Cyber warfare is the new dimension of battlefield Earth.

It is a virtual reality sold to the public as the truth, when in reality it is a lucrative new marketing ploy for corporations involved in CyberSecurity. The pentagon plans to hire as many as 20,000 professional hackers, train them to do internet espionage on global competitors, and create a new warm war in the Ethernet. The propaganda machine is heating up with stories of Russian and Chinese cyber warfare army units. Sound like the cold war with communism? It is. Only this time whole economies may be crashed by simply interfering with cyber trading, communications, and conducting an internet era invasion. The US is poised to compete with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran who are already rapidly expanding their own cyber warfare capabilities. Blatant fear mongering is the marketing ploy of the CyberSecurity giants running this show. Admiral Michael McConnells Op-Ed in the Washington Post got the ball rolling. Formerly Bushs Director of National Intelligence and a revolving door executive at Booz-Allen, which firm represents numerous government contractors in the Military Industrial Complex, McConnells career over the past two decades has focused in on merging government and private sector intelligence, surveillance and national security. The illegal NSA domestic spying program that implicated the telecom giants Verizon and AT&T was his baby. Privatizing government cyber-spying and cyber warfare is his goal now. Warning that chaos would result from a cyber-attack on the USA with vulnerable power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and so forth, McConnells Op-Ed raised the specter of enemies annihilating US infrastructure combined with possible missile attack scenarios that could level the USA. Hysterical reactions are the norm. Trumpeting that an early warning system to monitor cyberspace and complete control of the internet is necessary to protect us from such an attack, reactions to McConnells Op-Ed range from complete alarm to complete distrust. As Wireds Ryan Singel wrote, Hes talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation. The Obama Whitehouse followed up McConnells Op-Ed with their own fear-mongering decree on cyber-threats, depicting the US as a vulnerable victim to cyber-aggression. President Obama has identified cybersecurity as one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counterThe executive Branch was directed to work closely with all key players in US Cybersecurity, including state and local governments and the private sector and to strengthen public/private partnershipsto implement the recommendations of the Cyberspace Policy Review built on the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) launched by President George W. Bush. Since then the rhetoric has intensified, all devoted to scaring citizens into believing that the US is at serious risk of cataclysmic cyber-attacks from aggressors. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned of a cyber-Pearl Harbor in rhetoric reminiscent of Condoleeza Rices Iraqi Mushroom Cloud. But wait. This massive new expenditure of money on cybersecurity is not primarily devoted to defending against cyber aggressors. Actually the USA is the worlds leading cyber-aggressor. A major purpose of this expansion is to strengthen the USs ability to destroy other nations with cyber-attacks. President

Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Irans main nuclear enrichment facilities. Knowing that first use of cyber-attacking would lead to our enemies being justified in using the same methods to attack us did not deter the president at all. The gradual militarization of the internet will be the result. It is obvious that the US is the leading cyber warfare perpetrator in the world. This fact makes the defensive posturing of the fear-mongering campaign stand on its head. The US government generally convinces its citizens that it is a peaceful victim of aggression by rogue nations when the reality is that the US builds more weapons, sells more arms and bombs to more countries than virtually the rest of the world combined. The US government is creating a smoke screen of national defense in order to cover its ultimate control of the internet as a means of distributing propaganda and tweaking the virtual world US citizens now view as the truth. Using the NSA and the Pentagon means there will be no meaningful citizen oversight by congress or anyone else. The US seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet, nothing less. Freedom on the internet will be a thing of the past. Schools are in on the act, bigtime. In November the LA Times described programs that teach students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives. The program, needless to say, has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagons National Security Agency, which conducts Americas digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA, and the Department of Homeland Security. The Washington Posts 2010 Top Secret America series noted that: Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls, and other types of communications. As Wireds Singel wrote back in 2010: Make no mistake, the Military Industrial Complex now has its eye on the internet. Generals want to train crack squads of hackers and have wetdreams of cyber warfare. Never shy of extending its power, the Military Industrial Complex wants to turn the Internet into yet another venue for an arms race. This would be a bonanza for private contractors. Marketing US intelligence on cyber threats to corporations is one angle already underway. Private sector profit is now inextricably linked with the fear mongering campaign over cyber threats. The NSA is the lead agency when it comes to outsourcing. Booz-Allen is one of about ten large corporations that play a very major role in American Intelligence. Everytime you hear about intelligence watching North Korea or tapping Al-Quaeda telephones, you can bet they are heavily involved.

This new, massive expansion at the pentagon has little to do with protecting the US from cyber threats. It has everything to do with strengthening the USs offensive cyber warfare capabilities, consolidating control over the internet, and insuring further massive transfers of wealth from the citizens to the private Military Industrial Complex, and we are talking billions and billions of dollars. Questions: virtualism as described by Paige West in her book talks about marketers creating a virtual reality in order to market coffee. Does the US Government attempt to create a virtual world in which we are constantly under attack by our enemies in order to justify the Military Industrial Complex President Eisenhower warned us about in 1952? Will we sit on our hands while the Internet becomes a tool of US oppression? Or is the United States the exceptional good guy in the world of cyber warfare? Are we losing our cyber freedom or gaining cyber security? Is the rest of the world going to benefit from cyber warfare? How does this contribute or detract from Globalization?