LOOK AT THE DISTANT
AND
NOT SO DISTANT
HORIZONS
By
Maj Gen Yashwant Deva, A VSM
(Retd)
"The only thing harder than
getting a new idea
into the military mind is getting
an old one out.”.
The most signilicant contribution of the last millennium to the civilisation in its later half was the demise of the hierarchies and the beginning of the age of networks, bright and promising in perceptions, yet often bleak and demanding in prospects. Network-centric technologies in general and the Internet taxonomy in particular, now drive the society in all aspects of its devclopment, even daring the very mores that pivot the humanity. The e-prefixed buzzwords. e.g. e-business, e-governance, e-services or ITES (Information Technology-enabled Services as they are commonly referred to) like e-banking, e-insurance and e-medicine underscore this revolution. "Access", "backbone" and "security" technologies are the marrows that lend the network architecture the attributes of bandwidth, safety and time responsiveness - obvious acid tests of their merit.
The beginning of the new millennium has been highly
turbulent both nationally and internationally. We have been hit by the economic
slow down: the peril of lay-offs; near demise of dotcom; amoral and unhealthy
competition; a growing menace of "S" abuses on the Internet like spying,
spoofing, spamming, spinning, stalking, sleazing etc.: possibility of
e-learning and e-services going the e-business way; and to top it all, the
Menace of scams and scandals. Then we were visited by it natural disaster in
Gujarat and asymmetric attacks on the most powerful nation in the world, rem
inding us of the frighteningly hideous fronumd font of the international
terrorism to which we'in India have been perpetually hostage of, both pre 9/11
and post 9/11. Whereas terrorism has become network-centric and technology
sentient, the civilised are fissure ridden, comatose to the dangers that
threaten their very existence, and ill disposed to sharing technologies.
"For nearly 200 years, the tools and tactics of how we fight have evolved
with military technologies. Now, fundamental challges are affecting the very
character of war. Who can make war is changing as a result of weapons
proliferation and the fact that the tools of war illcreasingly are marketplace
commodities. By extension, these affect the where, the when, and the how of war.
"1
The burden of this paper is that the network-centric technologies and
culture is panacea for all our ills and yet these pose the greatest threat to the human
race, because the worldwide terror network too relies and thrives on thesl: very
technologies and facilities on the one hand and has acquired capabilities to
abuse, negate or interfere with the legitimate-use systems. on the other.
Whether we arc going to be a step ahead or a step behind is the moot
question.
It would be pertinent to whack a few fencing
home-thrusts, endorsing, even parrying the laws and hypotheses that govern the
design and architecture of the networks. A look at the Hobbes' Internet
Timeline v5.32 would show how arduous and gruelling lias been the
path taken by the Internet in the development of the backbone, access networks,
packet switching, the protocols and the services that we now take for granted.
One of the most signiticant contributions of this history is the gift of World
Wide Web (WWW) from CERN in 1992, which allowed everyone to have 24-hour
presence on the net. Web is a blending of hypertext, user interface and
distributed data. Specially written tiles, which use Hypertext Mark Up
Language (HTML) are pigeonholed on the net, which can be accessed by anyone
using browsers. Internet 2 and the current rage about Mobile Internet with a
basketful of emerging technologies, headed for 3G (3rd Generatron) and
beyond, are part of the process. "These are no incremental add-ons to
technologies: they are no salad dressings. Each one has brought about a
revolwion, a sea-change to our daily
life,” 3
A million-dollar question that often nags thc
unsuspecting, is what prompted the US to adopt altruistic stance and gift away
these technologies. It bestowed the TCP/IP to the world, free of cost with no
strings attached. Bill Eager and Ann Pike call it simply unparalleled. It is
aptly described as “the most counter intuitive, curious event.”4 A
plausible reason for the US benevolence could well have been that they foresaw
the vulnerabilities of the network to electronic attack, which could initiate
from anywhere. Take for instance seeding of viruses, worms
and Trojans in the system. Morris Worm, which burrowed through the network much
against the initiator's intention in 1988 proved the point; it bared
vulnerability affecting over 6,000 of the 60,000 hosts, i.e. one in
ten.5
Let us not forget that growth does not come by merely
buying computers, but from connecting them to each other, more so by spreading
network culture. This truism is not widely understood or appreciated; more so by
the military who have been hidebound in divorcing computers from communications.
