TECHNOIR (21 page)

            Thompson once told me he will someday challenge the video game industry with a wrongful-death lawsuit, forcing it to reign in game developers, pay millions in punitive damages and crack down on retailers that don't enforce Entertainment Software Rating Board ratings.

            “Look at the tobacco industry,” he said. “We're pioneers at this. The first time you don't succeed....”

            Thompson has been interviewed on Fox News about violence and sex in media. He calls games such as
Grand Theft Auto
and FPSs such as
Doom
“murder simulators.” Like Grossman, he says FPS games not only desensitize our youth from the psychological ramifications of killing, but also teach the very mechanics of killing. Thompson said this belief is hard to argue against if one considers the relationship between the video game industry and the U.S. military, which uses video games (
America’s Army
and other, larger simulators) to teach soldiers combat skills. He says the U.S. military’s dirty secret is that these games also break down the inhibitions to killing.

            “The military has contracted the video game industry to manufacture virtual reality simulators that teach new recruits how to kill,” he said. Some of these games, such as the free download of
America’s Army
, are widely available to the public, he says. “And these same simulators do not affect civilians? The video game industry has no argument against this.”

            Thompson has helped file several civil suits against the video game industry and its retailers, but all were dismissed before making it to a jury trial. Retailers have argued that laws against selling Mature-rated video games are unenforceable because preteens and teens simply get older relatives and friends to purchase the games for them.

            But the track record for litigation may change during the coming years. In 2003, then 18-year-old Devin Moore shot and killed two police officers and one dispatcher at a police station in Alabama. Moore was an avid player of
Grand Theft Auto
and it was alleged that his parents had physically abused him. He told police upon arrest, “Life is a video game. You’ve got to die some time.” Moore had no criminal history. He also had the skill to shoot each victim in the head, and all within 60 seconds.

            Thompson filed a $600 million wrongful death suit on behalf of the families. After gaming industry attorneys made a motion to dismiss the case, the judge decided that the trial could go forward, yet there are several more opportunities for dismissal.

            Thompson and his colleagues would first have to show the jury psychological or medical evidence that video games have an adverse psychological impact on certain individuals, resulting in dangerous conduct. They must also prove that either the video game manufacturers knew, or should have foreseen, the violent and antisocial content of their video games could have a dangerous psychological impact on certain individuals.

            In late 2003 and early 2004, during the Ohio “Highway Sniper” scare, the perp,
Charles McCoy Jr.,
took turns shooting at homes, schools, and passing motorists as he stood on highway overpasses. Thompson at the time urged a law-enforcement task force to stake out a Columbus, Ohio area GameWorks, a restaurant and video game arcade. He told the task force their shooter would be there.

            Lo and behold, the admitted shooter, McCoy Jr., spent a lot of time playing video games (many violent), and was known to frequent the area GameWorks. When he was arrested after going on the lam, police said his few possessions consisted of his PlayStation 2 and the game,
The Getaway
. Incredibly, McCoy’s shooting spree resulted in only one death, that of 62-year-old Gail Knisley of Washington Court House, Ohio. The Knisley family, with Thompson as their attorney, wanted to go forth with a lawsuit but several factors, such as McCoy’s paranoid schizophrenia, changed their minds at the last minute. McCoy pled guilty to manslaughter and is now serving a 27-year prison sentence.

            Many close to the McCoy case, however, said video game violence was not the reason McCoy went on his shooting spree.

            “My first thought was that such an allegation is complete bullshit,” said Dr. Mark J. Mills, a forensic psychiatrist from Maryland who interviewed McCoy and testified on behalf of the defense. Mills said that after McCoy stopped taking his medication, his “auditory hallucinations” worsened and eventually these voices in his head tricked him into shooting into speeding highway traffic.

            Dr. Anderson, the researcher from Iowa, agreed that, like the tobacco industry, the video game industry in time will lose in court and be forced to make changes.

            “I suspect Mr. Thompson is correct,” he said. “A lawsuit victory would bring about enforcement. It may not have an effect on the video game industry’s profitability, but it will have impact on retailers and how well the rating system is enforced. (Furthermore), parents have to get involved to a much greater extent then they are now. A victory will more than likely get them more involved.”

           The FPS is the fastest growing and most popular video game genre ever. It is also incredibly lucrative. Making billions for hundreds of hyper-smart geek-types. Geeks who won’t be able to resist the prestige or the payday. This can only mean FPSs will continue to evolve and improve, i.e., become more realistic. Thus generation after generation of young males will go through life stuck behind a virtual gun in a hyper-realistic virtual world blowing people away – over and over again.

The battle on the Internet amongst the US, terrorists and Patriotic hackers

            Just months into his first term, President Obama was making cyberwarfare a top priority. The Pentagon, he said, would be home to America’s new
Cyber Command
. These were smart and pragmatic moves, and made so early and easily in a President's first term. But they may become some of the most important set of decisions he ever makes. Because as the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, mankind’s ability to connect through cyberspace was getting easier and cheaper literally by the day. A “connectivity” that was once a luxury, is now a necessity for the daily lives of billions of people. Thus severing the lines of this connectivity could literally mean the Apocalypse of an information kind, and what exactly follows is a nightmare humanity has never truly faced.

