Computers crash every day. Servers go down. Bandwiths get congested and networks clog. The IT world is as prone to breakdown and gridlock as our transport systems. But something unusual is happening. Since early February there have been a series of strikes on high-profile e-commerce and e-news targets:Yahoo!, Amazon,Buy.com, Ebay, CNN.
The assaults have all followed a pattern - floods of data released by implanted saboteur programs in remote sites. The result, for a few hours, is overload and "denial of service": a jam. The raiders were initially assumed to be hackers; pointy-headed kids playing computer games in grown-up places. The authorities were not amused. After the third wave of assaults the raiders were relabelled "cyber- terrorists"; up there with Osama Bin Laden.
The Justice Department warned of grim penalties: five years and $250,000 for a first offence; 10 years for a second. Attorney general Janet Reno declared: "We are committed in every way possible to tracking those who are responsible". Not since the Unabomber have the G-Men seemed so determined to get their man.
Who are they? "Pranksters", cyberloonies, or a new underground army linked with the anarchists who pissed so spectacularly on the WTO party in Seattle?
In a thoughtful editorial on February 10, the Guardian proclaimed itself alarmed but also "puzzled". Alarm is understandable. The US economy is booming on the strength of its grotesquely overvalued high-technology stocks. Amazon.com, whose shares have gone up tenfold in four years, has yet to return a cent's profit. No one is quite sure whether this is the Calgary stampede, the 1849 gold rush or Tulipmania. For two years Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has been trying, vainly, to take the heat out of hi-tech stocks. There's a terrifying risk, if e-commerce proves vulnerable to any computer-literate vandal, that investors will pull out their money and put it somewhere safer. If Wall Street catches a cold, we get pneumonia. What if Wall Street gets pneumonia? Puzzling aspects to this scare remain. How did the crackers suddenly get so smart, so organised, and why are they so hostile to cyber-heroes like Jeff Bezos? Nerds hangouts are buzzing with poisonous suspicion. The US government, they believe, is confecting an electronic Gulf-of-Tonkin pretext for going to war against them. The case is put by "jim the paranoic" [sic] on slashdot.org ("News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters"). Jim's scenario runs thus: on January 27, Clinton announced in his State of the Union address that "electronic law enforcement" would be a high priority. Three days later, the National Security Agency announced that its mainframe had crashed from January 24 to 28.
It boggles the imagination that this could happen and that the secretive NSA would embarrass itself by voluntarily making its incompetence public. They instinctively cover their "asses", they don't bare them to the world's press. A week later, Clinton's budget allocated $240m to expand, massively, the government's wire-tapping facilities ("wire" means world wide web; the FBI will be listening to you, Guardian- reader). Then began the February cyber-assaults on the electronic shopping malls and news services of America.
What got less headline attention was that on February 8 the phone systems in Missouri and Oklahoma crashed. Why should those backwoods states be targeted by the new raiders of the net? As Jim darkly speculates: "It illustrated the horrors of vile cyber-terrorists, but without bothering 'important' people in Washington or on the east and west coasts. What better way to 'prove' the need for massively expanded surveillance, and create a frenzy of support for it?!"
It may be that when the FBI crawls back through the net they will find some 15-year-old kid at his keyboard having fun. Nonetheless, two new and frightening entities emerge out of the panic.
After this month, the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Centre is going to be a main player. And behind it is something eerily reminiscent of the old military-industrial complex. Only this time it's e-commerce and government. It's enough to make anyone paranoic [sic].