Sun Microsystems were the first to point out that it is not so much about th.:
computer as it is about the computer in the networked condition that the real
value and merits accrue." It is as true of business operations as warfare. This
paradigm shift in the philosophy of computing led IBM to announce that it was
moving to network-centric computing.7 The traditional PC is headed
for archiving. It is anybody's guess as to what shape second generation access
devices would take. It could be computing appliances, Web-enabled set-top boxes,
Webphones, Internet-connected wireless communicators, or Java-based network
computers – all of these or something else.
Network-centric computing is governed by Metcalfe's Law,
which asserts that the "power" of a network is proportional to the square of the
number of nodes in the network.8 The "power" or "payoff" of
network-centric computing comes from information-intensive interactions between
very large numbers of heterogeneous computational nodes in the network.
One of the reasons why we succeeded in creating a highly responsive network of
commun ications during Operation PAWAN was scrupulous adherence to this
principle, both in numbers of nodes and imparting them
multi-connectivity.
The term broadband has been somewhat obscurely defined
to mean any service, which is "always on" and exceeds 100 Kbps. The latter is
not even double the 56 k dialup speed: no wonder the term hardly purveys
vastness or inspires contidence. We now talk of wide bandwidth and
ultrahigh bandwidth. Further, "always on" is not much of a novelty with the
arrival of cell-phones. Not long ago the mandarins of the Indian establ ishment
made a brag that bandwidth was not a problem, but looking at the demand of
bandwidth-consuming services and Gigabit networks, hopefully better
understanding would have dawned. Seshagiri writes, "The peak folly was to
thing that every ISP (Internet Service Provider) can become a bandwidth
wholesaler and then next best folly was to open a shop for pure bandwidth
r etailnlg, This effervescent cummodtly called ‘bandwidth’ was,
directly or indirectly controlled by the Videsh Sanchar Nigam
Limited (VSNL), at least so far. Holding on their monopoly and monopolist
profits was a prime motivation for the VSNL and the retailing ISP had
to compete with them for customers, the wholesaler being also a retailer.
This is a telling example of a growth limiting, dis-economic feedback
system. "9 What Seshagiri describes as a national experience is
equitlly true of international arena, narrated under Backbone Technologies later
in this article.
Governed by the speed of communications increasing at a
much faster rate than the speed of computing, the network-centric communications
are on the upswing. A comparison on a matrix of computing speed, channel
capacity, packet size and delivery speed underscores the point that "time
available for protocol processing has become much less and therefore protocols
will have to be simple.”10 Recently an international research team has set a new
Internet 2 Land Speed Record using the next generation Internet Protocol by
transferring the equivalent of the entire contents of a CD-ROM over more than
9000 miles (14,800 kms) of network in less than 17
seconds.11 The transfer was accomplished at an average speed of
348.22 megabits per second, more than 6000 times faster than a typical computer
modem.12
Subscribing to the thesis that the networks are more
democratic, more liberal and a priori more open, accessible and
responsive vision of the true netizens, be it in India or elsewhere, has always
centred on their unequivocal adoption. In the prevailing smog and smoke that
engulf the under-developed world and the societies in transition, struggling for
a space under the sun, networks provide the solution. Networks have a profound
impact beyond their physical borders, confines and boundaries. They can
transform political, economic, social and cultural relationships and give them a
wholesome integrated identity purveying a system's approach to resolving
societal problems. They lend value to human interactivity and therefore it is as
important to network individuals and organisations as it is to inter-web
machines. In his book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of
Prosperity, 13 Francis Fukuyama emphasises the role of "social
capital" and organic cohesion for success in "post-historical world." He
describes the social capital as "reciprocity, moral obligation, duty towards
community and trust."14 Technologies that marry up with social
capital lend a greater chance of creation of prosperity and a priori
economic and political survivability in the prevailing hostile
environment.
Maintaining that in the new "social context, there
are very serious and dangerous tensions growing: tensions that can only be
resolved through conflict, "15 Garigue avers. "The greater
battle will be between the different types of cyber-environments as they
continually assimilate more and more of humanity into their network structure.
