where is is going and he turns to general john, and chairman of the chief of staff and he said could Something Like this happen and could someone break into one of our most secure computers and he said ill look into that mr. President. He comes back a week later and said mr. President , the problem is much worse than you think. One year later there was a National Security assistant director and i saw the president about telecommunications in computers and was the first document of its source but it took a strange direction. It was written by the nsa and the way they wrote it the nsa was controlled the standards for all computers in the United States. There are some people on capitol hill who didnt go along with that and so they rewrote it so its basically the nsa would have security over classified stuff in the Commerce Department would have Everything Else. While the Commerce Department didnt know anything in the have no ability to do this so the nsa had no interest in securing these channels and they were interested at the time purely in exploiting security gaps, not in filling them. For about a decade nothing was done about this problem and i wont go any further. Im just giving you an introduction but the point is these two incidences, [inaudible] and the dawn of the internet and the extremely unlikely coincidence of Ronald Reagan watching war games and asking the question that had everyone in the room rolling their eyes like where is the old man going now led to the systems, programs and more than that, the issues of policies and the controversies and the tensions that persist to this very day. One more little thing about the wargames before i go back and sit down and have a conversation, this is something i discovered almost by accident. It turns out that the two writers of wargames, you probably have all and im assuming you remember or have seen wargames but he gets into the computer by he has something called human dialing, this is for the age of the internet and he hooked up a system and it automatically dials the phone number in the area code and when the modem is reached a record that number is and he goes back. He thanks that he is just last on to some new online game and he almost starts world war iii but the screenwriters puzzled because they wondered if this was possible and could somebody and theres got to be a closed system, right . Could someone from the outside get it and they lived in santa monica and they called the Rand Corporation and they wanted to talk to willis where they went in and talk to him and he was a very nice guy and they laid out the problem and he said you know, i designed the computer and i designed the software. Computer and you are right, it is a closed system there is always some officer who wants to work from home on weekends so he leaves the port open so he can get it. You know, the thing is the only secure computer is a computer that nobody can use. That is the lesson that weve all learned since then and now i will sit and have a conversation. Thank you very much for that. He went on to write another movie called [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] we will be talking to him on wednesday about what his next movie will be about so we can see what direction this goes in. Before we get there, you have written a history of cyber war and traditionally when people write books about war they write about battlefields in people tend to study those battles so that they can get a greater sense of how to fight battles in the future and create brittle and strategy. What do you think having done the research of the events between 1983 and now that the cyber war should look back on and instead of looking at the battlefield to have taken a lesson to study for the future. There are no battlefields to study unfortunately but i guess a typical moment came in 1997. There was the director, new director of the nsa at the time, he had been commander of something called the air force Information Warfare and they were doing a lot of things about what we would now call Cyber Security and cyber war and he couldnt get any of the other officers interested at all. Back then, fighting wars was dropping bombs on people. No one even knew how to use computers. So he decided that to get anybody interested he knew about the vulnerabilities so he got permission to do a wargame where the five team members of the nsa would hack in to the networks of the Defense Department they had to go through a lot of lawyers and one of the conditions had to use commercially available equipment and they couldnt use their topsecret stuff to domestic networks. They did this and they prepared for it for a few months, scoping out the networks and scoping out they would do and those who have been victimized not to know about and the only ones who knew about it for the people who actually were doing it in the lawyers. They laid two weeks aside to do this and it turned out within four days they had hacked into all of the Defense Department networks including how the president communicate and sends orders and all of it mercilessly happened and sometimes theres a marker and sometimes they would send messages back false messages, mess up orders, peoples heads were being screwed with and they didnt know what went on and there was only one guy, a marine out in the pacific who knew that something was going on and even if you knew what was going on there were no protocol in what you do about this. You could unplug the computer from the internet which was the smart thing to do. Everyone else when the debate happened and they would go through heres what we found and here is what passwords he dug out of a dumpster here and here is the tape recorder when they called up the secretary and said i was an it guy and need to change the password for everybody and they told them and everything like that and everyone was appalled and that was when deputy secretary of defense said okay, who is in charge. Who is in charge and nobody was in charge. Then they started to set up warnings for the for seven watches which is a good thing because within a few months the wedding had to start attacking the us military and it had been going on longer than that but the thing there was solar sunrise where some serious hacking turned out to be to citizens of california and someone said these are just two kids in california but two kids in california to do this what about the nationstates and a few months later they called us and then moonlight maze happened which was someone really [inaudible] they were looking for particular things and we trace that back to a, it was the russians they were using servers from the Russian Academy and those were the two and then the chinese started doing it and then operations by the way, one thing is interesting. Wargame was called [inaudible] fever and they noticed some franchise strolling around and this is already really happening and in 1997. So, then there were other things and there was some sort of [inaudible] do you