Internet Silence - A New Approach To Cyber Espionage

I don't know a whole heck of a lot about how bits and bytes are funneled and exchanged by the quadrillions every millisecond across various cyber networks spanning the globe. I do know enough however, to know that all this cyber traffic can potentially be parsed down to the very last zero or one if need be. Binary systems are absolute.

Richard Fadden, the former head of CSIS, feels that Canada should get to have a kick at the cat in terms of cyber-sleuthing in a more offensive fashion; authorizing the DND to allow its operatives to go ahead and do some less-than-ethical hacking against our natural enemies - namely the Chinese and the Russians. I tend to agree.

Here's an idea all my own regarding Canadian espionage practices: we should deploy a bilateral communications equivalency scheme separate and isolated from anything that touches the Internet - apart from a one-way packet filter. Internet traffic could be filtered in, but nothing on the bilateral system could escape the confines therein.  An old-school approach to secretive transmissions of information. I'm not talking smoke signals and carrier pigeons (though such methods have proven effective, and shouldn't be ruled-out in a bind) but proprietary radio signals and unorthodox ways of passing bundles of information. It'd be like an intranet with no potential weak links for hackers to exploit. Something highly innovative and unique that is both reliable and entirely uncrackable from the outside.

If we had such a system in place, the DND could easily switch to "Internet Silence" mode while simultaneously monitoring and evaluating the ongoing bit stream flow in cyber space. Again, I'm out of my element here, but I'm thinking that the mere act of analyzing a remote transmission could possibly trigger an alert to the originator in a two way system. What I envision is a real cyber network that exists in a vacuum. Nothing that enters ever escapes.

 If such a system were elegantly designed and reasonably fast, it would perhaps become the envy of our allies and enemies alike.