Ultimately, the final battle will be, as usual between fundamentally
different belief systems. The fight will be flesh and silicate against flesh and
silicate.”16 His
thesis is that because "totalitarian and dogmatic systems" will continue to
exist. "for humanity to survive it has to learn to hack the belief , systems
that are encased in the networks. "17
Undoubtedly, belief systems are Human constructs and they will always be morc humane and fallible. So are machines. These too are human constructs and any fault-lines that are designed in them will, of sure, sire Frankenstein. The choice between technology and anti-technology too is of our own making. Whatever be the times, societal mores or the state of the technology, the networks have sustained positive belief systems and have been a bulwark against tyrannical arbitrariness and impulsivity imposed by the hierarchies. Yet the networks have spawned their own incongruities and inconsistencies. How else can one explain the hawala network, the drug network, the underworld crime network and cyber-terrorism that nibble at the vitals of the network of the networks, the Internet?
It would be interesting to study the genesis of the
Internet to appreciate the kind of global access or connectivity that we
covet. It was way back in the Sixties that the US strategic think-tank, Rand
Corporation did some serious mulling on the likely state of the US command and
control setup in a nuclear scenario and how US authorities could communicate
after the first nuclear strike. A dilemma that confronted them was that
post-nuclear America would need a C3 (command, control and
communications) network, linking city-to-city, state-to-state and base-to-base.
A nuclear attack would render any conceivable network to tatters; no matter how
meticulous were the planning for network protection to make it nuclear and
EMP proof. Baftled by the problem
of control, the Rand Corporation discarded the concept of centralised authority
over the network on the reasoning that such a network would be the tirst to be
targetted and eliminated by enemy missile attack. "In a highly secret
meeting, Rand came out with a novel and bold solution, perhaps a wicked one too.
It suggested let there be no celltral authority, assume the network to be
vulnerable at all times; design the network from the very beginning to operate
while in tatters, and perhaps with tongue in cheek, let the friends and allies
share the electronic vulnerability and also feel the pinch. Forty years hence,
there is no central authority over the Internet the network is hare and exposed
to its marrow, continues to be in tatters and its vulnerabilities, though of
different kind a concern of the entire civilized
world.”18
Let us shed crass naivete. The Internet was an
instrument of Cold War and still figures high in US security concerns. It was
created to serve Uncle Sam's globalisation agenda, more for the info-dominance
and less for any humane munificence. Its roots are in ARPANET. ARPA stands for
Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is part of the US Department of
Defense. One of the goals of ARPANET was research in distributed computer
systems for military purposes. The emphasis is deliberately on military
purposes, because that is how the Internet in its infancy bore a hierarchical
structure.
The New World Information Order helps the US to play
super cop ifnot in physical space, then certainly in cyberspace. It affords
legitimacy to spy on others, both friends and foes, and that is precisely what
the NSA and the Anglo-Saxon grouping of Project Echelon19 are
instituted to do. They excel in sniffing packets, passwords, e-mail and keys and
breaking codes and ciphers. The European Parliament has indicted them for
commercial spying.20
The Echelon has now a match in AI Qaida. The
latter has shown the World where the network chinks are, how footprints can be
hidden, and how "redundancy in bits" can be exploited to send
steganographically21 coded messages to their cadre. The Echelon now
searches for poisonous needles in a haystack, possibly of pornographic files and
frames.
Undoubtedly, the Internet has acquired a transcontinental personality; iron ically so has terrorism. If one searches for commonal ity amongst the terrorist attacks, it is the laptop and cellular that standout. In the attacks on the Parliament and the Red Fort, the terrorists left behind PCs, which amply proves the point. The analysis of the data stored in them would have yielded valuable information. The terrorists have become high Iy dependent on the Internet for spying, propaganda, money laundering, passage of information, interactivity and operation planning through ICQ (I seek you) and IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Mobile Internet, VOIP and Short Message Service (SMS) would provideincreascd flexibility. It stands to reason that it is through denial and decimation of "access" that effective countermeasures against terrorism can be instituted and shift from platform-centric to network-centric warfare so that terrorism can be defeated.
