https://www.fastcompany.com/90378700/richard-clarke-is-sounding-the-alarm-about-another-kind-of-9-11
By Alex Pasternack
Fast Company
July 27, 2019
Richard Clarke knows a few things about clear and present dangers. He had
already served under six presidents and been appointed the U.S.’s first
counterterrorism czar when he joined the George W. Bush White House, but when
he tried to alert important decision-makers before September 11 about the
threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, those warnings were largely ignored.
(Afterwards, he famously apologized publicly for the government’s failures.)
These days, Clarke is still trying to get people to think hard about the next
big attack—the cyber version—and all the ones that have already happened.
Clarke’s new book, The Fifth Domain, written with cyber expert and fellow White
House veteran Robert Knake, is in many ways a follow-up to a book they wrote in
2012 called Cyber War. That book was derided by some at the time as science
fiction, Clarke laments; now he has the benefit of a sci-fi-like series of
developments to illustrate his case. And yet, while we’ve been blindsided by a
slew of giant hacks, thefts, and attacks, the prospect of a Cyber 9/11 or Cyber
Pearl Harbor is still hard to grasp. Maybe those are the wrong metaphors.
As Eric Rosenbach, a former Pentagon cyberczar, tells the authors, “The big
cyberattack is going to be something that undermines our democracy in a way
that leads Americans to question the viability of our system.”
Clarke says that’s exactly what happened in 2016, when Russian agents hacked
emails, spread propaganda, and launched attacks on voting systems to interfere
with the U.S. election, and we can expect a lot more of that going forward. He
also worries cyberwar could lead to a shooting war too, especially now that the
Trump administration has taken a more aggressive stance to confrontations in
this new, fifth domain of warfare. “Every time I see the U.S. and Iran getting
closer to something, I worry that it could get out of control because I don’t
think we’re ready,” he says.
[...]
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