BATTLES IN CYBERSPACE

    Julian Assange, the intrepid champion of transparency and the scourge of corrupt political gangs, released another batch of internal Democratic Party communications today. Assange told CNN that more were on the way, infuriating Democratic Party apparatchiks.

    Recall that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton, Leon Panetta and a few other Democrat leaders now expressing outrage over these leaks were the same ones who authorized the NSA to commit blanket domestic espionage on innocent citizens---completely illegal of course---and recently argued before the Supreme Court the supposed 'right' of the FBI to hack private databases with no legal warrant.

    Assange, it should be noted, is turning what we expected to be a fairly contrived and lackluster convention into a really newsworthy event.

    The question which ought to be raised---but is prudently ignored by the US Government- Media Complex is: Just how good is American cybersecurity?

     Besides the DNC, the last year has seen database breaches in the Pentagon, CIA, FBI, IRS, some government contractors holding sensitive information, and two massive and extremely serious ones in the federal Office of Personnel Management. China is believed to been behind one of the latter---a retaliatory move against Obama for his antics in the South China Sea---but still, the fact that China obtained personnel records of every federal employee is quite serious.

      To underscore our vulnerability in cyberspace, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced today expanded funding for China's Cyber Warfare Force. China actually has a separate military branch, along with their army, navy, and air force, dedicated to Cyber Warfare. Xi believes that in future conflicts, control of enemy cyberspace will prove as important as conventional military objectives---and obviously he is correct about this.

     How effective Cyber Warfare can be is being demonstrated in Yemen. A group of Yemeni patriots calling themselves the Yemen Cyber Army have been wreaking havoc on the Saudi invaders. At one point, they shut down the Saudi government websites---they also hacked and collected sensitive internal e-mails of the Saudi Royal Family. Many of these have been published, exposing to the Arab world the crimes and perversions of the House of Saud. It has also been said that leaked information has foiled several Saudi military campaigns.

      What both Julian Assange and the Yemen Cyber Army are proving is that corrupt political elites like the Clinton Machine and the Saudi Royal Family are no longer  untouchable. Cyberspace has given us a degree of power to challenge the power elite, just as it is breaking Academia's and Corporate Media's monopoly on information.

     The best Cybersecurity a nation can engage in then, is the one that is most transparent. The capabilities of Cyber Warfare is also a great incentive for world peace.