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One thing I like about Crimea is that if you squint hard enough, you
can see the cyber battle and it's a battle of restraint.<br>
<br>
To wit: a while back the Syrian Electronic Army tweeted about
messing with the SCADA systems for a power system. Doing this sort
of thing kills innocent people, and the US has drawn a line there
that says "If you go there, very bad things will happen to you,
possibly we will just let the Isrealis kill you one by one with
magnetic bombs, but more likely it will be something worse." (SEA
members live in Tehran, not Damascus). Nobody has come out in public
and said that messing with things that could potentially kill
innocent people is "the line", but it's there and all the teams know
it. <br>
<br>
In other words, while the US isn't going to roll tanks into the
Crimea, there is a weapon system that the US can deploy against
Russia. Even damaged by Snowden, the Russians are massively,
catastrophically outmatched at cyber and getting MORE outmatched
over time, and they know it. At some point Utah will come online and
the Russians have nothing to match it. And of course there is future
payoffs from quantum computing research, which, even if everyone has
the same fundamentals will require "hegemony-sized" levels of
investment to implement. And everyone doesn't have the same
fundamentals, to put it shortly.<br>
<br>
Keep in mind that Obama is, for better or worse, the cyber war
President. When he threatens your economy, when he says that
"everything is on the table", he doesn't just mean sanctions.<br>
<br>
-dave<br>
P.S. Sign up for <a href="http://infiltratecon.org">INFILTRATE</a>.
Chat about cyber war over an open bar filled with your peers. <br>
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