Wartime Wireless Worries Pentagon

Wired News

By Xeni Jardin

The rapid proliferation of digital cameras, phonecams
and wireless gadgets among soldiers and military
contractors is giving senior military officials
concern, in the wake of images that showed abuse in an
Iraqi prison and snapshots that showed rows of coffins
of American soldiers.

The Defense Department said it hasn’t banned the
devices and doesn’t plan to — as the Business Times of
London and two wire services have reported. But the
Pentagon is telling commanders in the field to strictly
monitor the use of consumer wireless technology through
Directive 8100.2 — Use of Commercial Wireless Devices,
Services and Technologies in the Department of Defense
Global Information Grid — issued last month.

"We’re in the situation today where everyone is using a
cell phone, BlackBerry or some sort of wireless device
that can be carrying voice, imagery or text — and we
either need that to be highly encrypted, or off of DOD
systems altogether," said Department of Defense
spokesman Lt. Col. Ken McClellan. "We don’t want to be
in a situation where anyone with a scanner can figure
what we’re about to do."

In a nutshell, the directive tells all soldiers,
contractors and visitors to Defense Department
facilities that they can only carry wireless devices
that conform to the military’s security standards.
These specify that the devices use strong
authentication and encryption technologies whenever
possible. In addition, the devices cannot be used for
storing or transmitting classified information. Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz signed it in April
after two years of internal debate.

McClellan said commanders in the field haven’t been
told to use the directive to stamp out the use of the
gadgets in Iraq. Instead, the directive is "general
guidance" passed "along to the theater commanders, and
they decide how to implement it in their own commands."

While Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may not have
signed a ban on new consumer digital-imaging
technologies, he did express clear concern about the
unforeseen impact of such technologies during the
Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on May 7.

"People are running around with digital cameras and
taking these unbelievable photographs and passing them
off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise,
when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon,"
Rumsfeld said.

According to McClellan, some Defense Department lawyers
may be reviewing how the spread of consumer digital-
imaging technology among military contractors and
enlisted personnel affects the military’s obligation to
abide by a Geneva Convention article against holding
prisoners up to public ridicule. "Lawyers may have
looked at that and said, ’It’s probably a good idea to
get these things out of the prisons.’ There’s no
Pentagon-induced rule in the theater at this time ...
but there may or may not be some discussion taking
place as to how the directive might be supplemented in
Iraq to prevent things we saw at Abu Ghraib."

Regardless, bloggers and media commentators perceive
the directive as hand wringing by the administration,
worried that someone else will expose another scandal.
Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page chided the
military’s concern and called the devices "Weapons of
Mass Photography" in a recent editorial, saying he
believed every soldier should have a digital camera.

Blogger and media critic Jeff Jarvis called for the
Pentagon to "ban stupidity, don’t ban exposing it."

Apart from the debate around digital cameras in the
battle zone, one significant item in the directive
requires all branches of the military to encrypt
unclassified data sent wirelessly by using FIPS 140-2-
approved encryption, a tough-to-crack standard.

Other items in the April directive include mandatory
implementation of antivirus software on PDAs and
smartphones, a move likely to please vendors like
McAfee and Symantec, both of which have military
supplier contracts. And the directive recommends (but
doesn’t mandate) that all voice communication be
encrypted.

Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist who researches
phonecams, culture and law, said that while authorities
can — and probably will — attempt to restrict the use
of handheld digital-imaging devices in specific
facilities, the technology is too ubiquitous for any
broad attempts at prohibition to be effective.

"The cat’s already out of the bag, but what’s striking
about what we’re seeing now is that it’s very unlike
the top-down, Big Brother surveillance we normally
associate with the idea of other people watching you,"
she said. "This is a bottom-up, ’little brother,’ peer-
to-peer type of surveillance.

"My hope is that this will ultimately be a positive
development, because powerful top-down institutions,
like corporations or governments, won’t be the only
ones controlling the circulation of information."

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