The 4th Wing of Defense

I know you are pondering - "Hey, there are only three wings of the armed forces, the Army, the Navy and the Air force. What is the fourth one?"

Well to answer your question let me first welcome you to the 21st century. An age where wars are not limited only to the physical domain but also to the virtual domain of cyberspace. I am not talking about something out of a science fiction movie. The threat that we face in cyberspace can be very well conceived by most us as we analyze our overwhelming dependence on Internet based applications and services and the notion of being "connected".

Threats to citizens on the Internet like being swindled out of some credit card balance by some foreign based cyber-hoodlum is commonly heard of by most of us but what we dont realize is the scale at which we as a nation can be crippled by armies of hackers and crackers residing in some foreign land. I know this sounds like a plot of a science fiction movie but consider the points mentioned below:

1. On April 8th the Wall Street Journal quoted “current and former national-security officials” who warned that “cyberspies” from China, Russia and elsewhere had broken into the systems that control America’s electrical grid and had installed software that could be used to disrupt it.
2. And on April 21st the Wall Street Journal said foreign hackers had penetrated computers containing data about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
3. Estonia (a former member of the USSR) had suffered very much at the hand of 'unofficial' cyber criminal groups that created havoc in its Internet networks. These cyber criminals were suspected by many intelligence agencies as being sponsored by the Russian government who were allegedly not happy of the pro-west and pro-NATO stance that the Estonian government had taken.
4. Many government sites of the Republic of Georgia (another former member of the USSR) which fought a 5-day war with Russia last year were defaced and in many cases forced to shut down due to attacks believed to have originated in Russia.
5. Recent reports by the Indian news channel Times Now stated very clearly the threat to India of hacker armies in China which reportedly possessed the potential to cause serious damage to Indian Internet networks in times of war.

These are just some of the excerpts from many such instances of reports that have gone on to state the tenacity that such armies of hackers and crackers can cause to a country in times of war.

Such a threat is multiplied more so in the case of India which prides itself as an IT outsourcing giant and is an emerging superpower. Moreover, India does share tense relations with Beijing and Islamabad not to mention its other smaller neighbours.

In such a case is it not viable to establish a so called agency like America's NSA that can act as a 4th wing of defense on the frontier of cyberspace by securing Indian networks from foreign hackers and crackers.

Such an agency can also double as a monitor of traffic that flows in and out of India to sensitive places in addition to act as a censor to certain traffic that is considered inflammatory and anti-national. This was done in 1999 during the Kargil war when the website of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn was blocked by VSNL servers at the national level. That was OK considering it was 1999 and most of the traffic that came into and got out of the country was through VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited) servers. But today represents a very different scenario as there are many points of entry and exit in India. So my argument of having a national agency to sort out problems like these seem more relevant.

Again, the establishment of such an agency requires checks and balances to be placed in order to control the purview of its authority and ensure the government's responsibility to its citizens' right to privacy. A detailed and better (but not necessarily complex) law needs to be in place for the policing of the online world by government agencies. The current Information Technology Act 2000 (the 2008 Amendment is not active as it is still to be published in the Official Gazette) is not cut out to meet the requirements of today's online world which is moving at an amazingly fast pace. In such a condition the power of enforcing censors by government agencies can prove to be too powerful a tool.

An even more problematic thing could be the power of the agency to police the cyber world by tracking activities of citizens. Inefficient legislation can lead to such a power being directly given to such an agency which would be equivalent to America's very hated PATRIOT Act which authorizes policing of citizens' activity in the online world.

Legislation and initiative are not the only problems that the Government of India faces. An acute shortage of manpower (due to poor educational facilities) is one of the major obstacles in the establishment of this 4th wing of defense. The government needs to tackle this issue of poor education by firstly providing the proper means of education, motivating the younger generation and persuade them to take up cyber defense as a serious career option just like service in the other wings of the armed forces.

Cyber defense is no longer a science fiction story. Its the need of the hour and an investment in maintenance of national security.

Mitul Choksi
29th April 2009
10:32 PM Indian Standard Time