@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex Read Free

if they were exposed. It was like they were daring the Americans to come after them, believing they wouldn’t.
    The spies had made off with potentially useful intelligence, but they’d also set back the development of the F-35. US officials later said that rampant penetrations of subcontractors’ computers had forced programmers to rewrite software code for the jet, contributing to a one-year delay in the program and a 50 percent increase in its cost. The Chinese might never have to fight the jet if it didn’t get off the ground. But China also moved forward with its own design. In September 2012, during a visit by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Chinese officials leaked photographs of their newest fighter jet parked on an airfield. It bore a number of design similarities to the F-35, which was no coincidence, US officials acknowledged.The Chinese jet’s design was based partly on information the spies had stolen from American companies six years earlier.
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    The CEOs weren’t sure why they’d been summoned to the Pentagon.Or why they’d been granted temporary top-secret security clearances. Looking around the room, they saw plenty of familiar faces. The chief executives or their representatives worked for the twenty biggest US defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, among others. These were blue-chip companies in their own right, and collectively they had spent decades building the American war machine. Whatever had brought them all together at Defense Department headquarters that summer day in 2007, on such short notice, it couldn’t be good news.
    The executives gathered outside a “sensitive compartmented information facility,” or SCIF (pronounced “skiff”), a room built to be impervious to eavesdropping. Their hosts began what had been billed as a “threat briefing,” which didn’t seem unusual, since military officers routinely talked to defense company chiefs about threats to national security. But this briefing was about threats to corporate security. Specifically, the corporations run by these executives.
    Military personnel who’d investigated the F-35 breach described what they’d learned. A massive espionage campaign had targeted each of the companies’ computer networks. The spies weren’t looking just for information about the F-35; they stole as many military secrets as they could find. Spies had overrun the companies’ weak electronic defenses and relayed classified information back to their home servers. They had sent employees working on secret projects innocuous-looking e-mails that appeared to come from trusted sources inside the company. When the employee opened such an e-mail, it installed a digital backdoor and allowed the Chinese to monitor every keystroke the employee typed, every website visited, every file downloaded, created, or sent. Their networks had been infiltrated. Their computers compromised and monitored. America’s military-industrial complex had, in the language of hackers, been owned.
    And the spies were still inside these companies’ networks, mining for secrets and eavesdropping on employees’ communications. Maybe they were monitoring the executives’ private e-mails right now. “A lot of people went into that room with dark hair, and when they came out, it was white,” says James Lewis, a prominent cyber security expert and a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, who knows the details of the meeting.
    These companies were the weak link in the security chain. Pentagon officials told the executives that responding to theft of military secrets was a matter of urgent national security. And for the companies, it was a matter of survival. Most of their businesses depended on the money they made selling airplanes, tanks, satellites, ships, submarines, computer systems, and