Comment Articles

Cyberterror and professional paranoiacs

Declan McCullagh, CNET News.com CNET News

Published: 24 Mar 2003 15:27 GMT

The US-led war on Iraq has begun.

Now wait for the hype about "cyberwar" and "cyberterrorism" to follow.

The first onslaught came this week when US homeland security secretary Tom Ridge said he was ratcheting up to an Orange Alert to coincide with the coalition forces' invasion. Ridge said his department would "monitor the Internet for signs of a potential terrorist attack, cyberterrorism, hacking, and state-sponsored information warfare."

Then, during an appearance on Thursday to ask a House panel for a fatter 2004 budget, Ridge claimed that cyberterrorists were just as dangerous as physical ones.

"We will not distinguish between physical and cyber in this new unit," Ridge said. "We will pay as much attention to the Internet as we do physical."

What is this guy thinking?

Last I checked, it was physical terrorists who bombed the Marine barracks in Lebanon, who attacked the U.S.S. Cole, who took out the Oklahoma City federal building, and who suicide-bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Wily-fingered hackers had nothing to do with it.

Until recently, Ridge has seemed basically levelheaded about the real dangers of cyberterrorism. Someone who's close to Ridge told me that the secretary simply doesn't care that much about the topic, which would explain his silence.

But now that agency budgets are up for review, Ridge seems to be treading the same alarmist path as did his former cybersecurity deputy, Richard Clarke, who quit in January.

Clarke was a professional paranoiac, a modern-day Chicken Little blinkered by a career spent in the cloistered intelligence community. It didn't help that Clarke's résumé featured such harrowing tasks as planning for the "continuity of government" after a nuclear strike on Washington -- a job where no precaution is too extreme. Soon after President Clinton appointed him to a "national coordinator" post in 1998, Clarke became infamous for darkling warnings about the spectre of a "digital Pearl Harbor" that would snarl computers and roil the world's economy.