Inside Cyber Warfare - Jeffrey Carr [101]
The Art of Misdirection
Misdirection is a tactic that the Russian Federation has successfully applied to its military strategy for many years, particularly during negotiations for nuclear disarmament with the United States. However, it has never been used so clearly or frequently as it has been in this century during times of cyber conflict.
In order to understand exactly how the art of misdirection is applied so adeptly to cyber events in Chechnya, Ingushetia, Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, and Georgia, it’s important to know about a very successful practitioner of misdirection, a famous stage magician named Ralph Hull.
Ralph rose to celebrity in the world of stage magic as a magician’s magician. In other words, his preferred audience consisted of other professionals like himself. He had long passed the stage where fooling an audience of “civilians” provided any satisfaction. Coming up with a trick that baffled other pros, however, was his ultimate goal. He succeeded in that goal with a card trick that he named “The Tuned Deck.”
Here is one possible delivery that Ralph’s audience would have heard as he performed his master trick:
Boys, I have a new trick to show you. It’s called The Tuned Deck.
This deck of cards is magically tuned. [Hull holds the deck to his ear and riffles the cards, listening carefully to the buzz of the cards.] By their finely tuned vibrations, I can hear and feel the location of any card. Pick a card, any card...
A member of the audience would pick a card, look at it, and return it to the deck. Hull would then riffle the deck by his ear, and draw the very card the audience member selected.
No one ever figured out how he did that trick until after his death, when the details of “The Tuned Deck” were published. Hull’s secret was shockingly simple. He, like his colleagues, knew multiple ways to perform this trick. Let’s label them A, B, C, D, and E. When another magician guessed that Hull was using trick A, Hull would repeat the trick using B. If someone else recognized the trick as B, he would repeat it using trick C, and so on. Every time someone thought that they recognized his trick, he would immediately repeat the trick in a slightly different way, and no one expected him to revert back to a method that they had already named. Therefore, in the minds of his audience, it must be something new.
What does this have to do with Russian military strategy? Nothing. The misdirection wasn’t contained in anything that Hull did on stage. The genius of Ralph Hull wasn’t in what he did; it was in what he said. It was in how he named his trick—“The” Tuned Deck.
By using the word “the,” he created an image of a single trick in the minds of his audience, when in reality he was performing multiple variations of one trick.
In discussing information warfare, both in speeches and in papers, Russian military officials point to a future capability that they are in the process of developing as a defense against US capabilities, which they claim are more advanced and already in place.
They define the debate by pointing to what their adversary is developing and therefore what they must develop to defend their homeland. Having defined what Information Warfare is, they will then argue for a treaty regime that limits development of those capabilities. And here is the artfully applied misdirection of the Russian government.
The Kremlin will negotiate on military capabilities that they haven’t used, but will not negotiate on their civilian hacker assets that they have used. In fact, the latter is considered an internal criminal matter not open to international negotiation at all.
This was clearly seen in a story reported in the New York Times on June 27, 2009, entitled “US and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace.”
Washington