@War by Shane Harris

@War by Shane Harris

Author:Shane Harris [Harris, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2014-11-06T05:00:00+00:00


PART II

EIGHT

“Another Manhattan Project”

May 2007

The Oval Office

IT HAD TAKEN Mike McConnell just fifteen minutes to persuade George W. Bush to authorize a cyber war in Iraq. McConnell had asked for an hour with the president and his top national security advisers, figuring it’d take at least that long to convince them that such a risky undertaking was worth considering. What was he to do with the remaining forty-five minutes?

“Is there anything else?” Bush asked.

“Well, as a matter of fact, there is,” McConnell replied.

Ever since he’d returned to government service in February, McConnell had been looking for an opportunity to talk with Bush about one of his biggest unaddressed concerns for national security: that the United States was vulnerable to a devastating cyber attack on a national scale. McConnell feared that the country’s communications systems, like those in Iraq, could be penetrated by outsiders and disrupted or destroyed. And he was especially worried that the financial sector hadn’t taken sufficient precautions to guard account information and records of stock transactions and funds transfers, or to stop criminals from stealing billions of dollars from personal and corporate bank accounts.

But physical infrastructure was also at risk. Two months earlier, the Homeland Security Department had asked the Idaho National Laboratory, which conducts nuclear and energy research for the federal government, to test whether hackers could gain remote access to an electrical power plant and cause a generator to spin out of control. The results were startling. A videotape of the test, which was later leaked to the press, showed a hulking green generator shaking as if in an earthquake, until steam and black smoke billowed out. The effect was almost cartoonish, but it was real, and the test revealed a critical weakness at the heart of America’s electrical grid. Officials feared that hackers could disable electrical power equipment and cause blackouts that might last for weeks or even months while the equipment was replaced.

The cyber threat was no longer theoretical. Defense Department officials had by now begun to notice intrusions into contractors’ computer networks. Among the secret plans and designs for weapons systems that the spies either had stolen or would eventually steal were those for the Joint Strike Fighter; Black Hawk helicopters; the Global Hawk long-range surveillance drone, as well as information on drone video systems and the data links used to remotely fly the unmanned aircraft; the Patriot missile system; a line of General Electric jet engines; the Aegis missile defense system; mine reconnaissance technology; sonar used for undersea mapping; the navy’s littoral combat ship; schematics for lightweight torpedoes; designs for Marine Corps combat vehicles; information on the army’s plans to equip soldiers with advanced surveillance and reconnaissance equipment; designs for the behemoth cargo plane, the C-17 Globemaster, as well as information on the army’s global automated freight-management system; and systems designs for the RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, signals intercept technology, and antenna mechanisms used by the navy. Every branch of the US Armed Forces had been compromised, along with the technology and weapons that the United States used to fight in every domain — land, air, sea, and space.



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