Powell's pals treat tech terror trivially

Rob Rosenberger, Vmyths co-founder
Friday, 16 May 2003

THE U.S. STATE Department this month released its "Patterns of Global Terrorism report" for 2002. I searched for two keywords in the monstrous 40MB document: "computer" and "cyber."

Kudos to the U.S. State Department for putting cyber-terrorism in its proper perspective.

Beltway officials scream all the time about cyber-terrorism. Surely the State Department worked oh-so-hard last year to keep those deadly Iraqi shockwave riders at bay. Right?

Apparently not. The entire massive 191pp. document contains only three trivial items of note [emphasis added]:

Page 33: "India and the United States launched the Indo-US Cyber Security Forum to safeguard critical infrastructures from cyber attack."
Page 90: "[Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism] member states adopted a strong 'Declaration of San Salvador Against Terrorism' and made recommendations on counterterrorism... The declaration and recommendations both call for increased cooperation to prevent and combat terrorism and recognize the emerging threats posed to the Hemisphere by international terrorist groups and attacks on cyber security."
Page 103: "[The Iraqi Intelligence Service] stole records and computer files detailing antiregime activity."

So there you have it. We made friends with India, our longtime cyber-enemy. We finally convinced poverty-stricken computer-deprived nations to take non-existent cyber-terrorism seriously. And the goosesteppers in Iraq stole some computer files. End of report for 2002.

Seems a little light on cyber-terrorism, don't you think?

Oh, waitaminit. We can only download the State Department's unclassified report. I'll bet the top secret version reeks of cyber-terrorism...