remember when clinton was planning to of take over haiti because of the warlords and they were looking up work plans and one part of it was how do we get into and how do we get into haiti had a rudimentary air Defense System and didnt want anyone to get shut down so how do we get into their air defense and this guy in hand wanted one of his tech guys said i found out that the haitian air defense is wired into the commercial telephone and i know how to make all the phones in haiti [inaudible] thats how they were going to deflect and defeat the air Defense System. In yugoslavia later clinton war against [inaudible] and remember the bombing went on for weeks, months and months there was a cyber element to it. Computers were run by phone stated some of the same thing. They got into this serbian phone system, cia guy went in and put in a plant and then they were able to hone in on this plant and they were able the air Defense System was wired to the phone system and they were able to go in there and missed their radars. On the screen it would look like there were planes in the northwest but they were coming from the west so they were aimed at the wrong spot. They would send messages to [inaudible]s cronies saying we know you owe this plant and we will turn out the lights and get rid of [inaudible] and they said, you know, forget about it and they would turn off the lights and then say if you keep this up will pop you tomorrow. That is how he lost his they were threatened by Information Warfare. This is the first Information Warfare campaign. [inaudible] after that we know about some of the things,. Net and there were some things and ill give one more than we should get into a different topic when the israelis bombed the nations reactor in syria which was really a [inaudible] a lot of people even the syrians didnt acknowledge this because those at the scene had to go about 15n territory without [inaudible] they would rather not acknowledge that it happened but what happened was they use the program that was developed by the air force and implemented by the israeli nsa and the intercepted not the radar and not the radar screens but a beta link between the radar in the screens. The people looking at the screens sought nothing and the radar wasnt detecting planes and affect the people in the airplanes were hearing thing and so it took a little nerve to continue but they also had people and they were able to intercept the signal off the monitor that the radar operators were looking at to make sure that this worked, to make sure they really were seeing nothing. Then they were seeing nothing so the planes got in, dropped the bombs, destroyed the factory and they were mystified. There screens show nothing. Actually, should do one more and that is the iraq war. I wrote a book called the insurgents and i accepted the idea that this is the only thing that i will qualify or retract a little bit but there was a big turnaround in 2007 and basically the surge and turn of strategy. One other thing was the nsa and the nsa sent over a threeyear period to iraq in 22 of them were killed on missions to capture insurgents but they basically captured the computers and got into the passwords and into the emails and dated things like sent messages throughout their insurgents saying lets meet at such and such a place tomorrow at 4 00 oclock and there would be special Operation Forces waiting there to kill them or they detected from drones someone planning a roadside bomb and it used to be you could follow them that you had to send the data back to washington and then it would go back and would take 16 hours. Within one minute they could target these guys. In 2007 through these tech leaps they killed 4000 insurgents which is one reason why the israeli turnaround did i remember the first person that asked about this and he looked alarmed that i knew anything about it and said well, yeah, when the histories get written about this this will be the equivalent of breaking the german submarine codes in world war ii which wasnt revealed for decades after the fact. Cyber has been a part of these operations, these plans and thinking for quite a long time. It is just taking you back to one of the antidotes you tell of the delegation that got sent to moscow to welcome the yeah, they realized that this was russia and of course this was postcold war so they decided we should send a delegation to moscow. Maybe they dont know this is going on and maybe its not the government. We werent presented as National Security and will president this as a little investigation for which we are seeking assistance from the russian federation. There was a controversy whether they sent a delegation and on the first day caviar, champagne, welcome our friends and there was this one general in the military who is helping out and they brought over and he brings out his own and is shocked and says this is terrible and these pastors in intelligence and this is awful we will not stand for this and were going to swing this up and the second day we will have a sightseeing tour and will go around sightseeing and on the third date they were going to do some more sightseeing in the fourth day there was nothing. On the 25th day there was nothing. Oh hes busy now and there is and so they left in the embassy is calling, the legal office and will send you a memo on this and what they realized when they got back is that this wasnt a Government Program in the sport general who god knows what happened to him for helping the United States military intelligence guys coming over, he just didnt know anything about it. For a while the hacking did stop but then it started again and the chinese started doing it, too. [inaudible conversations] the story you just told is a very military have a story, literally going through the war in iraq and clearly your other books were led to the establishment of a new organization in these networks [inaudible] in the 1990s there was a parallel the moment going on in the white house where people are starting to realize the critical infant structure is vulnerable and can you talk more about as all this other stuff was going on well, a couple years before and the Oklahoma City city bombing led to president clinton signed a president ial directive on terrorist, a policy on terrorism and they started setting up a joint task force called the critical infant Structure Working Group because people were thinking he blew up Federal Office Building and a lot of people were killed and a lot of but what happened in the next date they blow up a power grid or an electric facility and it could affect the economy. We need to set up some policies. They define what critical and production was. Eight sectors of the economy picking and finance, waterworks, and what and then they decided to create a commission to look into this. Well, the people who are on this commission they had had background in black programs and they knew about this Cyber Development and they thought it is pretty obvious h