Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard Clarke and Robert Knake

(Ecco, 290 pages, $25.99)

America’s former counterterrorism czar is sounding alarms again, said Ellen Messmer in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Nine years after Richard Clarke tried but failed to convince President George W. Bush that al Qaida was preparing an imminent strike on the U.S., he is again claiming that the nation’s military has wandered into a new type of global warfare without protecting citizens from predictable counterattacks. Cyberwar, Clarke insists, isn’t science fiction: The Pentagon itself has slipped malicious software into at least three nations’ computer networks, while America’s adversaries have infiltrated ours. A few keystrokes could cause trains to collide, gas lines to explode, or the nation to lose electrical power for months.

“Like Cassandra,” Clarke might be talking about threats that will never materialize, said Andy Greenberg in Forbes. He’s been warning about cyberthreats since at least 1998, when President Clinton asked him to look into them. But Cyber War argues that the Pentagon raised the stakes a few years ago, when it began investing heavily in cyber-offensive capabilities. Clarke thinks the consequences could be grave. A quietly escalating cyberwar blurs the line between peace and open hostilities, littering the world’s computer networks with booby traps that could be triggered by accident.

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Some of Clarke’s doomsday scenarios are “the stuff of bad movies or sci-fi novels,” said Ryan Singel in Wired.com. No hacker in the world could today plunge America into chaos in just 15 minutes; there’s only the flimsiest evidence that any foreign government has been able to sneak any malware at all into the networks that govern our critical infrastructure. That doesn’t mean all of Clarke’s warnings and prescriptions should be disregarded: Some of the threats are real, and we’re not well-prepared for them. “But yelling ‘cyberwar’ in a crowded Internet is not without consequences.” Policymakers tend to make the wrong decisions when motivated by irrational fears.