We need a new Internet, that’s all. One designed from the ground up to be far more secure than what we have today. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about the Chinese hacking into The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. All because they delved too deeply into the affairs of some Chinese government officials.

On Tuesday, Mandiant released two reports that not only provided more evidence to support its allegations that many hacking attacks originate in China, but also pinpointed the exact location, a 12-story building on the outskirts of Shanghai. As The New York Times put it, that building is the “People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.”

The hacking underground is teeming with activity, as witnessed by the Apple and Facebook attacks. In Apple’s case, a worm was unleashed when employees visited a site called iPhoneDevSDK.

No Evidence?

I shuddered at the foregone conclusion of some media outlets: “there was no evidence that any data left Apple.”

Really?

They can break in at will but they have to leave evidence that they took stuff? Then there was the wholesale hacking of the Burger King Twitter account, which resulted in a string of profane tweets.

Like I wrote in World War III Is Already Here - And We're Losing, we’re smiling the enemy in the face. In that article, I proposed that America ramp up its investment spending in cyber security and robotics dramatically, by boosting cyber-security investment to $5 billion and robotics to $20 billion, annually.

As Steve Blank observes, “We are getting our asses handed to us by the Chinese. Almost irrationally we have decided not to have a National Industrial policy — leaving that to private capital.”

Who Will Lead The Charge?

So it’s up to us pundits in the media to lead the charge for disruptive change. And one thing that clearly has to go, in its current form, is the Internet. I propose the U.S. create a next-generation Internet, a superset, or n-th layer if you will, that make our critical Internet infrastructure, which is now largely powering the U.S. economy, less massively vulnerable to hacking attacks.

We have already seen what Russia did to Estonia in 2007 and to Georgia in 2008. Now imagine what a full-blown war would look like today - or in 2015?

Way back in August 2006, Bloomberg BusinessWeek cited a counterintelligence report that found at least 108 countries engaged in “collection efforts against sensitive and protected U.S. technologies),” up from 37 a decade ago. Now that’s a trend. Among the few countries specifically mentioned, China and Russia were among “the most aggressive” in targeting the U.S.

The Fiscal Times, a publication funded by Peter Peterson, agrees with my bleak assessment: Chinese Attacks Reveal an Undeclared Global Cyber War.

Next-Generation Internet: Wants & Needs

So how should this Next-Generation Internet be architected?

I will give you my wish list and you, tech wizards, can write the spec:

• Secure: It should be extremely secure, from day one. I know some will say that anything can be hacked, but let’s put the fence up high enough so that climbing it becomes a relatively esoteric art.
• Real ID: Everyone using it in an official U.S. capacity should be readily identifiable. I propose some type of next-generation eye-recognition technology using a computer or mobile camera. This will help sites like LinkedIn and Facebook in their endless battle against identity fraud. It will also help deter spamming because each business will need to use its “eyeD” to launch a marketing campaign.
• America Only: It should be accessible by Americans only, for obvious reasons. Americans are free to leave the Next Gen Internet, but they do so as their own discretion.

I’m sure many people can’t believe I would even propose such a thing. I know that things are going to have to get a lot worse before anyone takes my proposals seriously.

That's OK. I've already called this World War III, and it's only beginning to escalate. To win, we'll need to innovate. And that means staying ahead of the pack.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Last Wednesday, The New York Times announced that its computers had been hacked. That passwords had been stolen. That its private networks had been traversed with impunity by a bunch of brazen hackers. We’re not talking Anonymous here nor a bunch of ethical hackers. No we’re at war with China.

To paraphrase an old newspaper joke, “what’s black and white and red all over?” The Chinese Red Army, that’s who.

How do we know that? As William Gibson might bark, “Pattern Recognition!” Computer security experts consulting with The New York Times identified the malware “as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China.”

There other telltale signs. Like the fact the hackers broke into The Times’ computers starting on Sept. 13, as the newspaper was putting its final touches on a report that the relatives of China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

The Definition Of War

In May 2011, the Pentagon promised it would announce a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks by declaring foreign computer hacks an act of war. But despite mounting evidence that Chinese attacks continue relentlessly, there has been no further action. In view of all the recent happenings, that’s tantamount to raising the white flag.

The New York Times was not the only company hacked. That same day, The Wall Street Journal admitted it too had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers who apparently were trying to monitor its China coverage. And Bloomberg computers were infected by Chinese hackers after the company published an article on June 29, 2012 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time.

But media companies are not the only ones being breached. An Air Force Cyber Command Recruiting video on YouTube urgently proclaims, “This building will be attacked 3 million times today,” while hovering over the Pentagon. Those are blatant acts of war, people, and the daily siege of the Pentagon is just part of today’s cyber-warfare landscape.

