slacktivism, noun, informal:
Actions performed via the Internet in support of a political or social cause but regarded as requiring little time or involvement, e.g. signing an online petition or joining a campaign group on a social media website.The year is 2047. You're in a dining hall on the desolate comet on which we all now live. You look down at your food, sitting on your plate. The plate is, as always, a large cheese pizza. A painful memory flashes. You ask the child next to you, "Remember when plates weren't also made of food?" The child does not remember. The child was born after the Papa John's Fritos Chili Pizza, which served a pile of Fritos on a pizza, and changed the arc of humanity forever.This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Cybersecurity, cyberwar and the rise of the military Internet complex is the subject of the new book "@War" by my guest, Shane Harris. His book reports on how intelligence agencies are working to defend us against cyberattacks. But he also reports on how American intelligence agencies, sometimes with the cooperation of American corporations, are trying to dominate cyberspace and use it to spy on other countries and how those efforts are changing the Internet in fundamental ways and not always for the better. Harris covers intelligence and national security for The Daily Beast and is the author of an earlier book called "The Watchers: The Rise Of America's Surveillance State." Shane Harris, welcome to FRESH AIR.
SHANE HARRIS: Thank you.
GROSS: Let's start with what you describe as the military Internet complex. What is it?
HARRIS: Well, the military Internet complex is an alliance - formal and informal really - between the U.S. military and the intelligence community and principally the National Security Agency - which is our largest intelligence agency - and large American corporations to include defense contractors who work for the government principally and build weapons systems for the government, but also increasingly technology companies like Google and Facebook and Yahoo that are responsible for providing information - information about people in the world - to the intelligence community who own and operate much of the Internet infrastructure in this country and around the world.
And what I mean by this alliance is that it is principally in the business of monitoring computer systems and monitoring the world's networks for threats. And principally in the book, I write about threats from hackers in other countries, but also in the United States. And this alliance has been set up largely for the purposes of defending computer networks in America, but also waging offensive operations on computer networks mainly overseas. It's something that's been done more in the shadows, but this alliance really has forged for the purpose of essentially trying to operate in cyberspace as if it were a battlefield, as if it were on land or in the sea or in the air.
GROSS: So before we get deeper into this relationship between the Internet companies and the military, has that been changed by the Edward Snowden leaks?
HARRIS: I think it has been changed. I think it's actually been strained by the Edward Snowden leaks. Mainly what we're seeing with the strain is in the relationship between government and principally the intelligence agencies and the tech companies like the Googles and the Facebooks and Yahoo. Those companies, we now know from the documents Snowden leaked, had been cooperating with the government in handing over - because they were forced to do so really - large amounts of information about their customers. We've learned a lot more about what the NSA was doing secretly with some of this data and ways that it was even trying to secretly hack into the systems of the companies that it was forcing to hand over data.
GROSS: So let's back up a little bit. When this cooperative relationship was formed between tech companies, defense contractors and the intelligence agencies - you write that the government views protecting whole industries as the best way to protect cyberspace. Why?
HARRIS: Well, the fear that the government has is that what we call critical infrastructure in this country - by which we mean things like our electrical power grid, water treatment facilities, big public utilities, large financial computer systems, the stock exchange, the systems that run large banks - the government fears that those computer systems are vulnerable to hackers and that an intruder could get in and steal data, manipulate data or possibly even damage the physical infrastructure that is connected via the Internet to some of these vulnerable systems.
And so what the government has tried to do is prioritize which industries and which sectors of the economy are the most at risk, and then go to the companies in those industries and try and share information that the intelligence agencies know about hackers with those companies. So, for instance, the government is trying to push information about hackers who were trying to break into banks and to share that with banks so that the banks can then take that data, which is information, by the way, that's gleaned from espionage, from our spies going into foreign computer systems and seeing what other hackers are up to, pushing that information out to the bank so that the banks can in turn take that and incorporate it into their own defensive strategies and better protect themselves.
And so the government has tried to divide up these critical infrastructures and essentially provide information when it can to those businesses so that they can protect themselves and the government does not have to go in and set up its own equipment on those networks to try and defend them for them.
GROSS: What have you found out about what these meetings are like, these secret meetings between, I guess, CEOs of these companies and members of the intelligence community?
HARRIS: They can be very tense and often I think sort of a little spooky and exciting. There's a couple stories that I like particularly that kind of illuminate this. The NSA has been in the practice of granting temporary security clearances, sometimes for as short as one day, to the CEOs of big tech companies. The CEO of Google, Sergey Brin, got one of these at a meeting that was held some years ago. And what it does is it sort of, you know, brings CEOs into the secret tent and says, OK, we're going to show you some stuff about hackers, threats to your networks and other networks in the United States. But you can't tell anyone; it's a secret. Of course if you do divulge the information, we can prosecute you. And I think it sort of has the effect, on the one hand, of making these CEOs feel like they're sort of part of a very important official mission and also scaring them, perhaps, and frightening them into thinking that their networks are very vulnerable and they better do something to protect them because national security is at stake.
Pond: Doris is fearless and I think that's a double-edged sword for her. It gives her the ability to go into Cartier and steal a 10-carot diamond, but she's also aware of what it's like to be in jail and she's not afraid of it.
Boone: I think Doris really thinks she's an actress. I really think that she thinks she's playing the part of Doris Payne. Actually, I would argue that Matthew and I don't really know her at all. We know the person that she has presented to us.
There've been also tenser meetings. I write in the book about the former director of the National Security Agency, which is sort of the - the NSA is the center of activity in the government in cybersecurity - this is a man named Keith Alexander who, a number of years ago, went up to New York and met with top executives from a number of big banks and said that the banks were at great risk for being hacked, which, of course, they understood and they knew already. And that what he would like to do would be to come and actually install monitoring equipment on some of their networks to be able to help them fend off hackers. And the executives - I talked to some who were there - thought this was outrageous, the idea that they would allow a spy agency into financial networks and look into the account data of their customers. And they sort of looked at Alexander like, you know, you must be crazy to think that we would ever let you do something like that.
GROSS: And I should point out here that the banking industry has had a lot of cyberattacks - I mean, big problems.
HARRIS: They really have. And it's particularly lately one of the more high-profile ones was there was a major breach of the computer systems at J.P. Morgan. This really - that particular event actually frightened a lot of security people in Washington because the banks have been generally assumed to have the best computer defenses in place because they're dealing with money. I mean, they're dealing with people's account data as well. And I think when hackers got into those J.P. Morgan systems, it really sort of rattled people.
In about an 18-month period my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience. We expect things of the dying that are really unreasonable. ... When I started to get better friends were saying, "Oh, you know, we were praying or we were thinking about this in a certain way and we want to know what you think about it now. We want to know, is there some secret out there?"
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