Seventy years ago, the world was rebuilding itself after a six-year global conflict had killed tens of millions, divided Europe and particularly Germany, and seen the unleashing of horrors never before seen, specifically genocide on an industrial scale and firebombing, first with traditional bombs and culminating with atomic weapons.
With each Remembrance Day of the 21st century, we have fewer and fewer Wilf Peckhams and Gordon Talbots to remind us of their sacrifice and we're also running low on the Tony Romeyns, who were children at war's end.
Each Remembrance Day ceremony is an opportunity to thank them once more for their sacrifice, as well as to thank all armed forces personnel, past and present, for their willingness to put themselves in harm's way for the protection of Canada.
Remembrance Day is also a time to consider current and future wars.
Much has been written about Syria and other seemingly endless clashes but less has been written about cyber warfare. This isn't the new Cold War, it's the present one and it's getting hotter. On one hand, conflict waged over computer networks seems bloodless and remote, hardly as significant as traditional battles fought in person with guns, bombs and planes. Yet cyber warfare has the potential to kill and harm millions of people. That's what state-sponsored hackers can do in the age of interconnectivity.
@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris is one of several recent books (Worm: The First Digital World War by Mark Bowden and Countdown To Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter are two more) chronicling the billions being spenteach year by governments and multinational corporations in the militarization of the Internet.
To future generations, Stuxnet will be remembered the same way Fat Man and Little Boy, the two atomic bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are recalled today. Stuxnet was developed by the United States, with Israeli support, for the sole purpose of infecting computers at the Natanz nuclear facility to seriously damage Iran's capability to enrich unranium with what would look like accidents and design flaws. Stuxnet succeeded in its mission but it also migrated onto the broader Internet, where it was discovered by analysts at the same computer security companies that produce firewalls for personal computers and corporate server networks.
To comprehend the full, frightening potential of cyber warfare, just expand the target to power stations, pipelines, financial markets, electrical grids, military communications and air traffic control. Successfully disrupting the computer networks controlling these operations for even a short time would do more than inconvenience consumers, it would lead to lives lost. These systems are monitored constantly but they are fragile and vulnerable because of their dependence on supporting technologies that can be corrupted. An American academic and a handful of students recently demonstrated on the PBS program Nova how they hacked into a vehicle's computer system and forced it to brake suddenly against the wishes of the driver.
Numerous countries, including Canada, have been growing their ranks of cyber soldiers for years but everyone is playing catchup to China when it comes to money invested, number of people involved and offensive and defensive capabilities. As the leaked Edward Snowden documents showed, the United States isn't just tapping into communications infrastructure to spy on citizens the world over, it is an active participant in a global online arms race through its various security and intelligence agencies as well as new divisions of its armed forces. As Harris points out, there are now advanced computer science courses at some of the top American university that require classified clearance to take because the students are being groomed to take their place on the front lines of cyber warfare.
The worst thing that can happen to war is to depersonalize it. Whether it's piloting a drone dropping bombs in Yemen from a bunker in Nevada or hacking into the computer system aboard Chinese war planes from the offices of a U.S. military contractor, death and destruction is not only easy, it's fun when it's on a computer screen, as any video game player knows.
The bombs are already moving around us, unseen as we check our emails, update our Facebook accounts, read the news and shop for Christmas. Wars don't have to be fought with bombs and bullets anymore, which is something worth remembering tomorrow while putting our smartphones away and standing in silent tribute.
