The New Face of War by Bruce Berkowitz

Author:Bruce Berkowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE FREE PRESS
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

AN ELECTRONIC PEARL HARBOR?

By now it ought to be clear how much our national security depends on our policies for promoting, regulating, and controlling information technology. We can’t defeat terrorist groups, rogue states, and other threats unless we can stay at least one step ahead of their decision cycle. That often depends on whether we can crack into their networks—and protect our own.

Type the phrase “electronic Pearl Harbor” into an Internet search engine like Google or Alta Vista, and you will find a surprisingly large number of hits. In the winter of 2003 Google would turn up 2,390 entries on the World Wide Web. The doomsday scenario du jour varies, and often seems linked to the latest headlines more than anything else.

During the stock market boom of the late 1990s, experts warned that terrorists might crash the U.S. economy by hacking NASDAQ’s computers. When there are an unusual number of airline accidents, they warn of hackers bringing down the air-traffic control system. During the California energy crunch of 2000, some pundits warned that terrorists might hijack computer systems at electric plants and shut down the generators. “You can black out whole cities,” warned Anjan Bose, a professor of power engineering at Washington State University. 1

Sometimes I blame Matthew Broderick for all of this. In the 1983 film WarGames, Broderick plays David Lightman, a teenage geek who gets his kicks by breaking into the computer systems at video game developers. Lightman stumbles into a computer at a defense contractor, and somehow manages to get into the warning network operated by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Lightman comes close to triggering a missile strike against the Soviet Union. But there is a happy ending. The computer figures out that there are no winners in a nuclear war. Lightman even gets the girl, Jennifer Mack, played by Ally Sheedy.

The plot was perfect for the 1980s, when people worried that the Soviet Union and United States might start lobbing nuclear weapons at each other. If anyone raised the issue of a catastrophic computer malfunction, naturally the risk that first popped into people’s minds was that the malfunction might trigger thermonuclear Armageddon.

These images can be hard to shake. A few years after WarGames hit the screen, I was visiting the NORAD command center at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Someone jokingly mentioned the film to the colonel hosting us. He just rolled his eyes. They were still trying to reassure people that it couldn’t really happen.

Network warfare will hinge largely on who can attack and defend communications and computer systems. But to deal with the issue effectively, we always need to focus on the central question—how could someone use such an attack? As we will see, even top officials are often preoccupied with hypothetical, abstract threats, and insufficiently concerned with plausible, immediate ones.

Once TS3600.1 was in place and the new Clinton administration appointees began to settle into office in 1993, organizations throughout the Defense Department began to look at information warfare more closely.

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