No cyberterror impact – empirics AND lack of motive

There is also great concern about an impending, if presumably viral, invasion by cybergeeks to commit sabotage, to steal intelligence, or to spread propaganda. Any military disruptions are likely to be more nearly instrumental or tactical than existential, and they call far more for a small army of counter-cybergeeks than for a large standing military force. In 2003, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta proclaimed cyber to be “without question, the battlefield for the future,” but, as Micah Zenko pointedly observed, the Pentagon was spending less than 1 percent of its budget on cybersecurity.70 If that proves adequate to deal with the problem, it would seem, intuitively, to be something of a bargain.

Cyber, even more than terrorism, is the weapon of the weak. In fact, suggests Jon Lindsay, it seems entirely possible that “chronic cyber friction is a sign that more dangerous threats have been constrained.”71

Cyber, unlike terrorism, has yet to kill anybody.72 Nonetheless, we and our possessions are increasingly becoming interconnected, and the internet, key to this process, is vulnerable. For example, the brake pedal on cars is no longer actually connected to the brakes as in days of old, but rather to a potentially hackable computer that tells the brakes what to do. In a recent book, rather cheerlessly entitled Click Here to Kill Everybody, Bruce Schneier warns that “everything is becoming vulnerable ... because everything is becoming a computer,” and, “more specifically, a computer on the Internet,” and warns of “hackers remotely crashing airplanes, disabling cars, and tinkering with medical devices to murder people.”73

Although it may be possible to commit sabotage using such methods, the record thus far is not very impressive. The United States, apparently in league with Israel, does seem to have explored the offensive use of cyber. Most famously, it managed to hamper Iran’s progress toward developing a nuclear weapon. However, the hampering proved to be only temporary, and the effort was ultimately counterproductive in that it encouraged Iran to accelerate its nuclear program at the time.74 There have also been cyber efforts by the United States to interfere with missile launches in North Korea, but there seems to be no proof that such interference was successful. There were multiple explanations for the failures, and eventually the North Koreans did solve whatever the problem was. As one official warns, “You have to be cautious whenever the enthusiasts of cyberattacks come in and claim victory.”75 There is some concern about disruptive cyberattacks on infrastructure, and, indeed, Russian hackers have caused a couple of power outages in Ukraine. However, they are much outclassed by squirrels who are credited with causing well over a thousand outages – and even jellyfish, who managed to take down a nuclear reactor in Sweden in 2013. 76

It was in 2002 that the Washington Post was relaying on its front page the views of “government experts” that “terrorists are at the threshold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed.”77 And a few years later an article in Forbes was solemnly assuring us that, while “four years ago al Qaeda operatives were taking flying lessons,” they were now “honing a new skill: hacking.”78 Nonetheless, despite such warnings, no terrorist has ever launched a successful cyber-attack – that is, while cyber has vastly expanded during this century, terrorists do not seem yet to have gotten the hang of it. As Michael Kenney has observed, although the United States has experienced “hundreds of thousands of cyber-attacks” in the ensuing years, none rose to the level of cyber-terrorism,” which he defines as “politically motivated computer attacks against other computer systems that cause enough physical harm or violence to generate fear and intimidation beyond the immediate victims of the attacks.”79 And even under the worst-case scenarios, cyberattacks are likely to be of limited physical effect.80 Moreover, if terrorists want to express their concerns through violence, there are much easier methods for committing it than by hacking. Even if it becomes possible for a hacker to kill somebody, shootings and bombings are likely to accomplish the same goal far more reliably.81