ACCESS
TECHNOLOGIES
For India, the most pragmatic access solution is copper
net broadband, which provides high speed, channelis.ed and packetised data
communication services culling and com bining Digital Subscriber Line (DSL),
Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technologies and techniques. It
has the right credentials of scalability and affordability to engineer and
service high-speed. "last mile" connectivity to local, wide and metropolitan
area networks (LAN, WAN and MAN). Last-mile problem is the most nagging and
challenging one and it can be resolved to an extent by DSL converting the
existing telephone lines into high speed data circuits of l28 Kbps to 2 Mbps symmetrically and up to 7 Mbps, or even beyond
asymmetrically. "Where utilisation of existing copper cables is convenient
and economical, the high bandwidth required for content-rich applications can be
realised by a mass deployment of DSL without need for massive infrastructure
replacement. The protocol of choice for business services is HDSL2, while
Asymmetric DSL delivers greater throughput to desktops. Where ISDN is
functionally essential. IDSL (ISDN + DSL) can be deployed. To push the
24 gauge copper pairs to the limit, we need VDSL (Very high bit rate
DSL). This uses the shortest possible length of copper wire and consequently the
longest run of fibre possible.” 22
That the copper net could ride to the state-of-the-art,
few can deny. It could provide flexible architecture, multiple configuration and
seamless end-to-end service, hosting remote access loops for internet/intranet
connectivity, legacy voice, PBX emulation, video conferencing, multimedia, Web,
mail and other e-services. DSL in its myriad manifestations, e.g. ADSL TDSL, DSL
lite, XDSL HDSL SDSL could support corporate networks, rural networks and
garrison networks spanning fixed-location logistic and adm mistrative establ
ishment. However, a word of caution for the last mentioned; there is a danger of
a copper m indset permeating the military. In the thick of battle in Jaffna, a
commander complainingly asked me, "Where is my PL (permanent
line)?”.
Where the existing copper wires are old and of poor
insulation, answer lies in taking Fibre To The Home (FTTH). In the long run this
would be the best choice, as it would do away with metal completely. The country
can gain world leadership in providing access if we can concentrate our R&D
resources on one commercially viable FTTH
design.23
Local Multipoint Distribution Services (LMDS) is the
broadband wireless technology used to deliver voice, data, I nternet and video
services in the 25 G Hz and higher spectrum. LMDS use cellular like network
architecture, though services provided are fixed, not mobile. Frequencies and
bandwidths are allotted by the national authorities to deliver broadband
services in point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Architectural
options are varied and the system design options are built around TDMA (Time
Division Multiplex Access). FDMA (Frequency Division Multiplex Access and CDMA
(Code Division Multiplex Acces~). "Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and Wireless
Access Network are fast maturing technologies and can be gainfully deployed. The
Multi-channel, Multi-point Distribution Service (MMDS) lacks in-band return path
and sufficient bandwidth to surpass cable channel capacity for offering Superior
interactive data services. LMDS overcomes this by offering two-way, high bit
rate wireless service and vastly increases
bandwidth."24
Free Space Optics (FSO) is another technology of interest not only for metros but also for mountainous and high altitude areas (HAA) where interference-free, line-of-sight topography is available, which can serve the static in-depth positions.
|
. ~
~,' |
3G is already he're and mobile Internet access marketls
blooming.'Japan and Korea are leading in hand-held devices for 3G. China
has started working with 4G technology, the refrain being "Never mind 3G,
look forward to 4G." China Mobile and China Unicom have joined hands and are
catching up with 2.5G or General Packet Radio Service - Code Division Multiplex
Access 1 X (CDMA 1 X) as part of the 863 programme.25 Russia has
opted for CDMA2000 1 X in 450 Mhz.
The crucial basic services on the Internet are VOIP,
interactive TV and video-conferencing. Unfortunately our track record is of
getting bogged down with regulatory, trivial and discrete issues and giving
short shrift to larger national interests. Whatever be the controversies that
have plagued the Indian scene, the times and opportunity demand that the public
and private sector operators network and cooperate with each other "on a sincere
level-playing field"26 for providing these services to the citizens
at the lowest feasible tariffs.
The Internet was started as a platform for data
applications, which were not time critical. Now its use covers real time
computer conferencing, audio broadcasting, transfer of images, video clips,
video telecasting and the Internet telephony or the Voice Over the Internet
Protocol (VOIP). The contours of Internet 2 are amply visible and there is much
literature and resume of R&D effort on the Internet. The technology is
galloping so fast that it is anybody's guess as to the shape it would ultimately
take.
