In a new directive, the “North Atlantic” Treaty Organization (NATO), has now made it part of its military doctrine to target hackers and hacktivists who are operating for “ideological, political, religious or patriotic” reasons, effectively making patriotism for a country not part of NATO, religion not in keeping with NATO’s approved religion, and anything opposed to NATO and its global expansion a crime and those guilty eligible for assassination by drone. Even George Orwell would have never dreamt up something so “Orwellian”. In an interview regular VOR contributor Rick Rozoff spoke to the Voice of Russia about this and more.
I am speaking with Rick Rozoff, of the Stop NATO website.
Robles: NATO has been very active lately. Can you give us a few details about what they are up to and maybe a little bit about this new Cyber-War Directive where NATO is declaring hackers military targets?
Rozoff: That is exactly what the new NATO manual identifies hackers as being: as fair game for military attacks, both cyber and otherwise, incidentally.
So, it is not so much retaliation in the cyber sphere strictly, as potentially launching a cruise missile at them. I’m sorry, a drone-fired missile, as one of your guests recently, Bill Blum, said about Julian Assange. I believe his words were that “there is a drone with Julian Assange’s name on it.”
And NATO then reserves the right to launch attacks, cyber and otherwise, on anyone they identify as being a hacktivist, that is hacking into military and even civilian sites in Europe, and this is coordinated through what is called a NATO Center of Excellence on cyber affairs, in cyber warfare really, in the capital of Estonia, Tallin, which was set up directly to confront Russia several years ago after an alleged Russian-based series of attacks on websites in Estonia.
But NATO has been active on a number of other fronts too, as you mentioned in your question. First of all, they have crafted the third or the latest Annual National Programme for the nation of Georgia.
Robles: I am sorry. Can I ask you one question regarding the cyber manual? Is this an official part of military operations or is this just some sort of “draft guidelines” or something?
Rozoff: No, it is official NATO doctrine as of the publication of the manual.
Robles: So, can they actually, seriously, physically, target anyone they deem to be a hacker threat with a drone missile?
Rozoff: I didn’t hear them specify they would use a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone but the terminology I’ve seen is that the attacks against the hackers, incidentally anywhere in the world, could be done either fighting fire with fire, that is through cyber denial of access or other attacks on the hacktivists or other measures “deemed legal”, is the language I am familiar with.
But we have to keep in mind that the major military power, the founder of NATO and the prime mover to this day within it, the United States, reserves a right to use drone missile attacks within its own borders against its own citizens, according to Attorney General Eric Holder of late.
So, it shouldn’t surprise us that the military bloc headed by the United States arrogates to itself the right to launch military attacks, and this is quite in keeping also, incidentally, with the US Cyber Command, which has set up in 2010, the first Cyber warfare command set up in the world, and wherever the US goes, NATO is sure to follow and very quickly thereafter, so it shouldn’t surprise us.
This was discussed, incidentally, roughly a year ago at the NATO summit in Chicago: that cyber warfare was one of the major components, one of the major emphases that NATO was placing, in the addition to things, matters like so-called missile defense, that is interceptor missile programs, and the development and extension of the NATO Response Force, for military interventions globally.
It’s worth noting that today news also quotes Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO, who is also the commander of US European Command, Admiral James Stavridis, stating that NATO essentially has contingency plans for replicating the Libyan scenario inside Syria. This is as of today.
As I was about to explain, NATO has crafted the latest Annual National Programme for the nation of Georgia. So, NATO is active on a number of fronts, and some of the stories I’ve mentioned indicate way out of the territorial area of responsibility for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization if they are talking about military actions in Syria, which incidentally follows the report of a couple of days ago, that the US is considering drone strikes inside Syria.
So, once again US and NATO are working in tandem. Georgia of course is in the South Caucasus and nowhere near the North Atlantic Ocean, and hackers anywhere around the world who are fair game for NATO attack, cyber and otherwise, extend the purview for NATO operations globally, which is what they have striven for and what they have arrived at.
Robles: This manual, it says: “a private citizen, who on his or her own, initiates, engages in hacking for, inter alia: ideological, political, religious or patriotic reasons”, if the hacktivist isn’t working directly within an “official military organization”, NATO says they could “still” be targeted. So, does that mean that “Anonymous” members could be targeted, or bloggers?
Rozoff: I would certainly draw that conclusion.. .I would go a step further: when they mention that if the motives are ideological, political, moral and so forth, then what is to prevent them considering somebody who is sowing what they consider to be disinformation or inconvenient and accurate information, then from being a target themselves.
Robles: I could be a target! I mean my views, I think, would fall into all of those areas but…
Rozoff: That’s right, any political adversary who is using the Internet in any capacity counter to NATO, how NATO envisions the world being structured, technically I suspect. You know as you mentioned, even an individual hacker with no organizational affiliation could, according to the terminology of the excerpt you just read, be considered a target, a potential target.
Robles: Hacking could be almost anything really. I mean it could be someone who’s just downloaded a picture from NATO’s site and added some words to it, or something.
Rozoff: On the NATO website itself it expressly forbids the use of any material, print or image, if in any way it mocks or ridicules NATO.
So, now it is apparently a crime – copyright laws would be used but in essence this is political censorship – if anyone used material garnered or gleaned from the NATO site in a way that NATO didn’t approve.
Keeping in mind that North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a consortium of Western military powers that is funded through those governments, of the respective member states of the country, the United States overwhelmingly, and that as a citizen of one of those countries you do not have the right to use information on those sites even though your tax monies are being used to support it if NATO determines that you are in some manner not treating them with proper respect.
So, this is another instance, another example of the US-dominated military bloc essentially letting the world, putting the world on notice, rather, that you either toe the line or you could be punished.
Robles: This last phrase here, it says; that anyone who initiates, (in hacking), which could be almost anything, for “patriotic” reasons: so that would mean, any person, on the planet, who loves their own country, if it is not a NATO member and who does something on the Internet could be targeted for NATO assassination?
Rozoff: That’s certainly how I would interpret that comment and I think you are right to highlight or to emphasize the world patriotic, as though somehow that is an evil motivation, ipso facto; that in the globalized, militarized world envisioned by the United States and its NATO allies, if their patriotic sentiments are in opposition to having their country destroyed by NATO rockets and bombs, then they are by that very fact “criminals”, I suspect, and can be targeted appropriately or correspondingly.
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