Heartbleed Internet Bug: Pretext For Web Lockdown?

April 10th, 2014

David Schulberg the 3rd

Debunkers would scoff at such a notion as an outlandish conspiracy theory – just as they did when Infowars asserted that the Stuxnet virus was the work of the U.S. and Israel back in 2010.

After Alex Jones pointed the finger at Washington and Tel Aviv for being behind Stuxnet during a September 27, 2010 broadcast, the likes of CNN, the Economist and others followed up by ridiculing the claim as a baseless conspiracy theory.

Months later in January 2011, the New York Times reported, “US and Israeli intelligence services collaborated to develop a destructive computer worm to sabotage Iran’s efforts to make a nuclear bomb,” acknowledging the “conspiracy theory” to be true.

The threat posed by Stuxnet to nuclear power plants continues to reverberate, spreading to other countries and causing chaos. The deadly nature of the bug was encapsulated by computer expert Ralph Langner, who warned that, “the Stuxnet code was designed to trick human operators by showing them recorded readings indicating machinery is running normally while behind the scenes they are heading for destruction.”

However, Stuxnet was not the only virus that led directly back to the U.S. and Israel. In 2012, researchers working for both Kaspersky and Symantec discovered that the United States was almost certainly responsible for three new viruses used in Lebanon and Iran to conduct espionage.

As the Washington Post reported, the United States and Israel were also responsible for jointly developing the Flame virus, a huge malware assault that monitored Iran’s computer networks.

Since the US and Israel were caught as the culprits behind all these viruses, the finger of blame for Heartbleed must surely point in the same direction.

Shortly after Stuxnet emerged, Washington argued that the threat posed by such viruses necessitated draconian cybersecurity legislation that would have handed the U.S. government similar powers to regulate and censor the web that have been exercised by China and other dictatorships for years.

Stuxnet’s appearance was dovetailed by an aggressive PR campaign during which Joe Lieberman and others called for the government to be allowed to, “disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war,” just as China did. What Lieberman failed to mention is the fact that China’s Internet censorship program was and continues to be based around crushing dissent against the state and has nothing to do with cybersecurity.

Will those who wish to exploit contrived cybersecurity threats in order to impose government kill switches and web censorship see the Heartbleed bug as another opportunity?

Expect the likes of DARPA and other tentacles of the U.S. military-industrial complex to be very active over the next few days and weeks extolling the necessity to mandate tighter cybersecurity controls on the Internet as a result of Heartbleed, while conveniently ignoring the fact that the U.S. government itself has been responsible for some of the biggest cybersecurity threats to emerge over the last four years.

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