When we talk of "access", "connectivity" or "last-mile"
technology, if cannot possibly be an end by itself. It is the "backbone," the
"trunk" or the "vertebrae" to which these outers or edges are connected in a
meshed architecture that forms the kernel and bears the burden. There are
thirteen major players or the Internet backbone providers in the world that use
tele-communication networks and routing equipment to deliver data traffic to and
from their customers. Internet backbone providers interconnect with one another
in order to enable their custQmers to exchange traffic with the customers of
other backbones, resulting in the universal connectivity that is the hallmark of
to day's Internet. They are monopolists to the boot, claims of conformity to
anti-trust laws and the so-called market forces notwithstanding. The legacy of
international telecommunications cost-sharing models are not acceptable to these
Internet backbone providers.27 A lesser entity, be it one amongst the
emerging tigers, has little scope of entering the elite group unless
they "handshake." The term handshake involves either
"peering" or "transit." Peering entails exchange of traffic with one another at
no cost, whereas transit is at a cost whereby one backbone pays" another
backbone "for delivering its traffic.28 This arrangement speaks
volumes about the ugly face of international capitalism. It is the monopolists
who decide whether, how and where to interconnect in commercial negotiations
among themselves.
The Internet backbone is over three media; satellites in
the space, submarine cable under the sea and fibre buried in the ground. If one
peruses the Atlas of the Cyberspaces,29 it would be an eye opener to see how
richly endowed are the countries on either side of the Atlantic and the Pacific;
how poorly we are served in South Asia and how strangulating would it be if the
only submarine cable that touches the shore at Mumbai is cut off. Even the
tracks and footprints of communication satellites somewhat evade us. We do not
fall in the category of the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), and the ITU
apparently is only concerned with the growing digital divide between the likes
of us and the LDCs. To them, neither the count of humans matter nor the stark
reality of where the developed world is headed
for.30
There is no short cut to creating a backbone of our own,
spanning the length and breadth of the country. Project Sankhya
Vahini31 was an excellent project; unfortunately it got
scuttled. The project was designed to meet the high bandwidth communication
needs of commercial, manufacturing and financial sectors besides meeting the
research, teaching and learning requirements of educational institutions. It was
designed to be the test bed for developing and proving multigigabit technologies
and creation of backbone for the national Internet.32 The National
Information Infrastructure would have come up in phases. The design and creation
of the National Backbone and setting up of Urban Link was to be coordinated
jointly by IUNet India, the then omnipotent DOT and the key technology
providers.33 This would have involved lighting of existing dark
cables, laying new bundles of advanced fibres, enhancement of the capacity of
existing fibres to large bandwidths, multiplexing and aggregation to free a few
fibres exclusively for the backbone.34 It was estimated that the
project would have built a network topology of approximately 16,000 kilometres
with 8 to 10 nodes located at major cities and 25 high bandwidth Points of
Presence (PsOP), extendable to 100.35
Pity this cutting-edge-technology project went awry,
putting us back by a full decade. The philosophy holds; let someone take
cudgels.
Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) that would
have hinged on Sunkhya Vahini, is a fibre-optic transmission technique
that employs light wavelengths to transmit data parallel-by-bit or
serial-by-character. Scalable DWDM systems in enabling service providers to
accommodate consumer demand for ever-increasing amounts of bandwidth. DWDM is a
crucial component of optical networ~s that allows the transmission of e-mail,
video", multimedia, data, and voice-carried in IP, ATM and synchronous optical
network/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) respectively, over the
optical layer.16 The top rate of embedded fibre networks is
limited to 2.4 Gbps. WOM could double the capacity by providing two
wavelengths that could he transmitted over a single optical fibre. Through DWDM,
8, 16 and even up to 96 channels are now available. Research OWOM systcms have
crossed I Tbps. DWDM reduces the need for costly signal regeneration units
for MAN, 10 Gbps DWDM arc now commercially available, which can host
applications like high speed Internet access, corporate LAN interconnection,
back-end server connection, inter and intra POP connections, real time
streaming, tele-commuting applications and of course high speed data
transport.37
THE AGENDA
From the above discussion, let us identify an agenda for
ourselves. The agenda should embrace building participatory and interactive
networks, creation of vibrant structures to thrust forward various facets of
technology, give a wider academic reach to the officers and men of the I\rmed
forces and bring technology savvy of the society to those who are wedded to
nishkam service on a common platform.