Cyberattacks are exploding. In Jan. 2010, Google, Intel, Adobe and and more than 30 other companies were attacked in a coordinated terrorist campaign. Google said the attacks originated in China, which lead the company to abandon the Chinese market. If Google leaves the world’s largest market, what does that say about the enemy?

In January 2011, Morgan Stanley admitted it too had been hit by the same China-based hackers who attacked Google’s computers, an operation dubbed “Aurora” by cyber-security firm McAfee. Terremark Worldwide estimates that the number of companies known to be hacked in Operation Aurora now exceeds 200.

While government organizations and companies spend vast amounts of money on security precautions, the situation is so dire that the Defense Department, whose Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) developed the Internet in the 1960s, “is beginning to think it created a monster,” reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

What Should We Do?

Let me repeat that again, the inventors of the Internet you like and use so much think they’ve created a monster! So what should we do?

I believe we need a serious dose of innovation and reinvention to stem this monster tidal wave.

America today spends about $718 billion on defense and security. Most of that money is spent on resources and equipment designed for old-fashioned warfare.

The reality is that World War III is being fought in cyberspace and most real-life interaction will be handled by robots. And in both sectors our public and private capital spending priorities are completely misaligned.

The global cyber security market was valued at $64 billion in 2011, or less than 10% of what the U.S. spends on defense and security. Major U.S. players include CA Technologies, Cisco Systems, Fortinet, IBM, McAfee and Symantec. International security firms include Check Point Software (Israel) and Kaspersky (Russia).

Our venture capital scenario is not much better. In 2011, VCs collectively invested $935 million in tech security companies, nearly double the $498 million they invested in 2010, according to a MoneyTree report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters.

Clearly, the U.S. cyber security market is woefully underfunded. As Delaware Senator Thomas Carper puts it, “The issue of Cyber Warfare is not science fiction any more. It’s reality.” Here’s what I believe we should do:

* U.S. Defense Budget – America should reshape its defense budget to reflect the reality that World War III is already here and it’s being fought in the cyber trenches. This means the Pentagon should officially declare Chinese cyber attacks as foreign warfare and treat the matter with the utmost urgency.

* Robotics - The worldwide robotics industry today is a $25 billion global industry, with most R&D activity taking place in South Korea and Japan. How can America allow its next-generation cyber-soldier technology to be based on foreign know-how? My recommendation: put the U.S. on a robotics fast-track with a combined government-private sector investment budget of $20 billion annually.

* Cyber Security – Like the robotics industry, cyber security is in dire need of more attention, but it’s not very sexy. VCs are falling all over themselves to fund the next Facebook or Snapchat, but what if those services could no longer function because the Chinese brought the Internet to its knees with relentless denial-of-service attacks? That $1 billion VCs invested in 2011 in cyber security is a drop in the bucket compared to the Pentagon’s $718 billion budget. We need to ratchet this up to $5 billion, preferably $10 billion, by next year.

* Internet 2 – As the pronouncements of DARPA suggest, the Internet was not designed for what it’s doing today. Please take some time to read this Bloomberg Businessweek story, it’s downright scary. We need to insulate this country from the enemy, and that means designing an all-new Internet, one created from the ground up for secure operations, and preferably one that insulates the U.S. from the rest of the world.

I’m sure this last bit of advice will have free-thinkers around the world cringing. But when the Chinese decide that you’ve had enough freedom, it might be too late to come to your senses. I fully expect to be hacked by the Chinese this week.

I’ve added Mandiant to my address book. I rather be safe than sorry. And please do contribute to my crowdsourced ideation engine to suggest more ideas on how we can protect ourselves in this brave new world.

Image courtesy of Larry Ye / Shutterstock.

In a press briefing late last week, Israel warned that any social updates embedded with location information or geotagging could aid Hamas’s efforts. Instagram photos of successful strikes and even geotagged tweets and Facebook updates by Israeli citizens could help Hamas home in on Israeli targets. Since the militant group employs relatively crude rocket technology by most standards, aggregated public geo-data could offer a precision otherwise afforded only by more sophisticated equipment - or inadvertently crowdsourced.

Israeli citizens have been documenting the escalating conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants on the popular social sites, often with attached images. The IDF called for the social media blackout just a day before longer-range rocket strikes reached Jerusalem for the first time.

