It would be irrational for Americans to begin acting as though terrorists are capable of making daily life hazardous for Americans generally. Acting that way would cripple the country’s social and economic vigor, its defining assets. And an even more important reason for not allowing current problems to knock America off its normally jaunty stride is that the nation’s equilibrium may soon be tested by even bigger problems.
When in 1820 the argument about the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state aggravated sectional animosities, Jefferson called the crisis a “fire bell in the night,” awakening the nation to the possibility of worse to come. Last week’s fire bell was anthrax, a small sample of what can be called the terrorism of substances, biological and chemical. There have been hearings, reports and books on these subjects, but complacent democracies are educated primarily by events, not exhortations–the British did not bring Churchill to power until Hitler approached the English Channel ports.
What might be the next alarm bell to ring? Of course, a truck bomb would intensify national nervousness by making things that are ubiquitous–trucks–seem ominous. And high explosives directed against, say, Hoover Dam would not only complicate life in the Southwest, it would underscore the unsettling message that even big things can be pulverized. However, it is time to think about attacks using things not solid and directed against things not as solid as skyscrapers or dams.
Consider cyberterrorism, assaults that can be undertaken from anywhere on the planet against anything dependent on or directed by flows of information. Call this soft terrorism. Although it can put lives in jeopardy, it can do its silent, stealthy work without tearing flesh or pulverizing structures. It can be a weapon of mass disruption rather than mass destruction, as was explained by the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection in its 1997 report on potential cyberattacks against the “system of systems” that is modern America.
“Life is good in America,” the report says, “because things work. When we flip the switch, the lights come on. When we turn the tap, clean water flows.” Now suppose a sudden and drastic shrinkage of life’s “taken for granted” quotient. The report notes that terrorist attacks have usually been against single targets–individuals, crowds, buildings. But today’s networked world of complexity and interconnectedness has vast new vulnerabilities with a radius larger than that of any imaginable bomb blast. Terrorists using computers might be able to disrupt information and communications systems and, by doing so, attack banking and financial systems, energy (electricity, oil, gas) and the systems for the physical distribution of America’s economic output.
Hijacked aircraft and powdered anthrax–such terrorist tools are crude and scarce compared with computers, which are everywhere and inexpensive. Wielded with sufficient cunning, they can spread the demoralizing helplessness that is terrorism’s most important intended byproduct. Computers as weapons, even more than intercontinental ballistic missiles, render irrelevant the physical geography–the two broad oceans and two peaceful neighbors–that once was the basis of America’s sense of safety.
A threat is a capability joined with a hostile intent. In early summer 1997 the U.S. military conducted a threat-assessment exercise, code-named Eligible Receiver, to test the vulnerabilities of “borderless cyber geography.” The results confirmed that in a software-driven world, an enemy need not invade the territory, or the air over the territory, of a country in order to control or damage that country’s resources.
The attack tools are on sale everywhere: computers, modems, software, telephones. The attacks can shut down services or deliver harmful instructions to systems. And a cyberattack may not be promptly discovered. The report says, “Computer intrusions do not announce their presence the way a bomb does.”
Already “subnational” groups–terrorists, organized crime–are taking advantage of legal and widely available “strong encryption” software that makes their communications invulnerable to surveillance. How invulnerable? John Keegan, the British military analyst, quotes William Crowell, former deputy director of the largest U.S. intelligence agency, the National Security Agency: “If all the personal computers in the world were put to work on a single [strongly encrypted] message, it would still take an estimated 12 million times the age of the universe to break a single message.”
Now suppose a state or group or state-supported group used similar cybermarvels to attack, say, U.S. banking and financial systems, or the production and distribution of electric power. Americans know how impotent, and infuriated, they feel when a thunderstorm knocks out electrical power for even a few hours. The freezer defrosts, the Palm handheld cannot be recharged, “SportsCenter” is missed. War is hell. And speaking of war:
It would be interesting to know how many of the thousands of foreign students who have earned advanced degrees in computer science (and nuclear engineering, while we are at it) at American universities have come from, and returned to, the Middle East. If we are supposed to stiffen our sinews and summon up our blood for a battle, it would be well to remember that the Battle of Agincourt, for which Shakespeare’s Henry V exhorted the stiffening and summoning, was won in 1415 by the skill of English archers wielding longbows, the high technology of the day.