The commitments and obligations of the Armed Forces have
multiplied not for any external reason, but from self-realised duty. It is time
to redeem our pledges and earnestly get down to pursuing relentlessly the
socially relevant and technology sentient agenda that we on our own are expected
to set for ourselves. When the going becomes rough and bristly, our resolves
must get further fortified. We must continuingly and convincingly refurbish our
ideas and renew our priorities to go with the emergencies and challenges.
Evidence suggests that commercial and Pak-abetted access to information
technologies may well give terrorists an edge. That would call for asymmetric
ways to counter asymmetric threats.
An important item for national agenda is to create an
information infrastructure backbone of our own. China, which joined NFSNET
two year later than us, has made great strides some of which merit mentioning.
The Chinese have setup 'Three Golden Networks', viz., Public Commun ications
Network. Economic Information Network, China Education and Research network
(CERNET),38 while we are
content with only one, i.e. Education and Research Network (ERNET).'" The total
capacity of telecommunications switches in China makes theirs one of the largest
telecommunications networks in the world. A California-based computer
networking firm, Bay Networks Inc. was awarded a contract for a
multimillion-dollar joint venture with the Chinese government to build a
countrywide intranet called China Wide Web. Five cities – Beijing, Hong Kong,
Shanghai, Shenyang and Guangzhou – were initially connected; 50 more are in the
process of being connected.40 If world can have WWW and China can
boast of China Wide Web, then why can India not plan and engineer an India Wide
Web?
Creating a synergy between market and battlefield, and
taking the network-centric technologies to the trench. is another vital
issue that begs immediate attention. A useful suggestion infer alia many
others, is to examine the feasibility of Blue Tooth networks to replace local
lines in command bunkers.
The network-centric technologies have lent new sheen to
business, education, social guidance, national security, services and
convergence of technologies. But there are detractions aplenty to match,
even undo their blessings. Let us be pragmatic and take an unbiased view joining
hands with both the developed and the developing economies. Let us not forget
that the new dispensation calls for recognition of the prevai ling ambience
of competitiveness and changed perspective on economic
growth.
As to the menace of network-centric and cyber crime. Web
defacing, hate campaigns, infraction, cyber laundering and "S" abuses, the
civilised have to get together and form a convention to contain and counter
them. Let the serious acts of war and breach of security be handled by the
security and intelligence agencies. The so called ethical hacker, Waner Senu
in teens, or corporate houses out to play 007, have no role to play and
should not be so encouraged.
Setting up research in emerging technologies and vital
areas wherein the Internet has created an indelible mark in the making
ofe-society is vital. It can neither be left to the establishment nor the
corporate world, whose priorities lie elsewhere. The Oxford University in the UK
has modelled an Internet Institute the first of its kind, at a cost of $22
million for carrying out research and making policy recommendations about what
effects the Internet has on society. RAND's contribution to throwing up fresh
ideas is well known. We may take cue from them, and in pursuance of the agenda,
set up similar centres and think tanks to conduct studies and debate on issues
of concern.
Lastly, we must include in our agenda, an intimate
earthy look at the distant horizons with the further seeding and maturing of
networks and informatics based on bio, neural, genetic, quantum, micro and nano
technologies as they impact on the generations ahead of computing,
communications, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and robotics. We may
even have a neural network linked to the physical surfing Brahmond and
"accessing" the Inaccessible.
George Landow suggests in Hypertext and Critical
Theory, "we are currently undergoing a revolution in human thought.
Simultaneously paradigm-shifts in apparently diverse disciplines are
converging, creating a new conceptual system based in multilinearity, nodes,
links and networks rather than center, margin, hierarchy and
linearity.41 That is precisely the import of this
article.
Of the three network-centric
technologies, access, backbone and security, it is the last mentioned that sits
at the perch. It is a natural consequence of the warfare itself becoming
network-centric, cyber-centric and info-centric. 9/l1 gave fresh impulsion to this
paradigm. What was hitherto a hacker-phreaker(sic) playground, the cyberspace
has become a macabre haunt of the terrorist in hosting and vending terrorism and
anarchy. It has accentuated the "historical discontinuities"42 in the
conduct of warfare. ''The Soviets called these discontinuities
"military-technical revolutions."43 The US analysts preferred to call
them RMA
more "to capture
the non-technical dimensions of the military organisations and
operations"44 than to de-emphasise the
technical.
