Cartoon 743: Maginot Line

France had its borders over run in World War I by a surprise attack. The stalemate that resulted, once the onslaught was halted, bogged down into “trench warfare”. After World War I France was determined not to be surprised in this manner again. It built the long running series of observation forts and barricades know as the “Maginot Line”. But World War II came along and France was surprised again.

It seems it is almost axiomatic that the bellicose will do the unexpected but fully obvious in a conflict. The Germans merely attacked around the Maginot Line fortifications.

Today we hear the patriotic exultation of our increasing cyber defenses. We have super computers to help analyze our monitoring of information all over the world. But it is a “Maginot” like faith. Our communication intelligence system is crafted on a scenario of 40 years ago. A time when most traffic was “voice” and data channels were few and highly identified. The amount of traffic, the complexity of the traffic, the protocols and transport vehicles have grown exponentially in 40 years.

A couple of years ago there was a article about school administrations having difficulty intercepting and understanding the information in the preverbal note passed around in class. Students were using a “collage” approach and embedding bits of the message in an image in plain sight.

A “collage” today can by pass our communication intelligence capability. An example might be a message that is composed of a bit of information that is a pixel in the 26th photo of a Picasa online photo album, a word or two in a classified ad in a newspaper, a word in a joke shared with someone on a cellphone, a phase posted on a blog, a salutation in a letter. The various pieces must be captured and assembled correctly to understand the message. Without a “Rossetta Stone”, the message cannot be re-constructed.

There just is not enough processing capability to analyze every bit of information in cyber space. Why have we not admitted things are beyond our control? The reason is too much money is being made bolstering the existing scheme of things. The best scenario is if you are tracking a specific individual. Even then you must track everything they do over the period of time they create a message. But suppose key parts are farmed out? Suppose parts of the message were posted outside your observation period?

One day something may happen and we have our “Maginot” cyber surprise.