Office of the Independent Blogger

Three congratulations are in order: first, to George W. Bush, for crying over casualties and planning a Freedom Thinktank after his Presidency. (Credit also goes to Robert Draper for writing Dead Certain, out tomorrow, about this White House.) Second congratulation goes to Piers Morgan, newspaper editor who mocked George W. Bush for falling off of a Segway and then fell off of one himself! And then there’s Pedro Martinez, who struck out his three thousandth batter today in his grand return from rotator cuff surgery.

Not much else for me to comment on today. Thought this was interesting.

The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American ­officials. The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack. Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People’s Liberation Army. One senior US official said the Pentagon had pinpointed the exact origins of the attack. Another person familiar with the event said there was a “very high level of confidence…trending towards total certainty” that the PLA was responsible. The defence ministry in Beijing declined to comment on Monday.

The Pentagon took down the network for more than a week while the attacks continued, and is to conduct a comprehensive diagnosis. “These are multiple wake-up calls stirring us to levels of more aggressive vigilance,” said Richard Lawless, the Pentagon’s top Asia official at the time of the attacks. The Pentagon is still investigating how much data was downloaded, but one person with knowledge of the attack said most of the information was probably “unclassified”. He said the event had forced officials to reconsider the kind of information they send over unsecured e-mail systems.

John Hamre, a Clinton-era deputy defence secretary involved with cyber security, said that while he had no knowledge of the June attack, criminal groups sometimes masked cyber attacks to make it appear they came from government computers in a particular country. The National Security Council said the White House had created a team of experts to consider whether the administration needed to restrict the use of BlackBerries because of concerns about cyber espionage.

“National security” begins at home. And no, that’s not a Nativist statement. It’s the truth.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).