The initiative of ARTRAC in hosting a seminar on
"Emerging Technologies for Access Networks" is
obviously designed to restore the balance with a bias to technologies. Coming as
this event does closely following the Army War College (erstwhile College of
Combat) going hi-tech with broadband connectivity and its teach ing IT
enabled,45 it is all the more praiseworthy and encouraging. That
technologies drive the national agenda and cannot be divorced from the human
values and the soldiering, is a truism we will do well to imbibe as a
doctrine.
1. Vice Admiral Arthur K Cebrowski and John J. Garstka,
"Network-Centric Warfare: Its
Origin and Future," Us. Navallnstitllle -
Proceedings.
2. See Robert Hobbes lakon, 'Hobbes' Internet
Timelines v5,3'. at
http://www.internetyearwise_mes/
3. Yashwant Deva. "The Greens, the Fairways and the
Roughs of the Internet," Internet: Challenges. Opportunities and Prospects.
e-Monograph, IETE Publication at www.iete.info/ p.61.
4. Bill Eager and Ann Pike, Using the World Wide Web,
(Indianapolis. 1995), p.l.
5. See Larry Boettger, 'The Morris Worm: How it Affected
Computer Security and the Lessons Learnt by it," The SANS Reading Room
(Internet), December 24,2000.
6 "Technology and the Electronic Company," IEEE
Spectrum. February 1997.
7. Ira Sager, "The View from IBM," Business Week,
30 November 1995.
8. George Gilder, "Metcalfe's Law and Legacy," Forhes
ASAP, 13 September 1993.
9. N Seshagiri. The Internet: Chellenges,
Opporlunities and Prospects, n.3. p.20.
10. Presentation made by Maj Rajiv Singh on "Gigabit
Networking" at the Zonal Seminar on "Converging Technologies" organised by Mhow
Centre of IETE on 7-8 February 2001.
11. See://archives.internet2..edu/. The research groups
are ARNES (Slovakia), RedlRIS (Spain)
and DANTE (Pan European).
12. Ibid. The speed achieved was 5154 terabit meters per
second on October 9,2002 as part of Internet Protocol IPv6 deployment as
compared to 1215 terabit meters per second by the same team on September
27,2002, using standard Transmission Control Protocol! Internet Protocol
TCP/IP.
13. Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues und
Creation of Prosperity, (Amazon.com).
'His earlier work The End olHi.l'tory und the Last
Man ('1992) was an international best seller. 14.
Ibid.
15. See Robert John Garigue, "Hacking Belief Systcms: An
Agenda for thc Survival of Humanity in Cyber-Socicty,"
http://www.infowar.com/articles/00/cyborglcyborg3.htm
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. n. 3, p. 58-59.
19. .See Yashwant Deva, Secure or Perish, (Ocean
Book (P) Ltd..2001 ), p.65-67.
20. Ibid.
21. "Is Osama using cyber cipher?" The Times of India
quoting LATWP SVC, October 15.
200 I. Also see Yashwant Deva, ed. "Information
Security," IETE Technical Review Special Issue, July-August 2002, wherein
three articles on steganography and steganalysis appear. viz. "Investigating
Steganographic Communications". "Steganography based Information Security" and
"FIAT–Fax Image Analysis Tool for Steganography and
Steganalysis."
22. n. 9, p. 26.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. "3G Generation: the Wireless Next Wave" at
http://www.3g-generation.com/
26. n. 9, p. 25.
27. Michael Kende, "The Digital Handshake: Connecting
Internet Backbones" Office of Plans und Policy (OPP) Working Paper No 32.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), September 26, 2000 at
http://www.fcc.gov/
28. Ibid.
29. See "Atlas of Cyberspaces: Cables and Satellites:
Mapping fibre optic networks, submarine cables und telecommunication
satellites" at map://www.cyber.georaphy.org/
30. See graph "LDCs failing to catch up: Total
teledensity (mobile + fixed)" of ITU World Telecommunication Report 2002:
Reyealing Telecoms.
31. n.19, p.58-59.
32. See "Tusk Force on IT and SD, Base Ground
Report BR-3" of 18 March 1999 at
http://it-taskforce.nic.in/
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35.
Ibid.