The Dangers Of Citizen Journalism

Following the Arab Spring uprisings, social sites have increasingly provided a platform for citizen journalism, instantly transmitting unfiltered images of violence to the world at large. Israel's call for a social media hush shares little in common with 2011's popular revolts in the Middle East, but there's certainly an uneasy balance between protecting sensitive military information and flat-out censorship. In Egypt and Libya, the ruling authority's desperate attempts to muffle the tweets and status updates only made the global community more engaged in those unfolding revolutions.

Both Israel and Hamas have leveraged sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to promote their respective political agendas in recent weeks. The sophistication and breadth of these militarized social campaigns has extended the conflict beyond rocket strikes and border zone scuffles into, bizarrely enough, a branding war. This is truly war 2.0 - and we’re watching it unfold in real time.

The IDF spokesperson who responded to me explained that "[t]he game 'IDF Ranks' was conceived and launched four months ago ... as part of our efforts to create a interactive community to encourage social interaction generated by the IDF social networks online." Basically, it gives you badges and ranks for actively using and sharing the stuff on the blog. Not very fun, but not a big deal.

"The IDF blog itself was launched in 2009 and is not a 'war blog,' but rather a site meant to encourage transparency and provide breaking news regarding events in the area," the IDF says.

Surely that was the original intent, but that changed on Thursday when it became a live blog for an ongoing attack. And again, just to be clear to critics, I did not find that practice inherently problematic. I found it interesting and mostly successful.

"During Operation Pillar of Defense we provide our readers with news updates and operational information regarding IDF actions. In other times, though, the blog has hosted varying content, from reports about routine activities to more lighthearted personal stories. It is this content that 'IDF Ranks' was meant to promote."

Yes, I'm sure it was, but the IDF turned the game off at the outset of Operation Pillar of Defense, and then it turned the game back on. When asked why this happened, the IDF offered this explanation:

"Over the past two days the blog has experienced technical difficulties due to high traffic, and 'IDF Ranks' was temporarily taken down to make necessary adjustments to our systems."

I was on top of the live-blog story very early, and I never saw a trace of any game components until 36 hours or so after the campaign began. It's plausible that the IDF took it down for traffic reasons at a very low level of traffic, but, if I may editorialize just a little, I'm suspicious of the answer.

I followed up to ask why the game was turned back on and got this response.

"We turned it on because it is an integral part of the blog and has been for four months. After the site was briefly down because of the spike in traffic, we isolated it as a potential factor and, once we rectified the technical difficulties, brought it back up again."

If you say so. Whether this is the entire explanation or not, we can certainly conclude that running a fun game on a live blog about serious military action wasn't troubling to the decision-makers at the IDF.

This is the meat of the IDF's explanation:

"In no way is 'IDF Ranks' meant to gamify Operation Pillar of Defense or any military actions during the operation. We embarked on the operation for serious reasons - Israeli civilians have been the target of rocket fire for over a decade - and we continue to see it with the utmost seriousness."

I take that response very seriously. But I'm genuinely surprised that the decision to turn IDF Ranks back on did not strike anyone as unserious. As I've tried repeatedly to make clear, I thought the initial social media campaign was quite seriously executed. It was well done. It captivated the media and steered the conversation. Then the game knocked it off the rails.

Well, day two has changed matters. The IDF Blog now has atrocious gamification badges with points and rewards for sharing the content to social media. For example, if you visit the site 10 times, you get the "Consistent" badge. If you search the blog multiple times, you're promoted to "Research Officer." Yes, Israel has gamified war. This is absolutely horrendous.

This game has existed since July. But it was not displayed yesterday, when the campaign began. Now that it's back, the world noticed. Promoting it on the front page during this military campaign is beyond crass.

An IDF spokesperson tells ReadWrite that "over the past two days the blog has experienced technical difficulties due to high traffic, and  'IDF Ranks' was temporarily taken down to make necessary adjustments to our systems. In no way is 'IDF Ranks' meant to gamify Operation Pillar of Defense or any military actions during the operation."

The technical reason sounds plausible, although I was on the site pretty early yesterday, and I never saw a trace of it. As for whether the IDF meant to gamify the operation, by turning the game back on, they did whether they meant to or not. When asked why they turned the game back on, the spokesperson said, "We turned it on because it is an integral part of the blog and has been for four months. After the site was briefly down because of the spike in traffic, we isolated it as a potential factor and, once we rectified the technical difficulties, brought it back up again."

The fact is, someone made the conscious decision to turn the game back on after the shooting began. I just can't imagine a justification for it. Gamification is offensive when coupon companies do it. This is a WAR. Israel is trying to enlist the people of the world in its campaign with military ranks, badges and points. Innocent people are dying on all sides, and the IDF wants to reward people for tweeting about it.

