Good afternoon. If you have followed diplomatic
news in the past weeks, you may have heard of a kind of crisis between China
and the U.S.regarding cyberattacks against the American company Google. Many
things have been said about this. Some people have called a cyberwarwhat may
actually be just a spy operation -- and obviously, a quite mishandled one.
However, this episode reveals the growing anxiety in the Western world
regarding these emerging cyber weapons.
It so happens that these weapons are
dangerous.They're of a new nature: they could lead the worldinto a digital
conflict that could turn into an armed struggle. These virtual weapons can also
destroy the physical world. In 1982, in the middle of the Cold War in Soviet
Siberia, a pipeline exploded with a burst of 3 kilotons, the equivalent of a
fourth of the Hiroshima bomb. Now we know today -- this was revealed by Thomas
Reed, Ronald Reagan's former U.S. Air Force Secretary -- this explosion was
actually the result of a CIA sabotage operation, in which they had managed to
infiltrate the IT management systems of that pipeline.
More recently, the U.S. government revealed that
in September 2008, more than 3 million people in the state of Espirito Santo in
Brazil were plunged into darkness, victims of a blackmail operation from cyber
pirates. Even more worrying for the Americans, in December 2008 the holiest of
holies, the IT systems of CENTCOM, the central command managing the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, may have been infiltrated by hackerswho used these: plain
but infected USB keys. And with these keys, they may have been able to get
inside CENTCOM's systems, to see and hear everything, and maybe even infect
some of them.As a result, the Americans take the threat very seriously. I'll
quote General James Cartwright,Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who
says in a report to Congress that cyberattacks could be as powerful as weapons
of mass destruction. Moreover, the Americans have decided to spend over 30
billion dollars in the next five years to build up their cyberwar capabilities.
And across the world today, we see a sort of
cyber arms race, with cyberwar units built up by countries like North Korea or
even Iran. Yet, what you'll never hear from spokespeople from the Pentagon or
the French Department of Defence is that the question isn't really who's the enemy,
but actually the very nature of cyber weapons. And to understand why, we must
look at how, through the ages, military technologies have maintained or
destroyed world peace. For example, if we'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago, we
would have talked about the military innovation of the day -- the massive
Vauban-style fortifications -- and we could have predicted a period of
stability in the world or in Europe. which was indeed the case in Europe
between 1650 and 1750.
