Joel Brenner > Quotes

“If the First Gulf War made PLA military planners pay close attention to American battle prowess, the appearance in Beijing in 1999 of a volume called Unrestricted Warfare returned the favor. This book gave Pentagon strategists an alarming window into Chinese thinking about the nature of their engagement with the Western world, particularly the United States. The authors were two senior PLA colonels from China’s rising military elite, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, whose work obviously had official sanction.19 Qiao and Wang argued that China should use all means, armed and unarmed, military and nonmilitary, and lethal and nonlethal, to compel the enemy to accept its interests.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“The lecturer’s name was Dr. Shen Weiguang, and although he’s now regarded as the founding sage of Chinese information warfare theory, his views were then on the fringe in strategic circles in the Middle Kingdom. “Virus-infected microchips can be put in weapon systems,” he pointed out. “An arms manufacturer can be asked to write a virus into software, or a biological weapon can be embedded into the computer system of an enemy nation and then activated as needed. . . . Preparation for a military invasion can include hiding self-destructing microchips in systems designed for export.” Tactics like these, he said, could have profound strategic implications if carried out carefully and systematically. They could “destroy the enemy’s political, economic, and military information infrastructures, and, perhaps, even the information infrastructure for all of society.” If China could do that, Shen said, it could achieve the greatest of all strategic military objectives: It could “destroy the enemy’s will to launch a war or wage a war.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“Information dominance remains a bedrock principle in both U.S. and Chinese war-fighting doctrine, essential to establishing naval and air superiority.17 In Kosovo, however, the Chinese saw the issue through the other end of the telescope. By corrupting NATO’s information flow, the Serbs had significantly reduced the importance of air superiority. Here was an example in information space of a venerable concept in Chinese strategic thought: the defeat of the superior by the inferior. But the Chinese were not interested in partial success and canvas decoys. They saw bigger possibilities.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“also pointed out the asymmetric advantage that nonstate actors would have, because a nation-state “adheres to certain rules and will only use limited force to obtain a limited goal,” whereas terrorists (artistic or otherwise) “never observe any rules and . . . are not afraid to fight an unlimited war using unlimited means.”18”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“The agents of imperial demise would certainly be backed up by military power—the Chinese have never wavered in that view—but the agents would be many and varied: economic, legal, public relations—and electronic sabotage. The success of George Soros’s then recent speculative attack on the currencies of several East Asian nations impressed but appalled the Chinese (who have pegged their own currency to the dollar in part to discourage such tactics). Soros and his traders had driven down the value of these currencies, forcing them into line with their true worth! But that point was lost on Qiao and Wang, as it was lost on noncapitalists (i.e., most people) around the world, who saw only economic chaos in Asia created by Western capitalists. To the authors of Unrestricted Warfare, these attacks were a form of economic terrorism on par with bin Laden’s bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa, Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, and the depredations of malicious hackers on the Internet. They “represent semi-warfare, quasi-warfare, and sub-warfare, that is, the embryonic form of another kind of warfare.” Such warfare knows no boundaries, and against it, borders have no meaning.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“And while von Clausewitz had preached the doctrine of the decisive battle, Qiao and Wang said there would be no more decisive battles. Henceforth, they said (paraphrasing Eliot), when empires perished they would crumble like the Soviet Union, “not with a rumble, but a snicker.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“Obama was apparently relying, at least in part, on intelligence disclosed more than a year earlier by a senior CIA official who, according to the Wall Street Journal, “told a meeting of utility company representatives in New Orleans that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S.”47 Later that year, CBS News identified one of the countries involved as Brazil, which reportedly suffered a series of attacks, one of which “affected more than three million people in dozens of cities over a two-day period” and knocked the world’s largest iron ore producer off-line, costing that company alone $7 million. The utility’s later assertion that the blackouts were caused by routine maintenance failures are difficult to credit.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“In the law and culture of the West, war and peace are an on-off toggle switch. Peace is what you have when you don’t have war, and wars are declared.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“The Chinese are forcing Mao’s PLA into the twenty-first century as fast as they can, and have launched the most ambitious naval modernization program since the PRC was founded in 1949.38 Yet the principle of the “people’s war” remains a pillar of military doctrine as well as national mythology, and they have not abandoned it.39”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World

“Between these amorphous hacker groups and the PLA’s network professionals lies a murky middle layer whose shape, not surprisingly, is indistinct, but whose mission—information warfare (IW)—is not. In 1998 the PRC launched what may have been its first experiment with a cybermilitia: a forty-person unit in a state-owned enterprise in Datong City, Shanxi Province, which had a rich talent pool drawn from some twenty universities, institutes, and companies.48 Militias are neither official government cadres nor freelance hackers. They operate in ambiguous space, connected to one or another government office by a loose string. A twitch of a government finger tightens the string, either to restrain or direct an operation. The PLA has been actively creating IW militias since about 2002, recruiting from universities, research institutes, and commercial IT companies, especially telecom firms. Some accounts call these cadres an “active reserve,” comprising eight million network operators under direct state control.”
― Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World