See Also: Israeli Defense Force Responds To Criticism Of Games On Its War Blog

It doesn't matter what your opinion on the conflict itself is. We're not talking about the morals of war. We're talking about propaganda, pure and simple. This kind of marketing is manipulative and sleazy on the best of days. It's a way for propagandists to drag your friends' brains into something by using you. I want to write this post about apps and start-ups making dumb products sometimes. To gamify war is just absolutely unconscionable to me.

This isn't the first digital war game that's horrified me. When America's Army came out, before the social media age began, I thought it was the most disgusting thing I'd ever seen. But it's abstract. It's a recruitment tool. There's no real-world component; it's just designed to get people fired up. That's awful enough. But this is check-ins for spectators watching an active, live military campaign. It makes me sick.

It's brilliant in its way. By controlling the messaging so tightly, the IDF ensures that the media coverage of the operation is framed the way Israel wants it. Why dig deeper when the information is so carefully presented right there? That's a rhetorical question, of course. The PR move here is as devastating as the operation.

We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

The stream of tweets began with background information on the operation, explaining that Operation Pillar of Defense is in retaliation against Hamas rocket attacks.

This IDF operation against terrorist orgs in #Gaza comes after a month of frequent rocket attacks against #Israel. idfblog.com/facts-figures/…

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

Since the beginning of 2012, Palestinian terrorists in the #Gaza Strip have fired 768 rockets into #Israel.

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

After providing the background info, the account announced that "the IDF has embarked on Operation Pillar of Defense," insisting that "all options are on the table," including a ground operation "if necessary."

The next tweet shared this intense, 10-second aerial video of a pinpoint strike on a vehicle reportedly carrying Ahmed Jabari, head of what the IDF calls the "Hamas Military Wing."

Immediately following that post, the IDF followed up with a blog post profiling Jabari. Jabari was in charge of the well-known operation that captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006 outside of the Gaza Strip. Jabari personally escorted Shalit to the Rafah Crossing with Egypt when Shalit was released in a prisoner exchange.

The IDF then offered this statement in an image engineered to go viral:

Ahmed Jabari: Eliminated. twitter.com/IDFSpokesperso…

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

The IDF is also posting maps and other images to an official Flickr account.

And in response to the operation, retaliatory strikes have already begun.

Bomb squad at scene of strike in Beersheba, Israel - @benhartman twitter.com/Benhartman/sta…

— Inside Breaking News (@breaking) November 14, 2012

Reminder of Hamas' strategy: Fire rockets & mortars from Palestinian schools & hope they land on Israeli schools. youtu.be/zmXXUOs27lI

— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

This carefully planned social media campaign around a military operation is an amazing kind of PR that we at ReadWrite don't know of a precedent for. If you do, please share it with us, and we'll be glad to update with more info.

UPDATE 12:51 Pacific: My friend Eugene has pointed me to the Twitter feed of the Kenya Defense Forces (@kdfinfo), which has posted ongoing updates about military campaigns. It's surely an interesting stream of information, but it's far from the cross-media PR war machine the IDF is running right now.

The Other Side Of The Story

The Twitter account @AlqassamBrigade representing Hamas-affiliated brigades in Palestine took to Twitter to respond to the IDF campaign. It continues to report on the operation as well as retaliatory Hamas attacks.

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

— Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

As he is beloved for doing, Andy Carvin is curating all sides of the story by retweeting reports from the ground on both the Israeli and Palestinian side.

11 month old son of BBC colleague killed in #Gaza. Sister-in-law killed, brother critically injured. Civilians always casualties of conflict

— Jon Williams(@WilliamsJon) November 14, 2012

#Israel Defense minister Ehud Barak: "We are still at the beginning of the event, not at the end. We expect some complicated tests ahead."

— Lauren E. Bohn (@LaurenBohn) November 14, 2012

I have just recorded the noise of drones. Hope you find it clear. It's dark because electricity is off. #Gaza keek.com/!FDMCaab

— Rana(@RanaGaza) November 14, 2012

some parts of #Gaza have no electricity now

— Majed Abusalama (@MajedAbusalama) November 14, 2012

This operation has driven Egypt to call for an emergency meeting of the UN security council. Ahram Online is reporting that Egypt's newly appointed ambassador to Israel, Atef Mohamed Salem, has been recalled by President Mohamed Morsi.

Egypt president orders UN representative to call for emergency security council meeting over Israel Gaza strikes, spokesman says - @reuters

— Breaking News (@BreakingNews) November 14, 2012

It's a strange new world.

We've reached out to Twitter for comment on how this whole thing looks from their perspective, and we'll update the post if we hear back.