WASHINGTON;—The House Homeland Security Committee meets in a cavernous yellow room in the Cannon House Office Building. The members sit at one end of the narrow chamber, and, on the opposite wall, hangs a 19th century painting by Walter Lofthouse Dean.
In pale blue, white and pink hues, the painting depicts several navy warships, with furled sails, at rest in the Boston Harbor.
The title of the painting is Peace.
When the portrait hung in the Naval Affairs Committee hearing room “the consensus [was] that the painting had a positive, calming influence on the committee,” according to a history of the painting on the website for the House’s Office of the Clerk.
One wonders if the placid imagery continues to evoke serenity in congressional representatives today. More than a century later, these legislators consider a very new and perplexing set of threats to the U.S. homeland.
Perhaps the most unsettling part of 21st century geopolitics is not the complexity of war, but the vagueness of peace. In 1891, the absence of war was a fleet of white ships–mighty and ready but static and serene. In 2012, when global terrorism, rogue nuclear nations and asymmetrical digital attacks are real, it is difficult to know what peace looks like.
Members of the Homeland Security Committee aimed to better understand contemporary war and peace during a subcommittee hearing recently. The primary subject was the cyber capability of Iran—a nation that typically makes headlines with its nuclear flirtations.
“We cannot blind ourselves to this new threat,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan, R-Pa., chairman of the Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.
“If Iran is willing to blow up a Washington restaurant and kill innocent Americans,’’ he said, “we would be naïve to think that Iran could never conduct a cyber attack against the United States’ homeland.”
Meehan and some other members sought to combat what they called the conventional wisdom in Washington with regard to Iran—that the potential for cyber warfare is notable, but that the real concern is nuclear.
“Cyber is not really quite that existential,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a security consultant and former senior Department of Homeland Security official. “It’s a real threat but if Iran gets a nuclear bomb, that’s a game changer.”
Rosenzweig, who was not present at the hearing, said that other nations are a greater threat when it comes to cyber warfare.
“If I were holding a hearing on the major cyber threats to America, Iran would be fourth or fifth or sixth on the list,”, he said.
The witnesses testifying at Thursday’s hearing begged to differ. While some agreed that Iran may not be the most sophisticated country technologically, they have plenty of reasons to attack the U.S. and its allies.
“The good news is that if you were to rack and stack the great cyber threats, Iran is not at the top of the list,” said Frank J. Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University and a former Bush administration counter-terrorism official. “The bad news is what they lack in capability, they make up for in intent.”
Iran has been the victim of recent cyber attacks—most notably the Stuxnet virus, which wiped roughly a fifth of the country’s centrifuges, a technological linchpin in attaining nuclear capability. The logic follows, experts say, that Iran has an interest in countering such attacks with its own offensive capabilities.
“Iran appears to be moving increasingly from defense to offense in terms of how it thinks about cyberspace,” said Ilan Berman, vice president of the conservative-leaning American Foreign Policy Council.
Evidence of the “seismic shift,” as Berman put it, can be found in recent history.
Earlier this year Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called for the establishment of a Supreme Council of Cyberspace. Thursday’s panel also pointed to reports that Iran is planning to invest a billion dollars in recruiting a cyber army of sympathetic hacktivists.
Iranians are suspected to be behind last year’s infiltration of a Dutch security certificate company, another demonstration of their interest in cyber warfare, according to Cilluffo.
Apart from the obvious intelligence benefits, Iran also sent a message when it recently attempted to extract data from a U.S. drone that crashed in Iran, Cilluffo said.
The real issue, according to the panelists, is that the U.S. lacks a comprehensive cyber warfare strategy. They urged the legislators that an important step in developing this strategy is to move cautiously and reasonably towards the offensive.
The U.S., the experts said, should find nonaggressive opportunities to put its digital arsenal on full display.
“We need to demonstrate capabilities. We need to be visible,” said Cilluffo. “What’s the point of a doomsday weapon if no one knows you have it?”
It may be time to update the picture hanging in Canon 311, but it is harder to find peace in ones and zeros than it is in the posture of ships.