           Downing the Internet could mean turning off modern life as we know it. Global business and finance systems would collapse. Draining bank accounts and erasing identities would be just a few personal nightmares that cyber-destruction or cyberwarfare could cause. Don't forget cyberspace is also interconnected, in most cases, to all of mankind’s most important physical infrastructures. Theoretically, experts say a team of covert hackers – whether civilian or part of a military unit – could shut down another nation's electrical grids, for example. And that of which can be shut down is a long, ominous list: Air traffic control towers could be blinded, phone systems cut dead, alarm systems deadened, traffic lights darkened, telecommunications silenced and satellite connections severed. Cyberattacks can also get dirty – literally. In 2001, an Australian hacker used the Internet, a wireless radio, and some software, to hack into the network that controlled the sewage lines of a coastal town near Queensland, Australia. The hacker promptly released a computer-hacked bowel movement of mega-proportions. He let loose 1 million liters of waste water into the ocean.

            But the worst cyberwar scenario must be this: Hackers access a network or computer that runs a nation’s nuclear arsenal, and thus they have the power of hastening the Apocalypse. Scores of nations in the future will have an arsenal of warheads that will no doubt be part of a network that will be connected to the Internet. Will their network security be as robust as America's?

            So it was no great surprise that President Obama stressed defense as being of tremendous importance for America and for today’s hyper-connected information age. More importantly, the US military has warned it cannot wage war if their Internet is down. But the Obama administration is also dead serious about the US’s growing offensive capability in cyberspace and the Internet. Sometimes referred in military parlance as “
Computer Network Attack
” or CNA.

            In the early 1980s, as the industrial age lay dieing and the Information Age began to rise, the Cyberpunk genre of science fiction gave birth to the term “Cyberspace.” A genre that gained traction with the help of authors such as William Gibson who coined the term cyberspace and authored one of sci-fi’s greatest books,
Neuromancer
,
which tells the story of a “console cowboy” in a terrifying future where life means surviving in two separate worlds: the physical and the virtual. Incredibly, Gibson predicted the advent of reality TV; he also predicted conflict in cyberspace. Roughly thirty years after Gibson’s cyber prophecies, Cyberwar is here and now. A reality that heralds an age when one nation's “I-force” can take down another nation’s cyberstructure – and probably the nation itself.

            Indeed, the US and Russia are now wrangling over an arsenal that doesn't even spill blood. At the beginning of 2010, US and Russia were engaged in bilateral talks seeking to curtail an arms race in cyberspace. Russia has long sought a disarmament treaty for cyberspace, but the Bush administration, as it often did, refused to even come to the table

            For the most part, CNA is computer-verse-computer warfare, hacker-verse-hacker, where the battlefield is cyberspace. One version of CNA under development across the globe, for example, are “Logic Bombs”, which can hide in networks for years and take them out when needed. But CNA doesn't entirely encompass super-secret codes. Microwave radiation devices can fry a network a mile a way, for instance. But how serious the American CNA arsenal is and how destructive, is a growing mystery. Yet the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said officially it wants to damage an enemy’s computer network “so badly that it cannot perform any function.” The Pentagon's cyberweapons are cloaked in hardcore secrecy. As for Russia's cyberweapons, perhaps their capabilities are a bit clearer.

            In 2007, a series of cyberattacks or CNAs against the northern Europe nation of Estonia flooded scores of critical government and commercial websites, making them inaccessible for several days at a time. The attacks coming in the aftermath of Estonian government’s decision to relocate a Russian-related war monument. Attacks that sure appeared like cyberwarfare as the black-hat hackers had predicted years before. The Russian hackers shutdown many of Estonia’s critical online services, such as banking and finance, and for added insult, popular web sites defaced with hacker graffiti. For two weeks government servers were shocked and awed, and overloaded with information turning Estonia's cyberspace into a virtual pool of quick sand.

            A virtual onslaught against Estonia is a smart thing if you’re going to war against them – the nation is considered one of the most connected on earth. An Estonian government official called it their “9/11”, even though no blood was shed. Estonians said Russians were bombarding their government servers with DDoS attacks better known as Denial of Service attacks. Some attacks originating from computers of the Russian government, they claimed.

              According to experts, the attacks were made with the use of a
BotNet
– a web of hijacked and compromised computers, many personal, spread across the world. These “zombie computers”(also known as “nodes”), had previously been ambushed and overtaken by a Trojan Horse, virus or worm, without the owner of the computer even knowing. Just before the attack, the Russians organized their zombies like Roman flanxs, and ordered them remotely via a BotMaster, to march on Estonia servers by bombarding them with information or a request for information at a steady clip. Flooding web sites with so much traffic they crash. International authorities have taken notice that BotHerders act as mercenaries selling their BotNets to militaries and governments. The Georgia Tech Information Security Center reported that 10 percent of all computers online are part of a BotNet, and according to the CIA, there may be 1.3 billion computers around the globe connected to the Internet.

            Not more than a year later after Estonia, Russia invaded its neighbor Georgia, and for the first time in history a cyberattack was used in conjunction with an armed conflict. But no one is sure if the attacks against sites such as the National Bank of Georgia and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were committed by civilian hackers or military hackers. It's become a cyberwar mystery, making the prospects for cyberattacks even more tantalizing for those who have to wage modern warfare:

            CNA is hard to trace. Plus CNA is relatively cheap and easily executable.

            In 2009, North Korean hackers – as their country continued to teeter on the brink of total annihilation due to its psychopathic leadership – were accused of attacking with DDoS overloads on dozens of US government sites such as the Pentagon’s, the White House’s official site, and also the site of New York Stock Exchange. The White House site would continue to face attack well into 2010. It’s still not known if they were government hackers, civilians or paid mercenaries.